President Joe Biden laughed off a question about who he wants to win the 2024 Republican presidential nomination while speaking to reporters on Tuesday.
Biden took one question before departing the White House for a three-day long campaign trip to California but declined to say if he would rather run against former President Donald Trump, the likely Republican nominee, or former United Nations Ambassador Nikki Haley, who is hoping to pull off a last-minute coup of Trump in her home state of South Carolina in the Feb. 24 primary.
“Oh, I don’t care,” Biden told reporters with a chuckle before boarding Marine One.
While Biden claims he doesn’t have a preference for a Republican opponent, he has campaigned heavily in recent months on the specific threats Trump and the “extreme” MAGA movement pose to American democracy.
“The president knows the stakes this November could not be higher for the American people,” Biden campaign spokesman Ammar Moussa said in a statement. “Donald Trump is the polar opposite of everything President Biden stands for and has accomplished since he took office, and the campaign’s top priority over the next nine months will be laying out that stark choice for voters.”
Still, Biden is performing significantly better against Trump than Haley in head-to-head general election polls. A Biden-Trump rematch appears too close to call, with both men holding slight leads over the other in any number of polls, but Haley leads Biden by double digits in some prospective head-to-head matchups, a fact she herself has touted on the campaign trail.
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“Under Trump we lost in 2018. We lost in 2020. We lost in 2022. How many times do we have to do this before we realize that that’s not a winning scenario?” Haley told a crowd of supporters in South Carolina in late January. “Look at any of the general election polls. There was one that came out yesterday. It said that Donald Trump lost by seven points to Biden. The one that came out today had a margin of error. In every one of those polls I defeat Biden by up to 17 points.”