Joe Biden has four women in mind who could serve as his vice president if he wins the Democratic nomination.
The former vice president was asked at a town hall this week who he was considering for his No. 2, and Biden responded with four women — though didn’t actually identify them by name. As The Hill reported, the first person he mentioned is the “former attorney general who got fired,” referring to Sally Yates. She was one of the first major departures from the Trump administration, being fired in early 2017 after she instructed the Justice Department not to offer a legal defense for Donald Trump’s Muslim immigration ban.
Biden mentioned the “two senators from the state of New Hampshire,” Democrats Jeanne Shaheen and Maggie Hassan. He also referred to “the woman who should have been the governor of Georgia,” Stacey Abrams.
Many political experts had already pegged Abrams as a potentially strong pick for Biden, and she has publicly defended him in the past. In April, after Biden faced accusations that he failed to respect the personal space of a number of women and subjected them to unwanted touching and kisses, Abrams said she has a “deep respect” for Biden and cautioned against those who might want to railroad his bid for the nomination.
“We cannot have perfection as a litmus test,” Abrams said during an interview on MSNBC’s Morning Joe . “The responsibility of leaders is to not be perfect but to be accountable, to say, ‘I’ve made a mistake. I understand it and here’s what I’m going to do to reform as I move forward.’ And I think we see Joe Biden doing that.”
But Abrams has also pushed back at the idea of being on the ticket as vice president, saying that she did not believe “that you run for second place.”
Biden remains the frontrunner in the 2020 Democratic primary, and has been the strongest of the Democratic hopefuls in hypothetical matchups against Trump. As CNN noted, he has opened up other times about who he might pick as vice president, saying he would prefer to pick someone of color.
“Whomever I pick, preferably it will be someone who was of color and/or a different gender, but I’m not making that commitment until I know that the person I’m dealing with I can completely and thoroughly trust as authentic and on the same page [as me],” Biden said at a roundtable of black journalists.