Former Vice President Mike Pence did not commit to backing former President Donald Trump on Wednesday should his old boss win the Republican presidential nomination again in 2024.
Pence is considering his own campaign for the GOP nod.
Pressed about whether he would back Trump in 2024 if Republicans coalesced around him to be the party's standard-bearer, Pence skirted the question. The Republican National Committee is poised to mandate 2024 hopefuls commit to backing the eventual nominee in order to participate in the debates.
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"Well, I think we'll have better choices, and I really trust Republican voters to sort it out," he told CBS's Red & Blue in an interview that aired Wednesday.
Pence did not retroactively criticize Trump's presidency, however.
"I just have great confidence in the American people. I don't think anyone could have defeated Hillary Clinton in 2016 other than Donald Trump. And I didn't realize that initially — I was supporting another candidate in the Indiana primary," he said.
"Trump offered a change of leadership and in the kind of campaign that was able to take on the Clinton campaign machine that was decades in the making," Pence added.
During that primary, Pence endorsed Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX), Trump's chief GOP rival at the time. Pence cited the 2016 example as a rationale for his faith in the voters to select the strongest candidate for the 2024 general election.
Trump has indicated that he likely won't re-up Pence as his running mate and occasionally dinged him for declining to decertify the 2020 election, something Pence contends he lacked the power to do.
Throughout the interview, Pence refrained from criticizing some of his potential 2024 foes, such as Gov. Ron DeSantis, though he appeared to reject Republican presidential contender Nikki Haley's call for a cognitive test for politicians over 75.
"I come from southern Indiana, where people think most politicians should have a competency test," Pence quipped.
The former vice president also painted himself as more of a traditional Republican, eager to discuss entitlement reform and skittish about the populist turn in the GOP, another area that puts him at odds with Trump. Pence also implored his political peers to refrain from partaking in the political slugfest.
"As I've traveled around the country, I've heard again and again that people look at the record of the Trump-Pence administration," he said. "I also hear that they want to see us get back to the kind of civility in politics that the American people show each other every day."
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Pence has previously laid out the spring as a timeline for his decision about whether to run. He reiterated that he and his wife are "continuing to give prayerful consideration to entering the race."
He is currently polling in a distant third place behind Trump and DeSantis in the 2024 primary, according to the latest RealClearPolitics polling aggregate.