Youngkin on potential 2024 run: ‘Long way between here and there’

Virginia Gov. Glenn Youngkin (R) on Wednesday tempered talks of a White House bid, saying there is a long way between now and the 2024 presidential election.

“I have to say, there is a long way between here and there,” Youngkin told CNBC senior congressional correspondent Ylan Mui at an event.

“It’s 2022. And my big focus right now is being the best governor that I could possibly be in Virginia to get our agenda moving, which I’m very pleased with how much we’ve accomplished, and to help our congressional representatives win California and to help a few governors.”

Youngkin, who won the governor’s mansion for the commonwealth in 2021, has become a rising GOP star after centering his campaign on the issue of parents’ involvement in education amid frustration over coronavirus school closures and controversy surrounding the teaching of “critical race theory” and other topics.

These issues have cropped up in other GOP-led states such as Florida and Texas, where state legislatures and governors have taken steps to broaden parents’ involvement in their child’s education and daily life at school.

Most recently, Youngkin announced a rollback of accommodations for transgender and gender nonconforming youth in the Virginia public school system.

The Virginia Board of Education unveiled its 2022 “model policies” mapping out the treatment of transgender students in public schools. The board will now require students be separated by their biological sex, for any school program or activity, rather than their gender.

In addition, the policies define a transgender student as an individual whose parent has requested in writing that their child be “identified while at school.”

In their conversation, Mui noted that Youngkin has been traveling to other states to boost GOP candidates. Early in September, the governor traveled to Maine to campaign for Republican gubernatorial candidate Paul LePage.

Youngkin remarked that on his travels, Americans are concerned about “kitchen table issues” such as education, the rising costs of groceries and violent crime.

Still, at the end of the governor’s four-year term, Youngkin told Mui that he would talk with his family to “decide what’s next.”

Youngkin earlier this month said that a 2024 presidential bid was “not a decision that we have even begun to undertake,” during an interview on CBS’s “Face The Nation.”

“And the reality, of course, is I think it’s based on the fact that I was in a state that was blue, and we turned it red. I ran on a platform that we’re delivering.”