WASHINGTON — Former Vice President Joe Biden’s daughter, Ashley, added more fuel to the 2020 speculation mill this week, saying that she thinks her father is considering a run for president.
Asked in an interview with Women’s Wear Daily if her father will make a bid for the White House, Ashley Biden said, “I hope so.”
However, she cautioned that he has not made up his mind yet and a decision on an actual run could be a ways off.
“Right now, his focus is on the (Biden) Foundation and Cancer Moonshot, as well as getting other Democrats elected. He’s not there. He’s taking it day by day after the loss of my dear beloved brother (Beau),” she said.
“He’ll make a decision when that time comes,” she continued. “A lot can happen in four years and we know this as a family. If he is in good health, knock on wood, and seeing what the landscape is at the time, yeah, I think he is considering it.”
Beau Biden died of brain cancer in May 2015 at the age of 46. His death was a major factor in the former vice president’s decision not to run in 2016.
“I lost part of my soul when my boy died,” Joe Biden told CNN’s “New Day” in October 2016. “You should never, ever, ever commit to run for president unless you know you can look the people in the eye and say, ‘I guarantee you, you have all of my being, all of my energy, all of my family’s energy to get this done.’ I wish I were a better man but I just wasn’t ready to do that.”
Prior to his death, Beau Biden tried to make his dad promise to run for president, according to The New York Times’ Maureen Dowd. Joe Biden has pushed back on the report, saying, “Beau all along thought that I should run and I could win,” Biden said. “But there was not what was sort of made out as kind of this Hollywood-esque thing that at the last minute Beau grabbed my hand and said, ‘Dad, you’ve got to run, like, win one for the Gipper.’ It wasn’t anything like that.”
Ashley Biden is not the only member of the former second family to lend her support to possible 2020 aspirations. Joe Biden’s wife, Jill, said her husband “is not going away.”
“He loves politics, he loves what he’s doing, and he said he would stay involved,” she said. His brother noted that the former VP “absolutely” has another run in him.
Biden himself has launched a political action committee, “American Possibilities PAC,” and is scheduled to tour the country this fall to promote his new memoir, “Promise Me, Dad: A Year of Hope Hardship, and Purpose.”
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