House Democrats can’t get Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell to hold a vote on their biggest legislative accomplishment.

So they’re going to pass it all over again.

Story Continued Below

House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer (D-Md.) is eyeing a new strategy that would take the caucus’ signature achievement this year — a sprawling elections and government transparency bill — and break it into bite-size pieces with fresh votes on the floor, according to multiple lawmakers and aides.

The move is intended to pressure Senate Republicans into taking up House bills and underscores a desire by Democratic leadership to spotlight all the legislation that has languished on the other side of the Capitol.

“Since Senator McConnell refuses to take up H.R. 1, I am prepared to bring to the Floor and pass individual bills to address the reforms included in the For the People Act,” Hoyer said in a statement to POLITICO.

The package, which passed on a party-line vote in March, is expected to be sliced into separate pieces in the coming weeks on election security, voting rights and campaign finance.

House Democrats are eager to remind the public about a marquee proposal that some lawmakers fear has been overshadowed by the bruising shutdown battle and subsequent fights on oversight and the Mueller probe.

Separate votes would also help draw attention to little-noticed pieces of the initial bill, such as automatic voter registration or a crackdown on super PACs, which are priorities for the liberal grassroots and something some lawmakers say Democratic leaders have not done enough to promote.

Democrats are eager to hammer Senate Republicans for failing to take up ideas that have bipartisan support, like tightening the rules for TV ad disclosures or protecting state election security systems from foreign hacking.

“It’s unfortunate that the ‘grim reaper’ has chosen to conduct himself like this,” House Democratic Caucus Chairman Hakeem Jeffries (D-N.Y.) said, referring to a nickname McConnell recently gave himself for killing Democratic bills. “At the end of the day, I hope that we’ll see more responsible behavior.”

In reality, the approach has little chance of changing McConnell’s mind. The Kentucky Republican has already rejected a wide range of ideas in H.R. 1 — like overhauling the Federal Election Commission and tightening restrictions for political ads. A spokesman for McConnell declined to comment on whether any of the Democrats’ bills could come to the floor, but there’s little reason to think he’ll reverse course.

Some vulnerable Democratic freshmen are growing anxious that after five months in the majority, the House has sent no major bills — besides must-pass spending measures — to Trump’s desk.

Democrats are indeed acting on core pieces of their agenda — passing legislation to curb gun violence, tackle the gender pay gap and bolster Obamacare — but the Senate has ignored the legislation.

“There’s been a lot of talk about how, tactically, how we can reinforce this point that we have legislation that has broad support — because the elements of H.R. 1 are broadly supported — and McConnell’s not willing to give anything a fair hearing,” said Rhode Island Rep. David Cicilline, who leads the House Democrats’ messaging arm.

“We want to make sure we put some pressure on him,” Cicilline said.

At least at this point, the rank and file doesn’t blame Democratic leadership for the impasse. Asked about the fate of their bills in the Senate, most Democrats are quick to slam uncooperative Republicans in the upper chamber.

And if McConnell’s blockade continues, as is likely, Democrats are likely to make the case to voters they need a Senate majority to get anything done.

“If the Senate refuses to take it up, then that’s the issue in 2020 they’re going to have to answer for,” said Massachusetts Rep. Katherine Clark, vice chair of the House Democratic Caucus.

Still, some moderate Democrats are hopeful that some narrow proposals may make it into law — noting that while zero Republicans voted for H.R. 1 on the floor, parts of it do have bipartisan support.

Washington Rep. Derek Kilmer, who leads the centrist New Democrats Caucus, said some of the two dozen separate provisions in the legislation have already been introduced as stand-alone bills that he says could eventually move in the Senate.

That includes his own bill, the Honest Ads Act, which had 13 Democrats and 13 Republicans as co-sponsors in the previous Congress. It also has a companion bill in the Senate sponsored by Sens. Amy Klobuchar (D-Minn.), Mark Warner (D-Va.) and Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.).

“That’s something, I think, that could move,” Kilmer said. “There are those sorts of ideas — that are stand-alone bills — that I think could see some action.”

NEW YORK — Bill de Blasio found a way to stand out.

The 23rd candidate to enter the Democratic presidential field found a slice of the limelight by botching his carefully planned announcement rollout.

Story Continued Below

First a high schooler in Missouri scooped de Blasio by tweeting that the New York City mayor would visit the Truman Club in Sioux City, Iowa, for the first stop on his “Presidential announcement tour,” with the club initially misspelling the mayor’s name. Then protesters appeared outside the windows as de Blasio was on nationally watched “Good Morning America” this morning for his first campaign appearance.

