Bernie Sanders announces 2020 presidential campaign

Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders will challenge Donald Trump for president in 2020. Thanks to popular (rather than merely "populist") policies, and a strong primary run in 2016 against a Democratic party apparatus that did everything it could to stop him, he becomes an instant front-runner.

"We began the political revolution in the 2016 campaign, and now it's time to move that revolution forward," the independent senator told Vermont Public Radio in an interview airing Tuesday morning. ... Sanders pointed to the Democratic Party's leftward shift as a reason for a second run. "It turns out that many of the ideas that I talked about that health care is a right, not a privilege, and that we've got to move toward a Medicare-for-all, single-payer system: very, very popular. The idea that we have got to raise the minimum wage to $15 an hour," he told Vermont Public Radio. "When I talked about making public colleges and universities tuition-free and lowering student debt, that was another issue that people said was too radical. Well, that's also happening around the country."

If he has a policy problem, it's that most of the other Democrats are already running with his ones. Read the rest