Mayor Bill de Blasio said on Sunday he wouldn’t rule out running for president, but he insisted he was focused on his City Hall job and on the Democratic Party as a whole.
De Blasio, who appeared on CNN’s "State of the Union" with Jake Tapper, said he wouldn’t rule out running for the highest office, but he had some advice for Democrats in general.
"I’m focused on my job, but listen: Right now our party is going through a serious debate and there’s still a lot of moderate voices in the party that did not learn the lessons of 2016 and are not listening to what people need in this country," he told Tapper. "So I want to push this whole party and I want to inform this debate in this country about the fact that we could go a lot farther, we could be a lot bolder than what we’re doing now.
"I never rule things out because you never know what life brings, but I’m focused on the work I’m doing now and getting this message out," he said.
De Blasio also wouldn’t commit to endorsing Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand for a potential presidential run in 2020. Gillibrand has said she is thinking about running.
"I don’t talk about hypothetical situations. There’s a lot of good candidates," he said, adding that among Democrats there is "a lack of recognition that, if you have tens of millions of people hurting, we’re not speaking to them," and that the Democratic Party needs "to be the party of working people again."