His announcement video quickly drew a mocking tweet from his would-be opponent President Donald Trump. The announcement came just days after de Blasio faced protesters so loud that they drowned him out when he tried to make an climate announcement at Trump Tower. All this was only after he equivocated for weeks about whether he should run as the 2020 field grew increasingly crowded.

The two-term mayor likes to point to his decisive margins of victory in the biggest U.S. city, but the perception that he is a bungler in chief was only reinforced by his rollout, which continues Friday and Saturday with travel to Iowa and South Carolina, two key early voting states.

“I’m not sure it’s sunk in yet, but he’s not competing against other ragtag campaigns,” communications consultant Eric Soufer, a managing director of Tusk Strategies, said in an email. “He’s competing against seriously staffed, deeply funded, totally professionalized operations. Those campaigns have dozens of staffers obsessed with making sure everything looks perfect for their candidate everyday. He has maybe one or two — and they’re already working overtime just to get this thing off the ground. It’s unrealistic to expect anything more from them, but the press and the voters won’t care.“

De Blasio opted to enter the race against the advice of some of his friends and advisers, one of whom called the idea “f—ing insane“ in an interview with POLITICO in March.

The people of New York City — who elected de Blasio to a second mayoral term in 2017 — are especially reticent about him running for president. In a Quinnipiac University poll released in April, only 18 percent of the city’s voters said he should run for president with 76 percent saying he should not. The respondents were uniform across political parties, gender, race age and which borough they live in, Quinnipiac said.

De Blasio has long harbored loftier ambitions than New York City Hall. He launched a federal leadership PAC called “Fairness PAC” last year to cover expenses for himself and his wife Chirlane McCray as they back liberal causes, support Democratic candidates — and likely raise the mayor’s national profile in the process.

The PAC’s creation followed a now-shuttered nonprofit he created in 2015, called the Progressive Agenda Committee. That group laid out a policy platform for liberal Democrats and aimed to try to move Hillary Clinton to the left on economic issues in the run-up to the 2016 election.

De Blasio’s effort was derided at the time by Clinton supporters and other Democrats, who wondered why de Blasio, Clinton’s former campaign manager, refused to outright endorse his former boss.

De Blasio’s day job as mayor has its challenges as well.

This week, a departmental trial began for a police officer’s role in the chokehold death of an unarmed black man — an incident that underscored the racial tensions in law enforcement in New York City.

The mayor also missed another extension to name a chairperson to lead the city’s public housing authority, which became so problematic on his watch it is now under the auspices of a federal monitor.

And on Monday, a former de Blasio fundraiser was sentenced to four years in jail for his role in a bribery scheme involving the police department.

“It’s no surprise that the mayor is learning on day 1 that running for President can’t get wedged between his mid morning workout and eating his late breakfast,” Risa Heller, chief executive of public affairs firm Risa Heller Communications, said in an email. “He’ll work out the kinks but America will groan along with New Yorkers until he does.”

Samantha Maldonado contributed to this report.

He’s late to his own announcements. He is late to his own meetings. He sometimes keeps staffers waiting while he naps in his City Hall office.

And when, after weeks of hedging, New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio confirmed Thursday he was entering a field of nearly two dozen Democratic contenders, he was late once again.

Story Continued Below

De Blasio clocked in as the 23rd Democrat to announce a run for the presidency. In a promotional video and an announcement on Good Morning America, he cast himself as the man best suited to defeat President Donald Trump and the torchbearer of the progressive left.

“There’s plenty of money in this world; there’s plenty of money in this country — it’s just in the wrong hands,” he said in the video, repeating the same line in his interview with George Stephanopoulos.

His tardy entry into the already crowded primary underscored one of the mayor’s most enduring characteristics. But de Blasio’s longstanding inability to keep to a schedule speaks to a deeper ding in his political armor: He’s not just late to ribbon cuttings and memorial services. He’s late to progressive causes, too.

“He’s a progressive who’s very conservative,” said George Arzt, a long-time Democratic operative in New York who was press secretary to former Mayor Ed Koch. “He likes to take leftist stances, but he always is late to issues. He thinks about the issues too much before he can make a decision.”

De Blasio is late to so many things, his tardiness inspired political button maker Mort Berkowitz to make it central to a de Blasio 2020 pin, which he sold for $3 a pop at a recent charity fundraiser hosted by City Hall reporters.

