Former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton shut the door on a third presidential bid during an interview with the German show Tagesschau, posted to YouTube on Tuesday. Host Sandra Maischberger asked Clinton directly if she was "thinking about running again." The answer was swift.
No. No, I'm not. But I think we'll have some very good candidates. Some of them were at Munich.
Clinton was in Germany for the Munich Security Conference, where she offered what amounted to a pep talk for a Democratic Party still searching for its footing. She projected optimism about the midterms, praised the party's "good bench," and cherry-picked polling numbers to paint a picture of Republican collapse.
It's a familiar posture from someone who lost presidential bids in both 2008 and 2016. The question is whether any of it holds up.
According to the Daily Caller, Clinton estimated that 10 to 15 Democrats would enter the 2028 primary. She singled out California Governor Gavin Newsom, who attended Munich, and gestured vaguely at "other people whose names have been mentioned."
We have a kind of big messy contest. And so people are going to run. There's probably going to be 10 to 15 people running. But we have a good bench, we have good candidates.
The RealClearPolling average as of Wednesday afternoon paints a different picture of that bench's strength. Former Vice President Kamala Harris leads the 2028 Democratic primary polling. Newsom sits second. Former Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg ranks third. Democratic New York Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez comes in fourth.
That's the roster Clinton calls deep.
Harris already lost a general election. Ocasio-Cortez had a disastrous appearance at the very Munich conference Clinton was praising. And Newsom carries baggage so conspicuous that even his own side can see it.
Longtime Democratic megadonor John Morgan appeared on Monday's edition of NewsNation's "CUOMO" and delivered a blunt assessment of Newsom's presidential viability. It wasn't friendly.
He's going to have to run from his woke … How's he going to deal with his transgender swimming positions and everything that brought him there? Usually when you're a governor, that's an asset. His problem is his record is far far left and far far woke. And can he do the Mitt Romney etch-a-sketch? I don't know.
When your own megadonors are publicly wondering whether your record is survivable, the "good bench" narrative starts to creak. Morgan isn't a Republican operative. He's a man who writes large checks to Democrats and still can't figure out how Newsom escapes his own governing record. California's progressive experiment isn't an asset in a general election. It's an anchor.
The etch-a-sketch question is the right one. Newsom governed as a culture-war progressive in the bluest state in the country. Pivoting from that to appeal to swing-state voters who care about inflation, border security, and basic public order isn't repositioning. It's reinvention. And voters tend to notice.
Clinton also offered a rosy assessment of President Trump's political standing, claiming his favorability had plummeted.
We've also seen Trump's favorability rating plummet. He's in the 30s. He is no longer popular, except his hardcore base will stay with him.
This is a selective reading, to put it generously. Some polls do place Trump's approval in the 30s. Others put it in the 40s. One poll had it at 50. The RealClearPolling average sat at 42.1. Clinton grabbed the lowest number available and presented it as the whole picture.
This is the same instinct that led her campaign to believe Michigan and Wisconsin were safe in 2016. Telling your party what it wants to hear instead of what's true is a habit, and it's one Democrats haven't broken.
While Democrats sort through a crowded and ideologically muddled field, the Republican picture for 2028 is considerably clearer. President Trump said during an August White House ceremony that Vice President JD Vance was "probably favored" to carry the MAGA mantle in 2028. He also pointed to Secretary of State Marco Rubio as "also somebody that maybe would get together with JD in some form."
That's not chaos. That's succession planning. The Republican bench isn't 10 to 15 candidates thrashing through a primary to figure out what the party stands for. The movement has direction, and it has named heirs.
Democrats, meanwhile, are heading into the kind of "big messy contest" Clinton described with apparent affection. A party that can't decide whether its future belongs to Harris, Newsom, Buttigieg, or Ocasio-Cortez is a party that hasn't resolved the fundamental tension between its progressive base and the general electorate. That tension cost them in 2024. There's no evidence that it's been addressed.
Clinton closed her interview by declaring herself "optimistic about the midterm elections and then about the upcoming presidential." She's entitled to that feeling. But optimism from someone who has lost twice and is reading polls selectively from a conference stage in Munich isn't a strategy. It's a coping mechanism.
The Democratic Party's 2028 field is led by a failed presidential nominee, a governor whose own donors call him too woke, a former cabinet secretary with limited electoral appeal, and a congresswoman from the deepest-blue district in America. Clinton looked at that lineup and called it a "good bench."
She's been wrong before.
