Douglas E. Schoen and Andrew Stein: Hillary Clinton’s 2024 election comeback

(Mr. Schoen is founder and partner in Schoen Cooperman Research, a polling and consulting firm whose past clients include Bill Clinton and former New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg. Mr. Stein is a former New York City Council president, Manhattan borough president and state assemblyman.) A perfect storm in the Democratic Party is making a once-unfathomable scenario plausible: a political comeback for Hillary Clinton in 2024. Several circumstances—President Biden’s low approval rating, doubts over his capacity to run for re-election at 82, Vice President Kamala Harris’s unpopularity, and the absence of another strong Democrat to lead the ticket in 2024—have created a leadership vacuum in the party, which Mrs. Clinton viably could fill. She is already in an advantageous position to become the 2024 Democratic nominee. She is an experienced national figure who is younger than Mr. Biden and can offer a different approach from the disorganized and unpopular one the party is currently taking.

If Democrats lose control of Congress in 2022, Mrs. Clinton can use the party’s loss as a basis to run for president again, enabling her to claim the title of “change candidate.” Based on her latest public statements, it’s clear that Mrs. Clinton not only recognizes her position as a potential front-runner but also is setting up a process to help her decide whether or not to run for president again. She recently warned of the electoral consequences in the 2022 midterms if the Democratic Party continues to align itself with its progressive wing and urged Democrats to reject far-left positions that isolate key segments of the electorate. In a recent MSNBC interview, Mrs. Clinton called on Democrats to engage in “careful thinking about what wins elections, and not just in deep-blue districts where a Democrat and a liberal Democrat, or so-called progressive Democrat, is going to win.” She also noted that party’s House majority “comes from people who win in much more difficult districts.”