Hillary Clinton may run against Donald Trump in the 2020 election after all, a former advisor says.
Clinton, who has twice unsuccessfully run for president, previously stated she will not run again. However, in an Wall Street Journal op-ed on Sunday, longtime Clinton advisor Mark Penn suggested that Clinton is planning a “Hillary 4.0” campaign.
In the op-ed, Penn said that he thought Clinton, who recently hit the campaign trail for Illinois gubernatorial Candidate J.B. Pritzker, would reinvent herself for the 2020 election, and “will come full circle—back to the universal-health-care-promoting progressive firebrand of 1994.” He says that Clinton won’t let her past defeats stand in her way of running again.
According to Penn, Clinton will “come out swinging,” going on to say that “Mrs. Clinton will take down rising Democratic stars like bowling pins. Mike Bloomberg will support her rather than run, and Joe Biden will never be able to take her on.”
While Clinton has been quite vocal about not running again since her defeat to Trump in 2016, Penn says that “Mrs. Clinton knows both Mr. Clinton and Mr. Obama declared they weren’t running, until they ran,” and that we might even see Hillary 4.0 announce her candidacy after the Iowa caucus. Given her past defeats, this new version of Clinton will be better prepared to win voters in areas where she has previously been defeated.
Democrats aren’t the only ones who may be excited about a potential third run from Clinton. On Sunday, Trump aide Kellyanne Conway retweeted a story suggesting Clinton might run again with the commentary “Dear God, please, yes.”
Dear God, please, yes. https://t.co/bmfWokusJj
— Kellyanne Conway (@KellyannePolls) November 12, 2018