New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio is feeling optimistic about his chances to rise from obscurity in the 2020 Democrat primary to take on President Trump, and he’s not going to let every poll get him down.

While de Blasio isn’t even provided as an option in most 2020 presidential polls, he was included in a recent poll of 600 Iowa voters and not a single one said they planned to vote for the “progressive” candidate.

The Hill pointed out the embarrassment Monday, providing de Blasio the opportunity to spin it into a good thing.

“One thing I learned a long time ago about polling, it’s not where you start, it’s where you finish,” de Blasio told the news site. “Right now, I’ve got nowhere to go but up.”

Polling so far behind the pack that he doesn’t even register makes de Blasio the “underdog,” he said, and that somehow gives him a great shot at winning.

“I have started many a race as an underdog,” the mayor said. “In fact, if you look across American political history so many times it’s the underdog that wins, and we have eight months until the first votes are cast in Iowa.”

It was essentially the same message de Blasio offered when confronted by CNN about the embarrassing poll last week.

“It’s a poll of 800 Iowans eight months before the caucuses. This is just the beginning of a very long process,” the mayor said. “And I’ll tell you something. Iowans have consistently surprised the pundits and come out many, many times with a choice that was not expected. Many times, that final choice only emerged in the final weeks before caucuses …”

De Blasio told CNN he plans to bring back an “urban-rural coalition,” likening himself to FDR.

“I’ll tell you something, when it comes to the issues I’m hearing from rural Iowans the same issues I hear from my constituents in New York,” de Blasio said in response to a question about how Iowans feel about a big city mayor.

“I actually think the Democratic Party for decades formed a rural-urban coalition – that what Franklin Delano Roosevelt did. That’s what we had for many, many years and it worked for Democrats because it was about working people,” he said.

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One obstacle for de Blasio is neither voters in the city nor the country like him very much.

“How do you want to run off and be president of the United States when you’ve got all these issues you’re supposed to be the mayor of?” Sharon Henderson, a 53-year-old home health aide in Brooklyn, told The New York Times when de Blasio declared his candidacy in May. “Nah.”

Others gathered in Times Square to protest the idea, chanting slogans like “no friend of labor,” and “Can’t run the city, can’t run the country.”

“He should run away,” John Puglissi, vice president of the city’s Police Benevolent Association, told the Times. “He’s a phony progressive.”

Many New Yorkers have complained that de Blasio’s administration has done very little for working class residents, while often ignoring serious problems in public housing, schools and other important city departments.

One city resident even got so fed up with getting the run-around that trekked all the way to Iowa in late May to confront de Blasio about his failure at a campaign event in Sioux City.

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NY1 reporter Grace Raugh posted an image of the woman, Tina Concepcion, speaking with de Blaiso on Twitter, where it quickly became clear that many of the city’s voters share her frustrations, The American Mirror reports.

“I think this gets to the heart of why New Yorkers are so angered by de Blasio’s campaign,” Brooke Rogers wrote. “We have so many problems in this city, and our mayor, who has done a spectacular job of either ignoring those problems or making them worse, thinks he should be president.”