Could Elizabeth Warren Add Andrew Gillum To Her Possible Democratic Ticket? Rumor Has It They’re Talking
While it might seem a little early for the Democratic candidates for president to be choosing a running-mate for a possible match with President Donald Trump and Vice President Make Pence, reports suggests that Sen. Elizabeth Warren, one of the Democratic Party’s front-runners, might be courting Andrew Gillum.
Although the Warren campaign denied the claims it was considering Gillum, the former mayor of Tallahassee, Florida, for the Vice President role, the reporting comes Thursday from The Daily Beast. According to the report, multiple sources said the Warren campaign is actively courting Gillum in a way that campaigns often do when courting potential running-mates.
Per The Daily Beast, others who said that the Warren campaign and Gillum were in talks claimed that the talks were more broad in scope, and were not narrowly focused on Gillum joining the campaign as Warren’s running mate. A source close to Gillum also said that the Florida mayor was in contact with several of the 2020 Democratic Party campaigns.
Per The Daily Beast, sources said that the Tallahassee mayor would be a smart choice for Warren, as it could help the 2020 hopeful win Florida, an important swing state in the election that went to Trump in 2016 by less than two percentage points.
Gillum also ran an ill-fated campaign for governor in Florida, losing in 2018 to Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis by less than a percentage point. As The Daily Beast noted, the high-profile race included involvement from both former President Barrack Obama, who in Miami joined DeSantis to campaign for his gubinetorial bid, and President Donald Trump, who accused Gillum of being a socialist and called him a “stone cold thief” in relation to a Florida corruption scandal that Gillum insisted was not related to him.
Speculation had even ensued over whether Gillum would himself run for president, though the former Florida mayor announced earlier this year that he would not be running for the Democratic Party’s nomination to beat Trump next year. Still, The Daily Beast notes, Gillum has kept a high-profile status among rising members of the Democratic Party, and in particular, his effort to register one million new voters in Florida has been a notable part of his recent political career.
As The Inquisitr has previously reported, Warren, a Democratic senator from Massachusetts, has gained traction in the past several months, which has given the candidate a co-frontrunner status with former Vice President Joe Biden. A recent Quinnipiac University poll found that Democratic voters preferred Warren to Biden, though it notes her advantage was within the poll’s margin of error. Twenty-nine percent of those surveyed said they supported Warren, while 26 percent of those surveyed said they preferred a Biden ticket.
The president even sent a tweet earlier this week urging his 2016 competition, former First Lady and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, to run for the Democratic Party’s nomination in order to “steal it” from Warren.
While campaigns often wait until after they’ve won the party’s nomination to announce a running-mate, Texas Sen. Ted Cruz changed the game in 2016 when he announced former HP CEO Carly Fiorina as his VP candidate, as CNN reported that year. Though as CNN reported, the move was seen as a last-ditch effort by Cruz to regain momentum after the 2016 candidate lost mathematical probability of winning the party’s nomination over Trump.
