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.