The pool of 2020 Democratic presidential candidates keeps expanding. But one name that won’t be in the mix is 2016 nominee Hillary Clinton.
She’s not running: Hillary Clinton rules out 2020 bid
That doesn’t mean Clinton won’t be a presence.
Emily Stewart covered business and economics for Vox and wrote the newsletter The Big Squeeze, examining the ways ordinary people are being squeezed under capitalism. Before joining Vox, she worked for TheStreet.
The former secretary of state and US senator ruled out a 2020 White House bid in an interview with the local New York City television station News 12 on Monday.
“I’m not running,” she said, “but I’m going to keep working on and speaking and standing up for what I believe.”
Onlookers have engaged in a sort of will-she-or-won’t-she speculation in recent months regarding Clinton and a potential third presidential bid. Longtime Clinton aide Mark Penn last year wrote an op-ed saying that Clinton would run again, and while Clinton had consistently said she wouldn’t run in 2020, some of her comments ignited conjecture that she might go for it after all. In a podcast interview with Recode’s Kara Swisher in October 2018, Clinton said she didn’t expect to run again but qualified that with, “I’d like to be president.”
The idea of a potential third run for Clinton brings out deep and often painful emotions and divisions among progressives. Some Democrats would love to see Clinton run again; others want nothing to do with it. And even for Clinton’s biggest fans, the idea of relitigating a Hillary-versus-Bernie primary is an unappealing one. Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) has already launched his 2020 bid.
While Clinton may not be on the ballot in 2020, she isn’t going away, either.
She has met with other declared or potential candidates, including Sens. Kamala Harris (CA), Cory Booker (NJ), and Elizabeth Warren (MA), Colorado Gov. John Hickenlooper, and former Vice President Joe Biden. In 2017, she launched a political action group, Onward Together, and she continues to make appearances and speak out on issues she cares about.
“I want to be sure that people understand I’m going to keep speaking out,” she told News 12. “I’m not going anywhere. What’s at stake in our country, the kind of things that are happening right now are deeply troubling to me. And I’m also thinking hard about how do we start talking and listening to each other again? We’ve just gotten so polarized. We’ve gotten into really opposing camps unlike anything I’ve ever seen in my adult life.”
Clinton isn’t going to disappear from the 2020 primary entirely
While Clinton may not be a candidate in the 2020 Democratic Party primary, it doesn’t mean she won’t be a presence. She told News 12 she would do “everything I can” to help Democrats win the White House in 2020 and that she has advised current candidates not to take anything for granted.
She was the first woman to win a major party’s nomination for the presidency and as such will serve as a model and point of comparison for the multiple women in the current field. We’re already seeing the “likability” question that dogged Clinton pop up about other women candidates, such as Warren.
And the animosity between the Clinton and Sanders camp has not subsided either, and with Sanders in the 2020 race, it seems likely to continue.
Politico reported in February that former Clinton staffers remain angry about Sanders’s use of a private jet for travel as a surrogate in the 2016 campaign. In the piece, Zac Petkanas, director of rapid response for the Clinton campaign, referred to the Vermont senator as “Royal Majesty King Bernie Sanders.” Michael Briggs, a spokesperson for Sanders’s 2016 campaign, called Clinton and her staff “total ingrates.” Politico ran another story on Tuesday on Clinton allies stewing over Sanders’s 2020 campaign and criticizing it in the way the Sanders camp did hers in 2016.
Clinton and Sanders themselves don’t appear to have the warmest of relationships. At an event in Selma, Alabama, over the weekend, reporters noted that Clinton hugged Sen. Booker and Sen. Sherrod Brown (OH) after they delivered speeches, while she and Sanders only shook hands.
In an appearance last week on The View, Sanders was asked whether he would seek advice from Clinton for his campaign. “I suspect not,” he said. He said Clinton had not called him but that the pair have “fundamental differences and that’s just what it is.”
Former Clinton adviser Nick Merrill responded to Sanders’s comments on Twitter, calling them “irresponsible” and “counter-productive.”
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