But a week and a half after the release of the redacted Mueller report, three days after Joe Biden got into the presidential race pitching a Hillary Clinton–esque campaign rooted in experience and personal offense at what Trump represents, and two blocks from the White House, the 2020 race was clearly on their minds.

“Rather than immediately saying ‘I’m for this person’ or ‘against this person’ or looking for every way to possibly criticize people because they have a record,” pay attention to who can do the job of president and who can win both the popular vote and the Electoral College vote, Hillary said.

“The thing that bothers me about having 54 candidates, or however many we’ve got, is someone with rising potential will never hear his or her voice heard,” Bill said at one point. A few minutes later, he said friends tell him, “‘It could be a raving disaster for us.’ But you can’t tell. Someone will rise. And you’ve got to believe in that.”

This Democratic primary is the first since 1988 in which the Clintons don’t have an obvious preferred candidate, and neither the inner circle nor the dozens of outer circles of the Clinton orbit have moved in any one direction. Private conversations in the VIP room ahead of the event on Saturday night had some people talking up Biden as the Democrats’ best hope, according to people there, but others saying they’re looking to Pete Buttigieg, the young mayor of South Bend, Indiana, who’s splashed onto the scene. And not just in the private reception—I spotted a “Buttigieg 2020” T-shirt in the audience.

Bill Clinton said 2016 was “a manure-spreading election,” but added, “We’re not going to have that this time.” The former president didn’t sound so confident about everything else. He said he worried that if Trump can get away with asking Russia to hack emails, China might be looking to get in the game this time, and a 2020 candidate could decide to ask for another foreign attack. “This is how absurd it can become,” he said.

Many Democrats are still bitter about what happened in the last election. They can’t shake the feeling that they were robbed, and that nothing makes any sense any more. Many of those same Democrats worry they’re going to blow it against Trump again. If the Democratic candidates “just want to slime people, we’ll never be as good at it as they are,” Bill said, referring to Republicans. “Especially the current chief executive—he’s good at that.”

Both Clintons are clearly frustrated that more hasn’t yet come of the Mueller report. In a video made for the event, the comedian Jordan Klepper got Hillary Clinton to read selections from the report, as if for an audio book. This included: “The investigation established that the Russian government perceived it would benefit from a Trump presidency and worked to secure that outcome, and that the campaign expected it would benefit electorally.” Doing a rough Trump impression, she also read the part in which Trump panicked about Mueller’s appointment.