On Tuesday, President Joe Biden laughed off a question from a reporter, regarding who he would rather go against in the 2024 general election between the two remaining GOP presidential candidates.
Biden only took one question as he was leaving the White House for a three-day campaign trip to California, refusing to say if he would rather run against former President Donald Trump, the likely Republican nominee, or former U.S. ambassador to the United Nations Nikki Haley, who is doubtful for a victory in her home state of South Carolina for the primary set to occur on Saturday.
“Oh, I don’t care,” Biden told reporters with a chuckle before boarding Marine One.
While Biden said he does not 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.”
Biden is performing better against Trump than Haley in theoretical head-to-head election polls. Many polls give Trump only a slight lead over Biden, and others rank such a matchup too close to call. Haley, meanwhile, leads Biden by double digits in several prospective head-to-head matchups, which she has touted on the campaign trail.
“Under Trump, we lost in 2018,” Haley told a crowd of supporters in South Carolina in late January. “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? Look at any of the general election polls. There was one that came out yesterday. It said that Donald Trump lost by 7 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.”
