Sen. Bernie Sanders is set to announce he will run for president in 2020, three years after fighting the Democratic primary race against Hillary Clinton, according to reports. Independent senator Sanders, 77, plans to announce his presidential bid imminently, Yahoo News reports. Early polls of the race have shown him as one of the top candidates in the Democratic primary field. And a source told the website: 'What the senator has this time that he didn't have last time is he is the most popular elected official in the country right now. That's light years away from 2016 when very few people knew who he was.' Scroll down for video. Sen. Bernie Sanders is set to announce he will run for president in 2020 three years after fighting Democratic primary race against Hillary Clinton, according to reports Early polls have shown him as one of the top candidates in the Democratic primary field Sanders, right, nearly defeated Hillary Clinton, left, in the 2016 contest for the Democratic nomination and was widely expected to try for the White House again His 2016 campaign was considered a success, even though he fell short to the eventual nominee, Hillary Clinton, left Sanders forcefully denounced President Trump as a 'racist' on Martin Luther King, Jr. Day in South Carolina, a crucial presidential primary state. Attending remarks at an NAACP event in the Palmetto State's capitol, Sanders said that 'a president is supposed to do is to bring us together,' yet Trump is 'trying to divide us up by the color of our skin, by our gender, by the country that we came from, by our religion.' 'Today we talk about justice and today we talk about racism, and I must tell you it gives me no pleasure to tell you that we now have a President of the United States who is a racist,' the senator asserted. The assault on Trump was the clearest signals to date that Sanders was likely seek the Oval Office again in 2020. Sanders, an independent senator, nearly defeated Hillary Clinton in the 2016 contest for the Democratic nomination. He was widely expected to try for the White House again, even though this race would pit him against progressive allies like Hawaii Rep. Tulsi Gabbard and Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren. His 2016 campaign was considered a success, even though he fell short to the eventual nominee, Hillary Clinton. Initially, Sanders was considered a longshot, but he did manage to win primaries. Sanders won a large enough chunk of the votes that he gained a following within the Democratic Party, forcing it to adopt a number of his positions. Sen. Bernie Sanders, left, and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, right, walk into an event with furloughed federal workers amid the partial government shutdown earlier this month He was forced to apologize to women who were sexually harassed on his 2016 presidential campaign and thanked them 'from the bottom of my heart for speaking out.' The New York Times reported that several women on his 2016 campaign reported episodes of sexual harassment, demeaning treatment, and pay disparity. He said: 'It appears as part of our campaign there were some women who were harassed or mistreated. And I thank them from the bottom of my heart for speaking out. What they experienced was absolutely unacceptable and certainly not what a progressive campaign or any campaign should be about. 'The allegations that I have heard, that you have heard, speak to unacceptable behavior, that must not be tolerated in any campaign or in any workplace in our country. 'To the women in our campaign who were harassed or mistreated, I apologize. Our standards, our procedures, our safeguards were clearly inadequate.' DailyMail.com has contacted Sanders' office for comment.<doc-sep>In January 2017, days before Donald Trump’s inauguration, Bernie Sanders appeared unexpectedly on stage at a rally in Macomb county, Michigan, a perennial political battleground in a state that had slipped from the Democrats’ grasp. The crowd began to stir. A woman shrieked. The Senate minority leader Chuck Schumer, who at that moment was in the middle of a fiery denunciation of Republican efforts to repeal the Affordable Care Act (ACA), looked up. Peering over his half-moon glasses, he saw the Vermont senator, the New Yorker’s “brother from Brooklyn”, had arrived ahead of schedule. Schumer gestured frantically that Sanders should wait. But it was too late. The senator, with his unruly mop of white hair, had been spotted. A familiar chorus began: “Bernie! Bernie!” Hillary Clinton won the popular vote and Trump won the presidency but in Warren, Michigan, the crowd wanted the independent Democratic socialist whose long-shot presidential bid captured the imagination of a new generation of progressive leaders and activists. Two years on, Sanders faces a decision that will likely determine the arc of his more than 40-year career. It’s vitally important for this movement and for this country that he finishes what he started Nina Turner, Our Revolution Should he run again for president, as he has given every impression that he will, the 77-year-old senator would enter not as an ideological crusader with “pie-in-the-sky” ideas but as the leader of an ascendent movement and a top-tier contender not to be underestimated. The possibility of a second run has hung over Sanders since Trump won. The senator has seemed to grapple for months with the decision, even as his team has moved to put the pieces in place for a presidential campaign. But the question has taken on a new urgency as the Democratic field fills with friends and colleagues. “The people have finally caught up to Bernie Sanders,” said Nina Turner, the president of Our Revolution, the organization that grew out of his 2016 campaign. “It’s vitally important for this movement and for this country that he finishes what he started.” Bernie Sanders six months after becoming mayor mayor of Burlington, Vermont’s largest city, in 1981. Photograph: Donna Light/AP The