CNN senior congressional correspondent Manu Raju said Monday that Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D., Mass.) was clearly dodging questions over the weekend about whether she plans to serve six more years in the Senate.
Warren is running for reelection this year, but while her name has often been put forward as a presidential hopeful, she has not said whether she plans to run in 2020. When NBC’s Chuck Todd pressed her on that fact during Sunday’s "Meet the Press," Warren said she is running for Senate, not for president, and plans on "staying focused" on that.
"If you win reelection this year, are you going to pledge to serve a full six-year term?" Todd asked.
"So, look, I am not running for President of the United States," Warren said. "I am running for the United States Senate, 2018, Massachusetts, woo hoo."
CNN’s "Inside Politics" played additional clips from the interview that showed Warren not answering directly whether she pledges to serve for six years, and Raju called it "very evasive."
"She obviously sounds very evasive," Raju said. "I think she needs to come up with a better answer than this."
"Is there a better answer if you're not sure of the answer?" host John King asked Raju.
"Well, maybe she could be honest with the voters and say, ‘I'm thinking about it, but I'm going to run for this right now.’ I don't know, maybe that would be perfectly fine," Raju replied.
Michael Warren from the Weekly Standard said the senator appears to be eyeing a presidential run without being sure it is the right time.
"She is, I think, looking at 2018, waiting to see what happens, and is probably a little less optimistic that it's going to be so easy for a Democrat, even a Democrat like Bernie Sanders or Elizabeth Warren who have so much fervor on the left side of their party to take on Donald Trump," Michael Warren said.
In addition to her "Meet the Press" interview, the Massachusetts senator expressed nearly identical sentiments in interviews with CNN and Fox News. She consistently said "I'm not running" in response to questions about 2020, but she refused to commit to serving a full six-year term in the Senate if re-elected in November