In the yellow dog days of August, when the fish aren’t biting, the political anglers have more time to ponder.

If talk turns to the presidential race in 2020 there’s no juicier summertime morsel than what’s next for John Hickenlooper, our moderate governor who has already written his book for national office two years ago. That, of course, went on the shelf when Trump won the White House last November.

I’m on record predicting Hickenlooper will run against Cory Gardner for the U.S. Senate in 2020. After chatting recently with Superior medical researcher Trish Zornio, who’s thinking about running, I’m questioning whether Hick is the Democrats’ best choice in the race if the political climate is anti-establishment, pro-women and pro-millennial. Hick is establishment, ask his pals Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama.

But if Hickenlooper was that close to entering the Washington. D.C., stratosphere last year on Clinton’s coat tail, his pal John Kasich, the moderate Republican governor of Ohio, was even closer.

These days the two seem figuratively arm-and-arm on the national scene talking about bipartisanship to find a solution healthcare. They seem to be talking about something more: a fresh way of doing the public’s business by governing from the center with ideas from both sides.

Bipartisanship, however, has a way 0f getting chewed apart from both sides on cable TV shows. Bipartisanship can write the scripts for barely true primary campaign ads. Bipartisanship invites being bitten by your own dog.

At a forum put on by Politico this month, Hickenlooper downplayed whether he and Kasich have future political ambitions, noting the two-party system. The Denver Post took that as definitive, but well-seasoned Ernest Luning of Colorado Politics took a more measured interpretation.

He reported Hick saying, “I don’t think Kasich would ever do that. You never know, you never say …”

In political translation, if our governor closed the door, he left himself a pet door to wiggle through.

The Washington Post reported last weekend that people close to Kasich said he feels a moral imperative to take on Trump in 2020, but could Trump drive the party establishment to the brink of greenlighting a primary against its incumbent? (It can’t stop it, but it might as well without party brass support. Even Trump needed it in the end.)

“I don’t have any plans to do anything like that,” Kasich said on CNN.

Again, not an airtight lid.

“… We’ll have to wait and see.”

Look, throw out the idea of Democrats and Republicans to begin with. The gears of both parties’ machines, oiled with the financial interests that grease their gears, turn deliberately. That’s how we got Clinton over Bernie Sanders and Trump over everybody.

But if America is fed up with both parties, America could do much worse than the mod(erate) squad of two swing-state governors who kind of fit together like the it couple in high school.

Hick is affable and easy to like. Kasich is gruff and speaks bluntly. Hick speaks in soaring rhetoric about ideals and the common good, Obama with a beer in his hand. Kasich tells you to eat your spinach. Hick likes fracking, and so does Kasich.

I was at the third GOP presidential debate on a golden October day in Boulder in 2015 when Kasich called the future president’s promises pure fantasy. He struck a tone on immigration that a majority of Coloradans would like.

“Or we’re just going to be great,” Kasich said to Trump on stage at the University of Colorado. “Or we’re going to ship 10 million people out of this country and leave their children in this country and dividing families. Folks, we gotta wake up.”

And in the shadow of the Colorado communities where fracking means fighting, Trump said Kasich’s success as a governor was because he “got lucky with fracking.”

Like Colorado, Ohio sits atop major shale formations.

“We came back from the dead,” Kasich said at the Boulder debate, but added “We are diversified.”

That sounds a lot like Hickenlooper when he was fighting for re-election in 2014. That’s when Congressman Jared Polis of Boulder was spending millions of his own money to toughen fracking regulations at the ballot box, contrary to the political interest of the sitting governor. Now Polis is running for governor.

If the oil and gas industry wants to invest money in the presidential race, they have two candidates with a reasonably friendly track record in Hickenlooper and Kasich.

But let’s get back to planet Earth.

If anyone tells you they know what will happen in 2020, they’re full of crap, so let me tell you what’s going to happen in 2020.

If Trump doesn’t run for whatever reason, and his base holds together, expect Mike Pence to carry the MAGA banner. If the Christian conservatives wander back in from the wilderness, it could be Ted Cruz. If the moderate millennials and non-white Republicans continue their rise, then Marco Rubio is in waiting.

But please bring back Vermin Supreme. We haven’t heard enough about a pony-based economy and mandatory toothbrushing. Hey, a 2,000-mile wall across Texas, New Mexico, Arizona and California sounded pretty nutty the first time you heard it, too.