“Make America Late Again,” it reads, the message superimposed on a photo of de Blasio, which is, in turn, superimposed on an analog clock.

“Those who know the mayor or who have dealings with the mayor understand it, because he tends to be late all the time,” Berkowitz said.

Last year, advocates for the poor backed a cause that seemed tailor-made for de Blasio, who ran for office railing against income inequality (in his formulation, the “tale of two cities”).

With subway and bus fares continuing to rise, and New York City cops continuing to crack down on farebeating in a racially disproportionate way, advocates called on the city to subsidize fares for low-income riders.

De Blasio’s board member at the Metropolitan Transportation Authority championed the cause. De Blasio resisted. Then, New York City Council Speaker Corey Johnson demanded de Blasio fund it if he wanted to pass a budget in 2018.

Following a good deal of wrangling, de Blasio ultimately agreed to fund the program. Today, de Blasio describes Fair Fares as “a major step towards a fairer and just society.”

But advocates for the program note that de Blasio was, per usual, late to the game.

“Fair Fares started moving in a serious way when Corey Johnson got involved,” said Nick Sifuentes, who helped spearhead the Fair Fares campaign when he was deputy director at the Riders Alliance.

On other issues relating to poverty, de Blasio has been similarly behind-the-ball.

As the city’s public advocate with an eye on Gracie Mansion, he was initially hesitant to back legislation that would mandate certain companies receiving city subsidies pay a “living wage” to workers. He eventually came around and used his support of the issue to go after then-City Council Speaker Christine Quinn, whom he would go on to defeat in the mayor’s race.

Chalk it up to prolonged deliberation or finger-in-the-wind political prognosticating, but Fair Fares and living wage are but two of a raft of progressive causes where the mayor has followed the progressive vanguard in the Democratic party, rather than lead it.

He was late to join the progressive effort to guarantee paid sick leave for New York City workers.

“The paid sick campaign started in NYC as early as 2008 and 2009, and [de Blasio] was not vocal or visible on the issue until later,” emailed a Democratic operative who worked on the paid sick leave campaign.

Despite a national recognition of the violence of Rikers Island, underscored by the 2015 suicide of Kalief Browder after he spent two years in solitary confinement for allegedly stealing a backpack, the mayor resisted shuttering the jail.

It was only after activists and other politicians backed him into a corner that he came around to embracing the costly proposal to replace the jail with four smaller ones throughout the city.

He now boasts of the goal in his speeches as evidence of his action on criminal justice reform — a far cry from calling it a “noble” but impractical idea when then-City Council Speaker Melissa Mark-Viverito seized it as one of her causes.

He came late to marijuana legalization — only reluctantly agreeing with the popular progressive cause in December after his political adversary, Gov. Andrew Cuomo, indicated that he would pursue legalization at the state level, making it seem a fait accompli.

His resistance to tacking too far left on policing — he opposes loosened enforcement of turnstile jumpers for instance — is an inevitable reaction to a feud with police officers that threatened to overtake his first term in office. But it has nevertheless put him at odds with some who voted him into office on his promise of police reform.

“The mayor I endorsed in 2013 is not the mayor I’ve seen lately,” said Public Advocate Jumaane Williams earlier this year when he was running for his current office, referring to the mayor’s record on policing and housing.

Congestion pricing — charging drivers a fee to enter Manhattan’s busiest areas to cut down on traffic and pollution — seemed a clear cause to champion for a left-leaning liberal. But de Blasio followed the same pattern: resistance until its inevitability overwhelmed him, followed by belated acceptance.

For most of the years that environmentalists and transportation advocates had been pushing for congestion pricing, de Blasio had called it a “regressive” tax. After the governor endorsed the effort and it looked like a legislative certainty, de Blasio came around.

“If you look at congestion pricing, some people would say it’s the biggest progressive accomplishment in New York City in a very long time,” said Nicole Gelinas, a transportation expert at the right-leaning Manhattan Institute. “He had a very small role in that.”

Observers note that it didn’t have to be this way. The mayor started his first term in office with a bang, fulfilling his ambitious commitment to establish universal pre-Kindergarten across the city. Since then, they lament, he’s lost that sense of momentum.

“[He has] the worst case of senioritis I’ve ever seen,” said Fordham University political science professor Christina Greer. “I’d be much more empathetic with the mayor if he was losing interest and it’s July, August of 2021, where a campaign is in full swing, he’s a lame duck, I’d understand that. But it seems as though he lost interest in the job shortly after he got reelected, and we just have a lot going on in the city.”