Beyond Hillary Clinton: 7 other Democrats possibly (or definitely) running for president

Hillary Clinton is in, but that isn’t keeping other Democrats from running – or at least thinking about it. Here’s our list, updated April 30, 2015:

4. Lincoln Chafee

Steven Senne/AP/File
Then-Rhode Island Gov. Lincoln Chafee responds to questions during an interview with the Associated Press, in his office at the Statehouse, in Providence, R.I., Dec. 11, 2014. Chafee says he has formed an exploratory committee to consider a Democratic presidential campaign, saying in a video that voters want to 'assess the character and experience of those offering ideas.'

Former Governor Chafee of Rhode Island has evolved politically over the years, from Republican to independent to Democrat. On April 9, 2015, he announced he was exploring a run for the presidency.

Chafee comes from a blue-blood, moderate Republican political family; his father was Sen. John Chafee (R) of Rhode Island. Lincoln served as mayor of Warwick, R.I., from 1992 to 1999. He was a GOP senator from Rhode Island from 1999 to 2007. In 2010, he won the state’s governorship as an independent, then in 2013, he joined the Democratic Party. Chafee finished his term in January 2015, opting not to run for reelection.

As Rhode Island governor, Chafee pursued largely liberal positions. He favored tax increases to address the state’s budget surplus, opposed charter schools, and signed legislation in 2013 legalizing same-sex marriage in the state.

So far, Chafee’s presidential explorations haven’t garnered much attention from voters. But he’s just getting started. He plans to make his first campaign stop on May 6 in New Hampshire.

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Dear Reader,

About a year ago, I happened upon this statement about the Monitor in the Harvard Business Review – under the charming heading of “do things that don’t interest you”:

“Many things that end up” being meaningful, writes social scientist Joseph Grenny, “have come from conference workshops, articles, or online videos that began as a chore and ended with an insight. My work in Kenya, for example, was heavily influenced by a Christian Science Monitor article I had forced myself to read 10 years earlier. Sometimes, we call things ‘boring’ simply because they lie outside the box we are currently in.”

If you were to come up with a punchline to a joke about the Monitor, that would probably be it. We’re seen as being global, fair, insightful, and perhaps a bit too earnest. We’re the bran muffin of journalism.

But you know what? We change lives. And I’m going to argue that we change lives precisely because we force open that too-small box that most human beings think they live in.

The Monitor is a peculiar little publication that’s hard for the world to figure out. We’re run by a church, but we’re not only for church members and we’re not about converting people. We’re known as being fair even as the world becomes as polarized as at any time since the newspaper’s founding in 1908.

We have a mission beyond circulation, we want to bridge divides. We’re about kicking down the door of thought everywhere and saying, “You are bigger and more capable than you realize. And we can prove it.”

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