A new PPP poll skips over the 2012 race and heads straight for what we all really want to know: Who’s looking strong for 2016?
It finds that among Democratic voters, Hillary Clinton leads Joe Biden by a whopping 57-14 percent, with Elizabeth Warren, currently running for the Senate for Massachusetts, third with 6 percent.
Clinton has said she’s planning to retire from politics after leaving the State Department at the end of this year. But a lot of political observers don’t take that claim too seriously.
“I think both Hillary and Joe Biden very much want to do it, or want to be in a position to do it if they choose to do so,” Politico’s Jim VandeHei said on Morning Joe Wednesday. “And so it does create a lot of drama behind the scenes.”
New York magazine’s John Heilemann agreed. “I don’t take anything that she says about how, I’m out of politics, I don’t take any of that at face value,” he said. “I think she’s probably going to run.”
And VandeHei added that if she does, she’d be a formidable candidate.
“I think she’d be extremely hard to beat if she got in,” he said. “She just has so many things going for her. I think no politician in the last four years has done more to repair their image than she has. And obviously she just has the Clinton network.”
“I agree with John that she wants to run much more than they’re letting on in public,” VandeHei said.
As for Biden?
“Biden just loves this stuff,” said VandeHei. “He loves the game, loves running, loves being vice president. So it’s going to be really hard to get him out of the game. He just wants to be in there.”
