Former Vice President Mike Pence still won’t say whether he’s running for president next year, and he won’t speak ill of his ex-boss, former President Donald Trump, CBS News reports. But in an interview with CBS News in Michigan, he also twice declined to commit to supporting Trump if he is the Republican presidential nominee. Instead, Pence said he believes voters in 2024 will choose “wisely again,” as they did in 2016. But said he thinks “different times call for different leadership.”
“I’m very confident we’ll have better choices come 2024,” he told CBS News political correspondent Caitlin Huey-Burns. “And I’m confident our standard-bearer will win the day in November of that year.”
But if Pence does run, he’s offering a vision of conservative principles and Trump-era like policies — without the Trump-era personality. The former vice president said his message in a speech to young voters in Michigan Wednesday was to “resist the temptation of focusing on personalities or embracing a populism unmoored to conservative principle.”