If you informed a room full of family members or coworkers that John Delaney was rumored to be exiting America’s presidential race in the coming weeks, even the more politically engaged among them would likely greet the news with a slightly bemused stare. After a brief pause and some head-scratching, there’s a good chance someone would venture to pose the most obvious follow-up question: “Uh . . .  who is that?”

The irony is that the former three-term Maryland congressman has actually been running for president longer than any other Democrat. Delaney declared nearly two years ago — a veritable eternity in politics, particularly during the Trump era — and has spent a far from negligible sum of money inflicting the same tedious, prosaic message on anyone who wants (or is forced by cable TV) to listen. He’s held countless events and given innumerable speeches. He’s visited all ninety-nine of Iowa’s counties and by the spring of 2018 had already spent over a million dollars there: his basic pitch being that Democrats need to offer realistic rather than utopian solutions to the problems faced by Americans, start championing a politics that “gets things done,” and stop making a villain out of banks when the real enemy is partisanship (Delaney is incidentally a former banker who, at a net worth of $90 million, ranked among the House’s richest members).

In practice, this has meant expending tremendous amounts of energy explaining why enormously popular policies favored by large sections of the electorate are actually inadvisable, to a resoundingly uninterested and sometimes hostile public. Delaney explicitly rejects the idea of a Green New Deal and, while plenty of Democratic contenders have waffled around the issue of Medicare for All, he’s been consistent in declaring it bad policy. (To date, one of his biggest and only real media hits remains getting booed by delegates at a Democratic convention in California for bluntly denouncing single-payer.)