Biden’s 2020 VP Pick Decision

With increasingly close Senate races in Colorado, North Carolina, and even South Carolina, the Democrats have a chance of flipping the Senate.

Joe Biden is on the clock for his selection of a vice presidential running mate for the fall 2020 presidential election. Having committed to choosing a woman, he is being subjected to immense pressure by the backers of several female candidates. It is universally agreed that this will be the most consequential decision of his campaign.

In some past presidential elections where races were anticipated to be close (as is the case for this one), vice presidential running mates were pivotal. Most political pundits agree that Sen. John F. Kennedy’s (D-MA) naming of Sen. Lyndon Johnson (D-Texas), his chief rival, as his VP in 1960, enabled him to carry Texas with its trove of electoral votes and other southern states.

JFK may not have won with a non-Southern running mate, and his call to Coretta Scott King to express his concern about her husband, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., who was in a Georgia prison for a civil rights protest, locked up the black vote. These two decisions gave Kennedy a huge Electoral College victory that year, even though the difference in the popular vote between him and then Republican Vice President Richard M. Nixon was just over 100,000.

Gov. George W. Bush’s (R-Texas) choice of Dick Cheney as his vice presidential running mate in the 2000 presidential election provided him with Congressional, Cabinet-level, and foreign policy experience, everything that was missing from his political resume. Cheney also brought along inside knowledge of how Washington works, having served as President Ford’s chief-of-staff.

Cheney was not a major asset on the campaign trail in a razor-thin result, where Vice President Al Gore won the popular vote, but once in office, Cheney proved to be a helpful, significant, and contentious sidekick. He was critical to Bush’s decision making during his first term and instrumental in Bush’s decision to invade Iraq, which has significantly sullied his presidential legacy.

Jimmy Carter rode to the Democratic presidential nomination in 1976 in the wake of the Watergate controversy. Opposed by the Democratic Washington establishment, Carter, a one-term Democratic governor of Georgia, capitalized on the electorate’s resentment towards Washington during the Watergate debacle.

In order to make the peace and at the behest of Sen. Hubert Humphrey, the 1968 Democratic standard bearer, and a mentor of the widely respected Sen. Walter Mondale (D-MN), Carter chose Mondale as his running mate. In doing so, he got someone who brought 10 years’ experience in the Senate to the campaign which helped him in the Midwest and assisted him in his defeat of the sitting President, Gerald Ford.

In 2020, the leading contenders for the VP nod, according to a CBS News/YouGov poll of registered Democratic voters released last Sunday, are: Sen. Elizabeth Warren (76 percent), Sen. Kamala Harris (59 percent), former Georgia gubernatorial candidate Stacey Abrams (50 percent), and Sen. Amy Klobuchar (49 percent). Several other white, Latinx and African American candidates were also mentioned.

Let us examine the viability of each of the top four. It is puzzling as to why Elizabeth Warren is getting such huge buzz given that she was not a top contender in any of the primaries in which she competed. The Democratic pollster, Stan Greenberg, has counseled Biden that she “… would consolidate support across the Democratic coalition and drive up turnout among young people and liberals ….”

However, she was unable to do so in her own liberal state during her primary run where she came in third behind Joe Biden and Bernie Sanders. In addition, she has demonstrated little traction among minority voters, and her past appropriation of Native American heritage, which she previously used on job applications, would surely be a bone of contention during the general election as Trump has already labeled her ‘Pocahontas.’

Kamala Harris, who is the preferred African American candidate among whites, would bring little to the ticket other than her skin tone in what is sure to be a nasty and hard fought race. Despite belonging to the world’s largest sorority of black women, Alpha Kappa Alpha, Harris was never avidly embraced by her sisters.

She also ranked fourth behind Warren, Biden, and Sanders in an October 2019 California poll in single digits (8 percent), while they all more than doubled her poll numbers scoring over 20 percent each. Except for her announcement at her campaign kickoff on January 27, 2020, and her attack on Joe Biden in a Democratic presidential debate, Harris never resonated strongly with minority and majority groups.

She would not be factor in black turnout in 2020 as she has not formed a strong bond with the national black community.

Harris, who many progressives view as a cop, would also be hurt in Wisconsin for “…threatening to prosecute parents whose kids missed too many school days…” while she was San Francisco district attorney. A similar policy was widely reviled in the African American community during the 1990s by Wisconsin’s Republican Gov. Tommy Thompson.

While serving as district attorney, Harris also locked up hundreds of African American and Latinx males on bogus charges which a judge overturned. These two elements in her electoral record would prove to be a problem in communities of color as she campaigns in battleground states where a sizeable number of minority groups reside and could provide the margin of victory.

Stacey Abrams is the only one of the four favorites who would add value to the Biden campaign. She ran against Trump-type voter suppression tactics during her 2018 Georgia gubernatorial run and came within one percent of victory. She was able to turnout a considerable vote from white women along with a huge number of African American and Latinx voters.

And her Fair Fight initiative, which fights for voters’ rights and has field offices in 18 battleground states, would be an advantage for Biden in his bare knuckle fight with Trump.

Amy Klobuchar, who like Elizabeth Warren, was a middling candidate during most of the Democratic primaries, also is viewed as a cop among blacks in Minnesota and elsewhere. While serving as Hennepin County, Minnesota prosecutor, she convicted Myon Burrell, a 16-year old black male of murder in a case where a stray bullet killed an 11-year old black girl in 2002.

In later years, the Associated Press reviewed thousands of pages of records and found the case leaned heavily on a teen rival of Burrell’s and other jailhouse informers who gave contradictory versions when they named the shooter. Burrell was given a new trial, and Klobuchar’s former office re-convicted him; he has been behind bars for 17 years.

In her last day on the primary campaign trail, an alliance of civil rights groups–the Minneapolis NAACP and Black Lives Matter Twin Cities and others—demanded that Klobuchar abandon the presidential contest due to “her role in sending an innocent black teenager to prison for life.” These groups shut down her last campaign stop in Minnesota, and she dropped out the next day.

She then flew to Dallas, Texas to endorse Joe Biden, escaping the embarrassment of having been forced out of the race. She was given credit for Biden’s subsequent win of the Minnesota primary, although he would have likely won it anyway as he did the Massachusetts primary over Elizabeth Warren.

Biden is expected to choose from this crew. He must tread carefully because he needs a partner who can bring something to the party as he is dealing with the sexual harassment and/or assault allegations of Tara Reade and the modest Democratic enthusiasm for his candidacy. Trump leads him by a 2:1 margin among Republicans. Biden needs help, lots of it, as did JFK, George W. Bush, and Jimmy Carter in their respective runs for the office of president.

Abrams is the only one of the four who can give it to him.