STATEN ISLAND, N.Y. – Democrat Max Rose won’t officially be sworn in as a member of the U.S. House of Representatives for more than three weeks.
But the 2020 re-election campaign has already begun, with Rose launching a pre-emptive e-mail strike at former GOP Rep. Michael Grimm.
Well, it’s never too early to start running. Particularly these days. With 24/7 social media and cable TV fanning the flames, the quaint notion of “election cycles” ceased to exist long ago. It’s all politics, all the time.
The Max Rose for Congress campaign sent out a fundraising email the other day, with “Grimm 2020?” as the subject line.
The email references a Buzzfeed article that says that Grimm, who left Congress in 2014 after pleading guilty to tax evasion, is already looking to run for his old House seat now that a Democrat has won it.
The Buzzfeed story hit the web a little after 11 p.m. on election night, Nov. 6, just after Rose defeated incumbent GOP Rep. Dan Donovan.
So here we are a month later, and the Rose camp is using the article as fundraising fodder.
“Max hasn’t even been sworn in and the Republicans and special interests are already lining up to take him out,” the email reads.
Pretty standard stuff. The only wonder is that it took four weeks for the Buzzfeed article to be put to political use. In truth, the 2020 campaign has been going on for months now.
Republicans weren’t convinced that Donovan would triumph over Rose in the first place. They thought he might squeak by, but nobody was betting the house on it. And you couldn’t blame them. Donovan had had a tough enough time against Grimm in the GOP primary earlier this year.
President Donald Trump had to tweet out an endorsement of Donovan in order to help the congressman over the finish line. The tweet cut the legs out from under Grimm, who was trying to position himself as a true Trumpian after Donovan had gone against the president on three key Trump agenda items: Tax reform, Obamacare repeal, and punishing sanctuary cities.
Not only that, but the entire state GOP boosted Donovan in the closing days, with Rudy Giuliani and Long Island Rep. Peter King joining entertainer Joe Piscopo for a rally on Staten Island.
In other words: Everybody knew that Donovan was in trouble, especially given the blue tide rising all around the country. He was ripe for the taking. There was no shock when Rose took him.
So the possibility that a Dem would be in the seat come 2020 has been baked into the cake for a while. GOP City Councilman Joe Borelli (R-South Shore) has already been mentioned as a possible contender. So has Assemblywoman Nicole Malliotakis (R-Mid-Island/Brooklyn).
And you can’t discount Grimm, even though Donovan ended up dusting him pretty decisively back in the spring.
Grimm has a positively rabid fan base out there. He’s a rock star-style politician. He excites people, and, as we saw during the primary, he doesn’t need to be in elective office in order to keep a high profile and generate news coverage. That could be a very lively GOP primary.
There was a thought earlier this year that the Dems would rather have squared up against Grimm in the 2018 general election, that an ex-congressman who did felony jail time would be easy meat.
They may get their wish in two years. And who knows that the gameboard will look like then? Who knows what Rose’s congressional record will be? Who knows whether Trump will again be riding high on Staten Island during his own 2020 re-election campaign?
For Grimm’s part, he said on Friday that the door is “wide open” for a potential run.
It’s never too early to start running. For anybody.