Bill de Blasio Is Out: 2020 Campaign Over

Bill de Blasio's 2020 campaign for president is over. New York City's mayor called it quits on Friday, telling MSNBC's Morning Joe program that "I feel like I've contributed all I can to this primary election, and it's clearly not my time," per Politico. De Blasio said the "central reason" he's out is his inability to meet the minimum requirements to qualify for televised debates. "The bar is so high so early that for a lot of us, clearly, some of my fellow chief executives, governors couldn't make that cut," he said.

De Blasio, 58, says he will return to New York City to focus solely on wrapping up his second term as mayor. He is ineligible to run for a third term, but in an essay at NBC News, he writes that "fighting for working people and ensuring that New York City remains the vanguard of progressivism will continue to be my missions." An analysis at Vox points out that de Blasio had a near-impossible task trying to compete against two other "big-name progressives," Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren. (The mayor's run had hiccups from the very start.)