If your Facebook and Twitter feeds are like mine – God help you – you’ve seen that former U.S. Senator Russ Feingold resigned his position with the State Department on Tuesday to teach at Stanford and travel around Wisconsin. Unless Feingold is taking up bird-watching or thinking of enjoying the back roads of Wisconsin on a Harley, “traveling the state” is undoubtedly a euphemism for laying the groundwork to reclaim his former Senate seat against Ron Johnson in 2016.

Johnson defeated Feingold in 2010 during a landslide Republican election year, but now Johnson is widely seen as vulnerable in 2016 due to higher Democratic turnout in a presidential year. His time in the Senate has been largely uninspiring, with many party line votes and a few public gaffes, including jabs against veteran’s getting access to healthcare.

I don’t need to reiterate Feingold’s qualifications – you can find those in any number of articles that will be coming in the next few weeks and months – but I think it’s fair to say that if he runs, no other prominent Democrats would challenge him.

However, there’s a bigger office opening in 2016 and Feingold might be tempted to consider his prospects nationally. Over the past year, columnists from the Washington Post and The Atlantic have speculated that Feingold would be a viable candidate for the Democratic presidential nominee in 2016. If he does set his eyes on trying his luck with the presidency, I think he would be a surprisingly good candidate.

The current crop of Democratic candidates for the 2016 presidential nomination is underwhelming. Hillary Clinton, the former secretary of state, senator and first lady, is the frontrunner and would make a fine, if bland, president. My biggest problem with Clinton, and one that has often been repeated, is that a(nother) Clinton campaign would not do much to move the party away from the cozy centrist position it now occupies, especially when comparing her record on the issues to Feingold’s.  I’m just not ready for Hillary, and I’d hope the party will go a different direction.

U.S. Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Massachusetts, is another name that is currently looming large in discussions about 2016. Warren is a vocal and unapologetic progressive who comes from an academic background. She is not afraid to push the party farther to the left – which is to say, actually to the left – and would be a far more interesting candidate than Clinton.

Feingold brings all of Warren’s progressive credentials to the table while also bringing two decades of experience in getting things done under both Democratic and Republican governmental control. He also has a tremendous amount of foreign policy experience from his time in Congress and at the State Department that Warren simply can’t match.

However, Feingold is coming off a loss. It’s not an insurmountable hurdle, but you can see how it would not be hard to paint him as out of touch when his own state won’t even re-elect him.

I also don’t think running for president for the Democrats in 2016 is any real prize. There’s a strong chance of another recession hitting the country around 2017 when the next President takes office, based on trends in the last 50 years, which will play a significant role in the 2018 and 2020 elections.  If the Democratic candidate wins in 2016 and the economy tanks as it is statistically likely to, 2020 could be an absolutely apocalyptic year for Democrats. We would have seen 12 years of Democrats in the White House and a second major recession leading to voter fatigue. Electing the same party to the presidency for 16 straight years has not happened since Franklin Roosevelt and Harry Truman in the 1930s and 1940s.

Of course, this is all hypothetical. Feingold is simply “traveling the state” and not even running for Senate yet, let alone the presidency. However, if were I in Feingold’s place – and I do not have near enough experience to compare – I would pass on any thoughts of the presidency. 2016 is a poisoned chalice for Democratic presidential nominees, but there is a chance to regain a significant Senate seat and be a major player in Congress again.

I want him to run, just not for president. Run, Russ, run.

Adam Johnson ([email protected]) is a Master’s candidate at the La Follette School of Public Affairs.