Former first lady Hillary Clinton was asked again about jumping into the 2020 presidential race during a recent book promotion in Westchester, New York, where she ducked, dived and dodged the question, as usual.
It wasn’t a yes, but it also wasn’t a no.
“So this next question is from Devon Sington: Dear Secretary Clinton, would you be able to run in the 2020 race?” Williams questioned, drawing an applause from the audience.
“Well, uhhh, you know, I, I don’t think so,” Clinton said.
She then danced around the question without ruling out the idea.
“Um, you know, look, I was so thrilled by the chance I had to be the nominee in 2016 and to campaign on what I thought would make the country safer, and more prosperous, and more opportunities for everybody,” she said. “And, um, it’s really important to me that I do everything I can to make sure we retire the incumbent, regardless of what happens with impeachment,” Clinton said. “So that’s the role I am playing.”
She spoke in generalities about Onward Together, her political outfit. Clinton also spoke about the need to get American politics “back on more of an even keel,” but she didn’t answer the question of whether she “would be able to run.”
“I started an organization called Onward Together. We support candidates and organizations that are working to register voters, and convince people to run, and help train them to run, and take on difficult challenges like children in cages at the border and other things that need to be addressed,” Clinton said.
“So that is what I am focused on right now. And I feel really good about that because … there is so many things we need to be doing and there is so much work that needs to be done right now in America, and it’s not certainly all political but much of it is, because we’ve got to get out politics back on more of an even keel without all of the vitriol and the meanness and the divisiveness,” she said.
“So that’s really what I’m doing in 2020,” Clinton said. “I’m gonna try to make sure we get everyone to vote and we get all those votes counted, and we get a new president. That’s what I think we all should be working toward.”
She didn’t discuss who that new president should be.
The 72-year-old twice failed presidential candidate also reflected on Trump’s impeachment, her experience with the Nixon impeachment, and suggested a majority of Americans want to convict Trump in the Senate.
“Based on what we know now, that (Senate Majority Leader) Mitch McConnell wants to just, you know, push it through, get to a acquittal, and put it behind,” she said. “But I think that, uh, where we stand now in the country is enough people have paid attention that there is a majority in favor of the impeachment, namely the indictment, and there is even now a small majority in many of the polls in favor of a conviction.”
The reality is polling is so close both ways it’s virtually worthless.
FiveThirtyEight analyzed all polling on the idea of removing Trump from office conducted since Oct. 1 and found a divided states of America. After accounting for poll quality, recency and sample size, data shows 82.8% of Democrats want to remove trump, compared to 8.9% of Republicans and 42.2% of Independents.
Overall, support for removing Trump stands at 46.8%, FiveThirtyEight reports.
At Real Clear Politics, another reliable poll tracking outfit, the average of polling data in December – 12 different polls from virtually all major pollsters – shows support for impeachment and removal at 47.2%, with 48% of Americans opposed.
Meanwhile, a USA TODAY/Suffolk University Poll released on the eve of his impeachment shows President Trump leading all of his potential Democratic 2020 challengers in hypothetical head-to-head contests.
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