To be sure, in the exchange with Swisher, Clinton did not say she planned to run, but she did say “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.”
Clinton told Swisher that she was “not even going to think about it till we get through this Nov. 6 election.”
Here is part of the transcript of the interview:
Swisher: We're going to talk about 2020 in a minute. Do you want to run again?
Clinton: (slight pause) No. No.
Swisher: That was a pause.
Clinton: 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. I mean, we have confused everybody in the world, including ourselves. We have confused our friends and our enemies. They have no idea what the United States stands for, what we're likely to do, what we think is important. So 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.
Swisher: So are you going to be doing any of that lifting? Do you feel like --
Clinton: Oh, I have no idea, Kara, but I'm going to -- I'm not even going to even think about it till we get through this Nov. 6 election about what's going to happen after that, but I'm going to do everything in my power to make sure we have a Democrat in the White House come January of 2021.
Clinton’s spokesman, Nick Merrill, said Clinton’s answer to Swisher’s questions was referring to supporting another Democrat and asked Swisher to clear up the confusion.
This is not remotely what she said. When asked if she’d run she said “No” (twice in fact).
— Nick Merrill (@NickMerrill) October 29, 2018
Then when asked who she’d support she said she was “not even going to think about it til we get through this November 6 election.”
Transcript:https://t.co/3lezPORUEL https://t.co/Oqpy4vkNKJ
Swisher tweeted Monday morning that her take was that Clinton "was basically implying she wishes she were president but doesn't relish running again."
Tweeps, simmer down! While it perhaps sounded like @HillaryClinton refused to rule it out, my take is she was basically implying she wishes she were president but doesn’t relish running again. Now back to our regularly scheduled vile tweeting from Trump: https://t.co/OB8g0uXCJI
— Kara Swisher (@karaswisher) October 29, 2018
In a Politico story earlier this month, Clinton aide Philippe Reines said there is a "not zero" chance that Clinton will run in 2020.
"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' second time and Biden’s third time. Is it lack of support? She had 65 million people vote for her."
Reines went on to give the odds that Clinton could appear on the ballot.
"It’s somewhere between highly unlikely and zero, but it’s not zero."
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