A former Clinton advisor co-wrote an op-ed Sunday insisting former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton would mount yet another presidential run in 2020.
"Hillary Will Run Again," reads the headline of the Wall Street Journal op-ed, written by Mark Penn and Andrew Stein. Penn served as a pollster and key advisor in the Bill Clinton White House and as chief strategist and pollster to Clinton during her 2008 Democratic primary run. Stein, on the other hand, is a populist New York City Democrat who supported Donald Trump in 2016.
"Get ready for Hillary Clinton 4.0. More than 30 years in the making, this new version of Mrs. Clinton, when she runs for president in 2020, will come full circle—back to the universal-health-care-promoting progressive firebrand of 1994," the men wrote.
"True to her name, Mrs. Clinton will fight this out until the last dog dies. She won’t let a little thing like two stunning defeats stand in the way of her claim to the White House," they continued.
Penn is the second longtime advisor to say it's possible Clinton makes a third presidential run. "It’s somewhere between highly unlikely and zero. But it’s not zero," communications advisor Phillip Reines said of Clinton's chances of running in October.
For her part, Clinton has maintained that she will not run for president again, but often in ways that seemingly leave the door open to a run. She answered "no" when asked if she wanted to run for president in an October podcast interview, only to immediately follow up with, "Well, I'd like to be president."
"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…" she continued. "The work would be work I feel very well prepared for, having been in the Senate for eight years, having been a diplomat in the State Department. It's just going to be a lot of heavy lifting."