Meghan McCain says she turned down Dancing With the Stars 3 times because she wants 'to run for office at some point'

Meghan McCain's tongue often tangos when it criticizes the political commentator's former cohosts at The View, but the conservative pundit has no plans to dance herself on Dancing With the Stars because she wants to hold political office in the future.

The 39-year-old revealed that she's turned down a spot on Dancing With the Stars multiple times in the past, citing both her inability to dance and her political ambitions as her reasons for declining.

"I've been asked to do Dancing With the Stars three times, and I said no each time, because I just don't want to publicly humiliate myself. I'm a terrible dancer and I don't do reality TV. The amount of reality TV I've been asked to do would blow your mind. I'm always like, what about my personality says I'd be good on these kind of platforms? I'm pretty shy in person. I'd be awful," the daughter of the late Senator John McCain said on Wednesday's episode of her Citizen McCain podcast.

She went on to say that, through secondhand knowledge of her friend Clay Aiken's tenure on The Masked Singer competition series, she "wouldn't have to work for a year" if she accepted a paycheck to do one of the programs. "I'm not going to say how much [it pays] because I don't have his permission, but he did The Masked Singer, and The Masked Singer, everybody should want to get on The Masked Singer. The Masked Singer is a paycheck," she teased.

McCain suggested that she was also offered a spot on Special Forces: World's Toughest Test as well as another performance-based competition series that she couldn't remember the title of, but reiterated her disdain at the thought of joining such a show.

"I do not do reality TV, because there's still a tiny little window in my life that I want to run for office at some point, and you can't do both. You just can't. It's just not serious," she said. "Come to me if I'm starving in the street and I've had some financial issues, but, I'm fine."

Entertainment Weekly has reached out to a representative for Dancing With the Stars for comment.

Though McCain won't participate in reality competition programs, her father's VP pick, Sarah Palin, appeared on The Masked Singer season 3 in 2020, while Bristol Palin — Sarah's daughter — also competed on Dancing With the Stars 10 years earlier in 2010.

On a recent episode of DWTS alum Cheryl Burke's Sex, Lies, and Spray Tans podcast, Bristol recalled her time on the show was somewhat contentious, and claimed that dancer Maksim Chmerkovskiy hated her "so much" at the time.

In response, a representative for Chmerkovskiy told EW that "Maks doesn't hate anybody," adding: "For [Palin] to say that would be a mischaracterization of his feelings. I think he and everyone else in America, 14 years ago, thought that he and [recording artist and Chmerkovskiy's dancing partner] Brandy were on their way to winning that year, if not coming into the finals. So there was a bit of disappointment when she leapfrogged him into the finals. It's a competition. He's very competitive and took it seriously."

Listen to McCain discuss Dancing With the Stars above.