Black voters in Michigan and Wisconsin picked Stacey Abrams as their favorite hypothetical running mate for Democratic candidate Joe Biden, but Sen. Elizabeth Warren was the overall candidate to beat, according to a poll commissioned in the two Midwestern swing states.
Donors of Color Action, which commissioned the poll, is part of the Donors of Color Network, a community of high-net-worth donors that launched in March 2019, Axios reported.
The group commissioned MRG Research to conduct the study and explore the viability with voters of a Black woman or woman of color as Biden’s VP pick in Michigan and Wisconsin.
Abrams was the first African-American woman nominee for governor by a major party. She ran in the 2018 Georgia gubernatorial election but lost to Brian Kemp and did not concede. At age 29, she was appointed deputy city attorney of Atlanta, and she served as Minority Leader of the Georgia House of Representatives from 2011 to 2017.
Sen Kamala Harris is the favorite running mate for the former vice president, at least that’s what bookmakers in Las Vegas say. Sites listing the odds agree that Harris is the favorite, McClatchy reported on April 16.
Betting site Bovada puts Harris as the favorite with +200 odds, followed by Sen. Amy Klobuchar at +300, Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer at +500. The odds are lower for Abrams at +1,000 and Warren at +700.
That’s kind of opposite from the results of the MRG Research poll, in which Black voters picked Abrams as their favorite VP for Biden, at 36 percent in Michigan and 38 percent in Wisconsin.
In the overall poll count, Warren was the candidate to beat. Harris was the only candidate of color in the top three for overall support, along with Sen. Klobuchar, Axios reported.
One thing Biden is getting right is his consistently stated commitment to pick a Black woman as his vice president, wrote Jason Johnson, a professor of politics and journalism at Morgan State University, in an opinion piece for The Grio.
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Harris would be the perfect fit, Johnson wrote. “She’s exciting but not scary. She’s progressive but not radical. She’s galvanizing but not polarizing.”
But “Abrams connects with a wider swath of Black voters than Harris and is probably the best ‘get out the vote’ strategist in the Democratic Party today,” Johnson wrote. “Abrams is incredibly popular across all demographics and is the kind of VP pick that would let the country know that big structural changes are coming.”
Johnson said he predicts Biden’s presidential campaign will bomb at the ballot box if he chooses a white woman as his running mate. “It would be a slap in the face to thousands of Black voters that pulled his campaign out of a ditch after the Nevada Caucuses and propelled him to the victorious lane he occupies today.”