political terrain has shifted remarkably since Sanders announced his run for president in April 2015, with little fanfare and from a grassy patch outside the US Capitol known as the swamp. Many of the 2020 candidates have embraced Sanders’ most popular economic proposals, such as Medicare for all and a $15 minimum wage. He and his allies were also successful in reducing the influence of so-called super-delegates in the party’s presidential-nominating process, a source of controversy in 2016. And, now, majority of Democrats now consider themselves “liberal” and hold more a more positive view of “socialism” than of “capitalism”. “In many ways, Sanders was the first to recognize that Trump’s strength was rooted in a kind of conservative populism,” said Celinda Lake, a longtime Democratic pollster. “He understood that you have to be populist to beat populism and, initially, he was the one who articulated most clearly progressive populism.” ‘It isn’t old vs new or progressive vs pragmatic’ No candidate enters the race with as many advantages as Sanders, who ended the 2016 primaries after winning more than 13m votes and raising nearly $230m, much of it through small-dollar donations. Should he run, he would start with near-universal name recognition, a loyal following, a digital media platform that reaches millions and an unrivaled donor list. Of the declared 2020 contenders, only Trump has more Twitter followers. But Sanders is also now a known quantity with no chance of repeating the insurgent, expectation-shattering campaign of 2016. The race is likely to be more negative and he would almost certainly face more scrutiny. The Clinton campaign ran no attack ads against him during the 2016 primary. “This time around,” Lake said, “he will be the one who has to worry about a surprise insurgent.” Early polling suggests Sanders has lost some grassroots support. And in surveys conducted by the progressive Daily Kos website, Sanders has trailed senators Elizabeth Warren and Kamala Harris and former congressman Beto O’Rourke. “His success in 2016 owed a lot to the contours of the race,” said Brian Fallon, the former national press secretary for Hillary Clinton. The voters who flocked to his campaign because they were wary of a “Clinton coronation” or who were disillusioned by party politics will likely have more than a dozen choices in 2020, Fallon said. And this time, there is no “establishment” favorite – at least not yet. “It isn’t old vs new or progressive vs pragmatic anymore,” said Tom Vilsack, the former US secretary of agriculture who served two-terms as Iowa’s governor. “His challenge in Iowa is to maintain what he has.” Sanders has remained one of the most popular politicians in America. Central to his appeal is the perception that like his accent, he has hardly changed since he left Brooklyn in the early 60s. Like a well-worn record, Sanders has been railing against economic injustice and Wall Street greed since he started running for office nearly fifty years ago. And his early support for gay rights, opposition to international trade agreements such as the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) and a vote against the Iraq war cemented his image as an “uncompromised” progressive champion. “There are very few people in politics right now as original as he is,” said Abdul El-Sayed, a former Democratic candidate for governor of Michigan. El-Sayed ran with Sanders’ imprimatur but lost the primary. But he believes the movement is reshaping the party in profound ways. Weeks before the 2018 election, Sanders returned to Michigan to campaign for Gretchen Whitmer, who beat El-Sayed in the primary and went on to become governor. There are no shortage of Democrats who do not want Sanders to be the party’s standard bearer in 2020. Many in the party say they would prefer a candidate fresh to the national political scene. While some say the long-serving Independent is more focused on waging internecine battles than leading the resistance to Trump.<doc-sep>(CNN) — Here are the stories our panel of top political reporters will be watching for in the week ahead, in this week’s “Inside Politics” forecast. 1. The Bernie Factor Sen. Elizabeth Warren is the latest Democrat to throw her hat into the ring and her colleague, Sen. Amy Klobuchar, is close to announcing her own decision. One name we’re still waiting on: their Senate colleague, Bernie Sanders. “He really has the power to reshape the field,” Time’s Molly Ball said. “This candidate who took everybody by surprise in 2016 has really held onto a large part of his following.” The problem, Ball said, is all the other candidates who are following Sanders’ progressive playbook. “So many candidates are running to the left, embracing free college, embracing Medicare for all, and embracing themes of economic inequality.” Ball said a decision on whether to run is likely imminent. “He’s really looking at whether a lane remains for him in such a crowded field.” 2. When Trump meets Kim President Donald Trump is watching the Democratic field closely, but he’s also preparing for one of his biggest moments yet on the international stage: a planned summit with North Korean leader Kim Jong Un, set for February 27-28 in Vietnam. “My question is whether this will simply be a repeat of last year’s summit in Singapore, which was basically just a media spectacle,” Politico’s Eliana Johnson said. “There was a lot of anticipation of simply watching these guys shake hands. That won’t be as exciting the second time around.” US intelligence officials say North Korea remains a nuclear threat. “I think there will be much more focus on whether there’s a policy deliverable and whether we will see a commitment from North Korea to make real changes,” Johnson said. “We haven’t seen that over the past year. I think there will be a lot more pressure on President Trump to extract something.” 