Former US first lady Hillary Clinton, who lost the 2016 race for the White House to Republican Donald Trump, is once again considering running for president in 2020, says a former adviser to the Clinton family.
Mike Penn, who is also a frequent contributor to Democrat-leaning newspaper The Hill, wrote in a Sunday op-ed for The Wall Street Journal that the former Democratic presidential nominee doesn’t want to end her political career with a “humiliating loss” to President Trump.
“True to her name, Mrs. Clinton will fight this out until the last dog dies,” read the article, co-written by Andrew Stein, a Democrat who served on the New York City Council. “She won’t let a little thing like two stunning defeats stand in the way of her claim to the White House.”
Penn said Clinton during the 2016 presidential election end her political career.
“You can expect her to run for president once again,” the pair predicted. “Maybe not at first, when the legions of Senate Democrats make their announcements, but definitely by the time the primaries are in full swing.”
Clinton has two years to review what went wrong during her last campaign bid, which fell apart despite her being viewed as the favorite in almost all polls, Penn said.
The article said Clinton needed a strategy to win over voters who surprisingly supported her rival in 2016.
“She has decisively to win those Iowa caucus-goers who have never warmed up to her,” the article read. “They will see her now as strong, partisan, left-leaning and all-Democrat—the one with the guts, experience and steely-eyed determination to defeat Mr. Trump.”
Clinton, who served as former President Barack Obama’s secretary of state after losing to him in the 2008 primaries, left the door open to a possible 2020 run, saying last month that "I'd like to be president."
Despite all this, however, Clinton’s longtime advisers and confidants have denied that she was weighing another White House bid.
“She’s more likely to win Powerball,” Philippe Reines, Clinton’s longtime adviser, told The Hill.
Penn and Stein, however, said that voters should not pay attention to Clinton’s “‘I won’t run’ declarations.”
“Mrs. Clinton knows both Mr. [former President Bill] Clinton and Mr. Obama declared they weren’t running, until they ran,” the pair argued. “She may even skip Iowa and enter the race later, but rest assured that, one way or another, Hillary 4.0 is on the way.”