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” Amy’s Making a Big Announcement,” posted Sen. Klobuchar, D-Minn., from her Twitter account just hours after the State of the Union. Absent from the presidential tease were mixtapes, celebrity headlines, and Instagram livestreams. Instead, Klobuchar just posted one single boomer image macro, and unless she’s taking to the stage over the weekend to announce that she’s definitively not throwing her hat into the already-crowded ring, it’s now clear: She’s running.

Klobuchar might be the first interesting candidate to enter the race in this entire season. Unlike Sen. Kamala Harris, D-Calif., and Sen. Cory Booker, D-N.J., who have spent the better part of the past two years auditioning for the presidency at every televised turn, or Rep. Tulsi Gabbard, D-Hawaii, whose bid was as unpromising as it had been unexpected, Klobuchar may just turn out to be the dark horse of this race.

Either in their pursuit to trigger President Trump, or to tax and nationalize America into socialism, nearly every professed and prospective 2020 candidate has swung slightly to the left of Eugene V. Debs. Kamala was a cop, but now she wants the state to eliminate private health insurance. Booker began his Senate career with the promise of bipartisanship, and now he wants a multi-trillion Green New Deal that would, by use of unicorns and rainbows, reach zero carbon emissions while banning nuclear energy and carbon trading. Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand, D-N.Y., who was an immigration hawk not long ago, has now endorsed abolishing U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement.

The only Democratic front-runner remotely aligned with Obama-era liberalism is his former Vice President, Joe Biden, who hasn’t even announced whether he’s running. Unlike Harris, Booker, and the rest, Biden still has Rust Belt appeal and doesn’t engage in the sort of “intersectional” silliness that has driven the white working class into the arms of Trump. And unlike Harris, Booker, and the rest, Biden has consistently topped primary polls without even trying. But a recent Emerson poll confirmed a key concern for Biden acolytes — that he may just be too old to run. Just one-third of those polled said that there’s no age too old to run for the presidency, whereas 27 percent said that anyone over 75 would be too old, and another 27 percent said anyone over 70 would be too old. Biden is currently 76, and if he won the presidency, he would be 82 by the end of his first term.

That leaves a massive void of moderate liberalism for a younger candidate to fill. And Klobuchar might have positioned herself to do just that.

Unlike her Democratic colleagues on the Senate Judiciary Committee, Klobuchar didn’t make a mockery of herself in an attempt to score a viral moment owning Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh during his confirmation hearings. Whereas Booker, Harris, and Sen. Maizie Hirono, D-Hawaii, threw cheap shots and leading questions at the judge, Klobuchar’s line of questioning was tempered and reflective of her record as one of Minnesota’s top prosecutors. It’s also worth noting that while Booker and Harris desperately tried to trip up Kavanaugh to no avail, Klobuchar actually managed to get Kavanaugh to question her during the hearing, immediately eliciting an apology from him.

Klobuchar also hasn’t taken the bait on Medicare for All. While single-payer may seem like all the rage, polling that includes its consequences crashes its favorability with the public. Only 37 percent of those polled by the Kaiser Family Foundation support single-payer when made aware that it would eliminate private insurance and raise taxes, and just a quarter still support it when told Medicare for All would cause shortages — an inevitability when considering that its $32.6 trillion price tag over 10 years implies that physicians and hospitals accept a reimbursement rate 40 percent lower than average private standards. Without that favorable assumption, the price becomes much higher.

As Democrats have rapidly turned their backs on Israel and embraced the boycott, divestment, and sanctions movement against it, and as they have warmly welcomed one-state-solution backers such as Rep. Ilhan Omar, D-Minn., and Rep. Rashida Tlaib, D-Mich., Klobuchar stood alone as the only 2020 senator to vote with Republicans and a shrinking segment of pro-Israel Democrats on a bill allowing states to withhold business from companies engaging in anti-Israel BDS.

So what does Klobuchar stand for? Basically everything that made pre-2014 progressivism viable in elections. But as it turns out, it may not matter too much.

Fifty-seven percent of voters currently say that they won’t vote for Trump. But given the choice between our blustery president and a Democrat who wants to nationalize one-fifth of our economy with single-payer, abandon Israel, chase the wealthy out of the country, and legalize third-trimester abortion, that number would surely either sink or fracture among third-party challengers. So the Democrat who could beat Trump is one who simply isn’t insane or a socialist.

But is that enough to win a primary? It may very well be. According to Monmouth, 56 percent of Democrats would prefer a candidate whom they may not agree with but would have better odds beating Trump, as opposed to 33 percent who’d take the reverse. As much as Democratic leaders may claim that the only way to beat Trump is to become his antithesis on the issues, the statistics tell a different story.