3. Dems target Trump taxes House Democrats are quickly ratcheting up their oversight of the Trump administration – and his personal finances. Ground zero for that fight will be the Ways & Means Committee – the law gives Chairman Richard Neal the authority to obtain the tax records of any American, including the president. “Democrats think they have the edge both politically and legally on this,” New York Times reporter Michael Shear said. “But there are minefields. Legally, the White House is preparing a huge, fierce response to challenge the effort in court. And politically, this is one of those areas that has the possibility to really be cast as exactly what Donald Trump says it is, presidential harassment.” Some Democrats worry the move could backfire for that reason, unless they’ve successfully made a public case for it first. “But the Democratic base really wants this to happen,” Shear said. “So this could finally be the year we find out what Donald Trump has been trying to hide all this time.” 4. Another Senate “nuclear option” On the other side of Capitol Hill, Senate Republicans want to expedite votes on the President’s executive branch and judicial nominees. They’re likely to take new steps to limit Democratic delaying tactics, The Washington Post’s Seung Min Kim reports. “It’s something the President focused on in his State of the Union,” Kim said. “He complained about the 300 nominees that have been backlogged in the Senate.” Democrats don’t have the power to block Trump nominees on their own, but they have been able to use parliamentary rules to delay final votes. “It’s something Republicans have been frustrated with for some time,” Kim said. 5. Spotlight on the Saudis And from CNN chief national correspondent John King: Saudi Arabia is increasingly in an unfavorable spotlight in Congress, amid signs its sway with lawmakers is waning. For years the kingdom has protected its interests and minimized focus on issues like human rights and political oppression by using its wealth to deploy an array of high powered DC lobbyists. That effort continues, and the costs have risen in recent years. On the one hand, it is clear the regime has a friend in the White House. Trump has made clear he values the relationship so much he does not favor a tougher line even in the wake of the murder of dissident journalist Jamal Khashoggi. Saudi leaders are thrilled with the White House take, but in the end, it could result in tougher sledding for the kingdom because of the negative reaction in Congress. The lead Democrat on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and the lead Republican on the House Foreign Affairs Committee issued angry statements this weekend saying the Trump State Department was ignoring the law and refusing to supply information about the Khashoggi murder. “The lesson of this terrible event needs to be that intimidation and violence by any government against peaceful dissent will be met with strong disapproval by responsible nations,” Texas Republican Rep. Michael McCaul said in a statement demanding the State Department provide more information. “Everyone involved in this gruesome crime must be identified and held accountable. When the United States fails to lead, we compromise our integrity and abandon those pursuing justice around the world.” Sen. Robert Menendez, a New Jersey Democrat, likewise pressed for more cooperation. “Today the Trump administration showed that it is willing to ignore U.S. law in its continued effort to stonewall accountability for the murder of Jamal Khashoggi,” Menendez said in a statement Friday night. As lawmakers press for more information there, Saudi Arabia’s role in Yemen’s civil war and humanitarian crisis is also drawing more and more criticism on Capitol Hill. Add in the mysterious assertion from Jeff Bezos that the Saudi regime has some arrangement with the National Enquirer. And the expansion of the House Intelligence Committee investigation, now that Democrats are in the majority, to include a focus on other foreign actors alleged to have tried to influence the Trump administration. “This feels like a tipping point,” a Republican senator said in a weekend exchange. The regime clearly senses the more difficult political environment.<doc-sep>Sanders will likely announce an exploratory committee in the coming weeks, followed by a rally. One major early focus will be finding a campaign manager and other top-level staffers who are not white, and preferably not male, in light of his problems appealing to minority voters in 2016 and recent revelations of sexual harassment by lower-level staffers on the 2016 campaign. Staff interviews have been quietly under way. But a core team of advisers will return from 2016, spearheaded by Sanders’s wife and closest adviser, Jane O’Meara Sanders. Peter Beinart: Bernie Sanders offers a foreign policy for the common man His aides know this race will be different from his 2016 run against Hillary Clinton, when he surprised even himself with how close he came to knocking her off. Democratic leaders have been impressed by the extent to which the ideas from his campaign have carried forward, injecting far-left populism into the mainstream of Democratic politics—even as many in the party still bitterly point to his candidacy as weakening Clinton to the point that Trump was able to win. Sanders has heard the argument that his stature would be diminished by running again if he doesn’t end up winning the nomination. He’s heard the argument that he might split the progressive vote and allow a more moderate candidate to win, but that hasn’t moved him either. That’s not how Sanders thinks, people who know him point out. “He understands what happens in the streets is what prompts actions in Washington,” said Vincent Fort, a former Georgia state senator who supported the last campaign and has been in touch with Sanders’s team about this campaign. There are also the nuts-and-bolts political considerations that Sanders doesn’t focus as much on, but that his team pays close attention to: He’s the one with the massive email