Naah, but Joe Concha wants to stir things up (see update below), so let’s at least play along. We know that Donald Trump would like to run again in the next presidential cycle, so there’s at least a possibility of a rematch of last year’s election. But if Joe Biden can’t answer the 2024 bell, Concha asks, who else do Democrats have on the bench except Hillary Clinton?

Maybe she should have kept that broken-glass-ceiling confetti:

There may be a rematch coming in the 2024 race for the White House. But we’re not talking (God help us) Biden-Trump II.

Instead, 2016 Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton is an interesting prospect to consider when looking for a viable candidate, particularly if an 80-something President Biden decides not to seek a second term. And why would he? Just 22 percent of voters want him to seek a second term, according to a I&I-TIPP poll. It doesn’t get much better when polling only Democrats, where just 36 percent want to see the president run again, with that juggernaut candidate named “someone else” coming in first with 44 percent support.

The Democratic bench is about as deep as the New York Jets’ these days. Vice President Harris? She’s at 28 percent approval, per USA Today. Former New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo? No longer governor and thoroughly disgraced. California Gov. Gavin Newsom (D)? He had to spend major time and resources just to avoid being ousted in deep-blue California during a recall election earlier this year. Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg? Not even 40 percent, and he has a supply chain crisis on his résumé. Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.)? Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.)? Sen. Cory Booker (D-N.J.)?

If those are the options, why not Hillary? She’s 74 years old, which is like being bathed in the fountain of youth compared to Biden.

There’s a word for this: wishcasting. If Republicans can’t run against a deeply unpopular and obviously decrepit Joe Biden in 2024, their next best bet for a beatable candidate would be Hillary Clinton. She may have been the only Democrat who could have lost to Donald Trump; she certainly was the first Democrat in decades to lose Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, and Michigan in an otherwise close presidential contest. Her obsessive self-focus was even more pronounced than Donald Trump’s ego in 2016, almost deigning to run.

Even without the baggage of 2016, Hillary won’t get a second thought for another run. For better or worse, her party has moved past her and the entire Clinton establishment. Hillary might have beaten Bernie Sanders to the 2016 nomination, but Sanders captured the party. We actually have a metric for that, even beyond the obvious hard-Left turn in the party over the last five years. The Daily Caller reported earlier this month that all of the monied interests have abandoned the Clintons in a most dramatic fashion:

The Clinton Foundation’s rapid decline in donor cash has alarmed top ethics watchdogs who say it shows clear red flags of political corruption.

Financial disclosures show a precipitous decline in contributions to the Clinton Foundation in the years following former president Bill Clinton and former first lady Hillary Clinton’s fall from the heights of their political power.

The Clinton Foundation received roughly $16.3 million in contributions in 2020, according to their newly released Form 990. This was a 93.6% decrease from the nearly $250 million the charitable organization raked in during 2009 after Hillary Clinton was appointed Secretary of State.

“For years, the Clinton Foundation raised ethical concerns and blurred lines between the foundation, private entities, and the State Department,” said Scott Amey, General Counsel for the Project on Government Oversight (POGO), a nonpartisan, independent government corruption watchdog organization.

“Money was pouring in when Hillary Clinton was a senior official and a candidate for president. The fact that foundation donors received special access to the Secretary of State isn’t surprising, nor is the fall in foundation funding after her 2016 election loss. Many people thought people were supporting the former president, but it really looks like they were cozying up to who they thought was going to be the future president — a situation that can’t be repeated,” the POGO General Counsel told the Daily Caller.

In one sense, this operates like a futures market. People bought into the Clinton Foundation when it appeared that Hillary would one day become president. That included a lot of foreign money from undisclosed sources. That the income has dropped by 93% after her 2016 loss should raise red flags as to the intent behind all of that cash, but it also should demonstrate the assessment that the Clintons have no real future in the party — not even Chelsea.

The Los Angeles Daily News reminds us that Hillary has more baggage in the foundation that she hasn’t yet shed, which would come into play immediately if she ran for office again:

In 2016, FBI agents from four field offices opened preliminary inquiries into the Clinton Foundation’s dealings with donors. At that time, the Justice Department wouldn’t grant authorization for subpoenas or search warrants, but in 2018, the New York Times reported that the foundation was served with a grand jury subpoena for records and complied.

In September 2020, the New York Times reported that then-U.S. Attorney John Durham was investigating the FBI’s handling of the investigation into the Clinton Foundation.

Durham was appointed a special counsel, authorized to investigate whether anyone “violated the law in connection with the intelligence, counter-intelligence, or law-enforcement activities directed at the 2016 presidential campaigns, individuals associated with those campaigns, and individuals associated with the administration of President Donald J. Trump,” and recently, Durham indicted two people for lying to the FBI. One was a Clinton campaign lawyer.

Prosecutors cited declassified CIA documents showing that then-CIA director John Brennan briefed President Obama in 2016 that Hillary Clinton had allegedly approved a plan to “vilify Donald Trump by stirring up a scandal claiming interference by the Russian security service” and that she had done this “as a means of distracting the public from her use of a private email server.”

Was there written evidence of pay-to-play in those deleted emails?

Durham’s assessment of the Clinton campaign’s involvement in the Christopher Steele dossier might create even more headaches for Democrats.

Finally, voters usually want to look forward rather than in the past when it comes to presidents. Trump will face that problem as well, but at least he’s more recent than Hillary would be in a rematch. He wants to revert back to 2017, while the Clinton brand hearkens back to the 1990s. Hillary 2024 is a laughable proposal, even in the case of a weak Democratic bench. Republicans should only be so lucky.

Update: I was having some fun with Joe on this, but I want to include his response:

Meant every word, my man. Enjoyed your take.

— Joe Concha (@JoeConchaTV) December 15, 2021

I appreciate his gracious response. I was being flip about stirring things up as a way to introduce this humorously, so if it came across that I was accusing Joe of trolling, I apologize for that.