Kamala, Warren & Abrams Raise Their Hands After Joe Biden Confirmed VP Pick Will Be a Woman
After the Democratic Party spent more than a year narrowing its search for a presidential candidate to Joe Biden, another question looms ahead of November’s general election: Who will be Biden’s running mate, which he has said will be a woman?
“I would be honored if I were being considered,” California Sen. Kamala Harris told MSNBC on Thursday.
Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren felt similarly.
“Yes,” she answered when MSNBC asked her the same day if she would serve as Biden’s vice president.
Georgia politician Stacey Abrams, a former legislator there who lost a highly contested election to governor in 2018, has also thrown her hat in the ring
“I would be an excellent running mate,” Abrams told Elle in a profile published Tuesday, touting her qualifications and adding, “I am ready to help advance an agenda of restoring America’s place in the world. If I am selected, I am prepared and excited to serve.”
While Abrams didn’t try for the presidency, Harris and Warren ran against one another, Biden and various other candidates in the 2020 Democratic primary campaign.
Harris dropped out late last year; Warren left the race in March as the former vice president made a dramatic comeback to all but clench the Democratic nomination with a string of big wins over Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders, who ended his bid earlier this month. (The nomination will officially be announced later this year at the party’s national convention.)
Biden, 77, has since pledged that he’ll pick a woman as his running mate against President Donald Trump, shooting down questions this week about whether he’d consider New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo — whose popularity has risen throughout the coronavirus pandemic.
“I think he’s a great guy, but I also think that it’s important that there be a woman,” Biden said during a CNN town hall on Thursday. “There’s plenty of women with the experience and with the capability of being president tomorrow. And I think it’s important that we begin to have my administration, God-willing, is going to look like America, and I genuinely mean that.”
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SAUL LOEB/AFP via Getty From left: Former Vice President Joe Biden and Sen. Elizabeth Warren at the Democratic primary debate in Ohio in October 2019.
The 2020 presidential election was poised to dominate the news cycle until the novel coronavirus pandemic spread across and then essentially stopped the world, as billions of people were told to stay inside as much as possible to stop new infections.
With strict social distancing recommendations in place, campaigning has taken on an unprecedented form. Biden has largely been left to communicate with voters from his home in Delaware while federal health officials ask Americans to avoid public gatherings and any non-essential travel, kicking the idea of campaign rallies out the window.
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President Trump, meanwhile, has injected a rally-style attitude into the his coronavirus press briefings from the White House, alternating policy updates and information from health experts with criticisms of reporters and governors who displease him as well as slipping in attacks on “Sleepy Joe.”
Warren said Thursday that a leader like Biden would be the one to get the U.S. through a crisis like the coronavirus pandemic. Trump has been scrutinized for the federal government’s response and his own changing tone, previously downplaying the virus compared to the flu.
“[Biden is] a man who has a good heart, and that’s what we need in a leader — someone who is steady, who is prepared, but ultimately who cares not just about himself, but cares about everyone else,” Warren told MSNBC. “That’s what is going to gets us through a crisis, that’s what is going to help us rebuild this country.”
