This is an excerpt from The Stakes 2020, BuzzFeed News' newsletter about what really matters in the 2020 campaign. You can sign up here.
I texted this week with Deval Patrick, the successful and well-regarded former governor of Massachusetts who left office in 2015. He ran on elements of Barack Obama’s message (and even the same language)…before Obama did. And I think he might well have had the 2016 nomination had he run then. But he’s getting in awful late now, and I began by asking him about that.