list. Alone among those eyeing the Democratic nomination, he’s the one who had 40,000 people watching various live-streams of his State of the Union response. He’s the one whose team thinks he could, on day one, raise more money online and get more attention than any of the other candidates. Sanders believes that he continues to have the strength in Iowa and New Hampshire to either win or come close there—especially with other candidates fragmenting support and lowering the bar for what it will take to win. Likewise, in a South Carolina primary that has both Cory Booker and Kamala Harris competing for African American votes and, likely, Joe Biden drawing on his own decades of connections there, Sanders sees a path to slip through and win. Biden in the race, after all, would make it so that the senator isn’t the only white man in his 70s in the field. If the early states all come together, Sanders would be positioned to power through the front-ended primary calendar that has California, Texas, and several other big states voting on the first Super Tuesday, March 4, just a month after Iowa. No one else in the field has anything like his proven success with both grassroots supporters and the small-dollar online fundraising that it will take to fund the kind of massive national operation any 2020 campaign will require.<doc-sep>
WASHINGTON—Three years after fighting a surprisingly competitive Democratic primary race against Hillary Clinton, Sen. Bernie Sanders, the Vermont independent, is making another run for the White House. Two sources with direct knowledge of his plans told Yahoo News that Sanders, an independent and self-described “democratic socialist,” plans to announce his presidential bid imminently. While Sanders has been considering a bid for months, one of the sources said he was emboldened by early polls of the race that have consistently showed him as one of the top candidates in a crowded Democratic primary field. In particular, the source said Sanders was heartened to see numbers indicating he is one of the leading candidates among African American and Latino voters, two groups he was perceived as struggling with in 2016. Sen. Bernie Sanders, the Vermont independent, in the Capitol on Jan. 24, 2019. (Photo: Tom Williams/CQ Roll Call/Getty Images) The source also alluded to a spate of recent polls that show Sanders as the most popular politician in the country. They attributed Sanders’ strength in the polls to the base and name recognition he built with the prior presidential bid. “What the senator has this time that he didn’t have last time is he is the most popular elected official in the country right now,” the source said. “That’s light years away from 2016, when very few people knew who he was.” A third source said Sanders’ bid will begin with an exploratory committee. Sanders’ campaign did not immediately respond to a request for comment for this story. In addition to these two sources, a former Sanders staffer who had not been briefed on the imminent announcement plans nevertheless said many recent signs suggest he is set to pull the trigger on a presidential campaign. Specifically, the former staffer said Sanders has been building out the infrastructure he would need for a White House bid. “He’s already talking to staff and there are people he’s hiring. They’re nailing down contracts with vendors. … All the movement is there for him to run,” the ex-staffer said. Story continues Although Sanders was ultimately defeated by Clinton last time around, his upstart campaign reshaped the Democratic Party. Sanders ran on a progressive platform that included a focus on eliminating income inequality, on campaign finance reform and an ambitious “Medicare for All” health care proposal. Those principles have become centerpieces for the progressive wing of the Democratic Party, and several Sanders-backed candidates won elections last year. But Sanders’ impact on the Democratic Party went beyond his political vision. The primary battle between Sanders and Clinton was contentious, with Sanders allies contending that Clinton’s campaign was working in conjunction with the Democratic Party establishment to prevent a Sanders victory. These battles cemented divisions in this party that linger on as the 2020 election approaches. After President Trump’s victory over Clinton in 2016, Sanders and his allies pressed for reforms to the Democratic National Committee that would make the party’s primary process more open and inclusive of what Sanders termed “the working people and young people of our country.” Amid Sanders’ push for reform, the DNC assembled a “unity commission” to recommend changes that included members chosen by both Sanders and Clinton. Ultimately, the DNC made rules changes that included one of the main items on Sanders’ agenda, curbing the role of unelected superdelegates in choosing the party’s presidential nominee. At the same time, the DNC also adopted a rules change that would make it more difficult for independents like Sanders to seek the party’s presidential nomination. In spite of this, Sanders’ allies consider that this new rule does not hurt his chances, because the Vermont Democratic Party passed a resolution last year recognizing him as a full member. A source who discussed Sanders’ 2020 plans with Yahoo News confirmed that he will be running as a Democrat. Although he will be entering an extremely crowded Democratic field, Sanders is starting from a formidable position. Early polls of the race have consistently showed him to be one of the top candidates, probably due to the base of support he established in 2016. Sanders allies also believe his prior run could give him a head start organizing in key early primary states. Last October, Pete D’Alessandro, Sanders’s Iowa state coordinator for the 2016 race, told Yahoo News he was confident the senator would be able to build on the grassroots support and infrastructure he established in 2016 if he made another run. “This was a movement.