“I suspect that on certain issues, she agrees with me more than Bernie does,” President Barack Obama said about Hillary Clinton. | Getty Obama opens door to Democratic primary endorsement

President Barack Obama on Tuesday commented on the contentious Democratic primary race between Hillary Clinton and Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders, acknowledging that Clinton aligns more with his policies.

“I suspect that on certain issues, she agrees with me more than Bernie does,” Obama told reporters at a press conference in Rancho Mirage, California. “On the other hand, there may be a couple issues where Bernie agrees with me more. I don’t know. I haven’t studied their positions that closely.”


Obama said he knows Clinton better than he does Sanders “because she served in my administration, and she was an outstanding secretary of state.”

Clinton escaped Iowa with an extremely narrow win over Sanders but lost New Hampshire by 22 percentage points. Obama, however, noted that primaries are a time for candidates to try to distinguish themselves as he ticked off a list of principles Democrats converge around. “Bernie and Hillary agree on a lot of stuff and disagree pretty much across the board with everything the Republicans stand for,” he said.

With only Iowa and New Hampshire having voted in 2016, Obama said he’d like to see the primary process play out more but signaled that he may throw his support behind a candidate. “Ultimately I will probably have an opinion on it based on [having] been both a candidate of hope and change and a president who’s got some nicks and cuts and bruises from getting stuff done over the last seven years,” he said. “But for now I think it’s important for Democratic voters to express themselves and for the candidates to be run through the paces.”

Obama, facing a battle with the Republican-controlled Senate over whether he should nominate a Supreme Court justice to replace the late Antonin Scalia during his final year in office, said the GOP has moved so far right that it’s often tough to find consensus.

“The thing I can say unequivocally here is I am not unhappy that I am not on the ballot,” he said.

Obama also took a few swipes at Donald Trump, who leads the polls heading into Saturday's Republican primary in South Carolina.

“I don’t think it’s restricted, by the way, to Mr. Trump,” Obama said of the billionaire businessman's anti-Muslim and anti-immigrant rhetoric. “I mean, I find it interesting that everybody's focused on Trump primarily just because he says in more interesting ways what the other candidates are saying as well.”

“I continue to believe Mr. Trump will not be president,” Obama continued. “And the reason is because I have a lot of faith in the American people, and I think they recognize that being president is a serious job. It’s not hosting a talk show or a reality show. It’s not promotion. It’s not marketing. It’s hard. And a lot of people count on us getting it right, and it’s not a matter of pandering and doing whatever will get you in the news on a given day.”