Sen. Marco Rubio, R-Fla., said Wednesday he isn’t interested in running for president again in four years, and promised he’d serve his full six-year term in the Senate should he win re-election this fall.
“Not only am I going to serve for six years — I’ve been honest with people [about] the things I want to achieve. Some may take longer than six years to achieve. And so that’s what my focus is on, 100 percent,” Rubio said in an interview with Newsradio 970 WFLA.
Politicos and journalists have suggested that Rubio, who bowed out of the GOP primary earlier this year after he lost to GOP nominee Donald Trump in Florida, is running again for Senate because he wants to take another crack at the White House.
The Florida Republican has denied that this is the case, and claimed earlier this week during a debate against his Democratic opponent, Patrick Murphy, that he is interested only in the U.S. Senate.
“If I wanted to run for something else, I wouldn’t have run for Senate,” Rubio said in his radio interview Wednesday. “My opponent keeps saying I’m going run for president. If I wanted to run for president in four years, I would have just stayed out of this race and started running on November the 9, which a lot of other people are going to do.
“I wouldn’t have run for re-election at the last minute in the toughest swing state in the country in a year as uncertain as this one,” he added.
After bowing out of the GOP primary this year, Rubio swore repeatedly that he was not interested in running again for the Senate. He changed his mind shortly thereafter.
He claimed then that he wasn’t interested in running again for president.
“I didn’t run for the Senate to run for president again,” Rubio said in June.
