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The House speaker refuses rule out a future bid for the White House. | AP Photo Ryan leaves the door open to future presidential run

He may have emphatically ruled out a last-minute bid for the Republican nomination at a contested convention in 2016, but that does not mean that House Speaker Paul Ryan is not keeping his options open for a White House run in 2020 or beyond.

Asked in an interview with CNN late Tuesday whether his repeated comments that he would not seek or accept the GOP nomination this year would preclude him from ever running for the presidency, Ryan demurred.

“Well, no, but I don’t think that far down the road," the Wisconsin Republican said. "I made a decision in this cycle for 2016 not to run for president."

Ryan repeated a variation of his standard line that, "if you’re going to be the nominee, you should run for the job."

"I don’t think it’s right to have someone parachute in who never ran for the job. And in my case, I specifically decided not to run for the job," Ryan said, adding that in an open convention, only candidates who campaigned and received votes should be under consideration. "I don’t know how I can be any clearer than that."