Let's say Hillary retires after one term. What Democrat would run in her stead? I've been looking back at the 2014 elections, and I have to say, Gary Peters is someone I think is a top Democratic talent. A lot of his ads showed him putting liberal issues in a conservative light (shrink government by stopping big tax giveaways to corporations). I think he's someone Republicans should be deeply afraid of.
He has yet to start his Senate career, having just been elected in a horrible year for Democrats.
As such he will gain seniority fast, and Senate leadership is not out of the question if and when the Democrats get the Senate back.
VP candidate? Nobody really wants the job unless a back-bencher or someone too old to have any chance of being President, and if in 2016 he is essential to winning the electoral votes of Michigan, the Democrats have lost the election anyway.
Definitely not a Presidential candidate until at least 2024, at which point:
1. Four terms of the Democrats will be seen as enough;
2. The Republicans have their new Reagan elected in 2020 and he is a sacrificial lamb;
3. The Republicans may have so consolidated power that they have a lock on the Presidency and just about everything else
(he would not run) -- or
1. The Republicans have had two terms of the Presidency in 2024 and Americans are become exhausted of it
2. The incumbent Republican is a Carter-scale failure on foreign policy or a Hoover-scale failure on the economy.
3. The Republican Party has so discredited itself that it has become irrelevant.
It is hard to figure which of those scenarios will be relevant.
