Hillary Clinton, the former secretary of state and first lady who lost the White House to Donald Trump in 2016, said officially on Monday (March 4) what has been unofficially clear for months: She is not running for president again in 2020.

"I'm not running," Clinton told a New York City television station, News 12.

"But I'm going to keep on working and speaking and standing up for what I believe."

Clinton, the first woman to win a major-party nomination for president, remains a complicated figure for the Democratic Party as both a trailblazing female leader and also the candidate who was defeated by Trump.

Ahead of the 2020 election, she has been holding private meetings with many of the current and potential presidential candidates, including Sen. Kamala Harris and former Vice-President Joe Biden, as they seek counsel from her even before she formally ruled out another run.

Four female senators - Harris, Kirsten Gillibrand, Amy Klobuchar and Elizabeth Warren - and one congresswoman, Tulsi Gabbard, have already jumped into the Democratic primary campaign. The glut of female candidates is widely seen as an outgrowth of Clinton's own nomination in 2016.

Clinton, 71, is still younger than some Democratic candidates who are either running (such as Sen. Bernie Sanders, who is 77) or considering runs (Biden, 76, and former New York City mayor Michael Bloomberg, 77).But many in the crowded field of more than a dozen candidates are already pushing to install a younger generation of leadership for the party.

In the television interview, Clinton signalled that she planned to remain a presence on the political scene.

"I want to be sure that people understand I'm going to keep speaking out," she said. "I'm not going anywhere."

But she laughed off the idea of running for any other political office, such as New York governor or mayor, in the future. "Oh, I don't think so," she said.