Hillary Clinton may be the prohibitive, if undeclared, frontrunner for the Democratic presidential nomination in 2016, but she still thinks it’d be “healthy” for the party to have a contested primary, she said Tuesday.
“I think there will probably be many candidates,” she told Fusion’s Jorge Ramos in an interview. “I’m not sure I’m going to run, but if I do, I think competition is healthy and if people want to get in and want to be in a primary, more power to them.”
Clinton added one note of caution, however: “Now, if they come in and they say crazy things, that’s not healthy, but if they say sensible things, of course that’s healthy.” It’s unclear if she had any specific possible challengers in mind.
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A majority of Democratic voters think Clinton should face a primary challenge in 2016, according to a recent Washington Post/ABC News poll, while just 28% think the former secretary of state should make it to the convention unopposed, if she decides to run.
Clinton is touring the country while promoting her new memoir, “Hard Choices,” about her time at the State Department.
In the Ramos interview, Clinton also joined fellow Democrats like Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid and President Obama in calling on the Washington Redskins football team to change their name. “I think it’s insensitive,” Clinton said, “And I think that there’s no reason for it to continue as the name of a team in our nation’s capital.”
She declined, however, to propose alternative names.
Alex Seitz-Wald