Hillary Clinton appeared to leave the door open to another presidential bid during comments made during a podcast taped over the weekend.
Asked by Recode’s Kara Swisher about a 2020 bid, Clinton initially said “no” and then paused, before saying “no” again.
But after Swisher noted the pause, Clinton didn’t sound so sure.
“Well, I’d like to be president,” she said at the taping Friday in front of a live audience. “I think, hopefully, when we have a Democrat in the Oval Office in January of 2021, there’s going to be so much work to be done.”
After asserting that President Trump has done a great deal of damage to the international standing of the United States, Clinton said, “The work would be work that I feel very well prepared for, having been at the Senate for eight years, having been a diplomat in the State Department, and it’s just going to be a lot of heavy lifting.”
Asked by Swisher whether she would be doing any of the lifting, Clinton said: “I have no idea . . . I’m not even going to think about it until after we get through this November 6th election about what’s going to happen after that.”
As Clinton has become more visible in recent weeks, speculation has mounted about whether she might make another bid for the Democratic nomination.
Longtime aide Philippe Reines told Politico earlier this month that there is a “not zero” chance that Clinton will seek a rematch against Trump.
“It’s curious why Hillary Clinton’s name isn’t in the mix — either conversationally or in formal polling — as a 2020 candidate,” Reines said.
“She’s younger than Donald Trump by a year. She’s younger than Joe Biden by four years. Is it that she’s run before? This would be Bernie Sanders’s second time, and Biden’s third time. Is it lack of support? She had 65 million people vote for her.”
When pressed on whether she’s running, Reines told Politico, “It’s somewhere between highly unlikely and zero, but it’s not zero.”
