US Election 2020: Joe Biden announces intention to run for president
Former vice president Joe Biden formally announced he’s running for president in 2020 — ending months-long speculation about his intentions.
Biden becomes the 20th Democrat to enter the 2020 race, and enters as a high-profile candidate, with decades of experience.
He will hold his first event as a candidate in Pittsburgh on Monday.
Biden opened his announcement video quoting from the Declaration of Independence.
“We haven’t always lived up to these ideals. [Thomas] Jefferson himself didn’t. But we’ve never before walked away from them,” Biden says in the video.
Biden contrasts Jefferson’s hometown, Charlottesville, with the deadly clash between white nationalists and counterprotesters that occurred there in August 2017.
He quotes President Donald Trump in the video, referring to the president’s “very fine people on both sides” quote in the wake of the death of Heather Heyer.
In Biden’s first fundraising email, sent just after the announcement, he writes, “If we give Donald Trump eight years in the White House, he will forever and fundamentally alter the character of this nation. I cannot stand by and watch that happen.”
Throughout the 2018 midterms, Biden cast the upcoming elections as a “battle for the soul of America.”
In a field that boasts a number of vocal progressive candidates, Biden’s bipartisan approach may make it difficult for him to gain support with the liberal wing of the party.
One of the first challenges to Biden’s candidacy will be answering tough questions on allegations from some women who have said that the former vice president made them feel uncomfortable in past interactions by touching them without their permission.
On Wednesday, his Democratic rival, Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand of New York, signaled that Biden “is going to have to directly answer to voters” on the allegations
This will be Biden’s third run for president. He previously ran in 1988 and 2008, before serving as vice president to Barack Obama.
Biden was one of the youngest people ever elected to the Senate, when he won his race in 1972 at 29 years old.
