There have been calls for presumptive Democratic candidate Joe Biden to select a Black woman as vice president. He has already promised to select a woman, and the results of a new poll show that former presidential candidate Sen. Elizabeth Warren would be a favorite for Black voters.
Warren will give Biden the biggest boost because she will help Biden with Black and Hispanic voters as well as voters under 45, according to the Morning Consult/Politico poll. Placing Sen. Warren (D-Mass.) on the ticket would make 26 percent of respondents more likely to vote for Biden; 23 percent said it would make them less likely to vote.
Morning Consult is a tech company that surveys 5,000 registered voters daily across the U.S. on the 2020 presidential election, updating the latest survey data to offer a guide on how the race for the White House is shaping up.
The national tracking poll was taken between May 22 and May 26 based on a national sample of 1,986 registered voters. The interviews were conducted online.
According to the survey report, Warren was the best known of the potential candidates listed in the survey — 77 percent of voters expressed opinions about her and 91 percent said they’d at least heard of her, Morning Consult reported.
However, views about Warren are nearly evenly split: 38 percent expressed favorable opinions and 39 percent expressed unfavorable opinions within the poll’s margin of error of 2 percentage points.
Warren is more popular than Biden with liberal voters. She abandoned her own campaign for the Democratic presidential nomination after Super Tuesday in March, and endorsed Biden’s candidacy in April.
The poll questioned voters about other high-profile potential possibilities such as California Sen. Kamala Harris, Minnesota Sen. Amy Klobuchar, and former Georgia gubernatorial candidate Stacey Abrams. Respondents indicated that Harris would make 22 percent of them more likely to vote for Biden. That’s roughly equivalent to Warren’s power with key groups such as voters under the age of 45 and voters in suburbs, Morning Consult reported.
An Abrams choice for VP would make 16 percent of voters more likely to vote for Biden, matching Harris’ strength with Black voters.
The other names in the survey included lesser-known candidates such as Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer, Wisconsin Sen. Tammy Baldwin, Florida Rep. Val Demings, New Mexico Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham, and Nevada Sen. Catherine Cortez Masto.
Right now, Biden has a 23-point lead over Trump among Hispanic voters (53 percent to 29 percent), and his standing among Black voters is ahead 76 percent to 9 percent.
Biden’s standing among Black voters is statistically unchanged following a controversial May 22 interview with Charlamagne tha God on The Breakfast Club radio show. Biden said, “If you have a problem figuring out whether you’re for me or Trump, then you ain’t Black.” Biden later apologized for the remark.
Possible Black female politicians whose names have popped up for Biden’s VP include Rep. Demings.
For a while, it seemed like Harris was a front runner in Biden’s camp and the press. “A number of advisers have pressed Biden’s campaign to pick Harris, 55, because the daughter of Jamaican and Indian immigrants could help excite black voters, a key Democratic constituency,” Reuters reported.
Former Georgia House Minority Leader Abrams has been vocal about her interest in the job. The 46-year-old gained a national profile during her failed 2018 bid to become Georgia’s governor.
Then there’s Demings, 63, an African-American congresswoman from Florida, an election battleground state. She is on the running-mate shortlist. A former Orlando police chief, Demings helped manage the House of Representatives’ impeachment proceedings against Republican President Donald Trump.
Still, Warren seems to be a favorite with prominent Democrats.
Famed pollster Stan Greenberg said he feels that Warren would help Biden solidify Democratic support and be the best choice for VP to get him into the White House.
The Democratic Party has not unified behind Biden, Greenberg said..
“In fact, Biden is now behind where Clinton was with Bernie Sanders voters in 2016, with more than 20 percent of the democratic socialist’s backers saying they would not vote for him, even as 87 percent of them pledge to vote for a Democrat for Congress, Politico reported.
“Above all else, (the Democratic Party) needs consolidation. That’s where the overwhelming percentage of votes are,” Greenberg argued.
In his presentation, entitled “The obvious solution,” Greenberg wrote, “The biggest threat to Democrats in 2020 is the lack of support and disengagement of millennials and the fragmentation of non-Biden primary voters.” Warren is the obvious solution, Greenberg said.
But big-money donors are pushing Biden to not choose Warren. “She would be horrible. He would lose the election,” said a Wall Street executive who once backed others running in the Democratic primary and later donated to Biden.
“I think a lot of the donor base, on board and coming, would prefer almost anyone but Elizabeth. I don’t see him choosing her for veep” a longtime fundraiser for Biden told CNBC.
Why? Warren brushed off big-money donors when she was running for president. Her campaign was funded by small-dollar donors and she refused to take part in any private big-money events.
Her campaign finished raising more $100 million, Federal Election Commission records show.
On top of this, Warren had run-ins with many Wall Street donors during her campaign. Some said in private that they planned to sit out or back Trump instead if she got the party’s nomination, CNBC reported.
Warren has often encouraged raising taxes on the wealthiest Americans. Her latest effort is a bill co-sponsored by progressive Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y, which would stop mergers and acquisitions during the coronavirus pandemic.
Listen to GHOGH with Jamarlin Martin | Episode 72: Jamarlin Martin Part 2. J Edgar Hoover, the first director of the FBI, may not be around but his energy is present in new Black politics.
“My private advice to him is that he doesn’t have to make that choice now. Go out and speak to the people who are voting for you,” said Bernard Schwartz, a longtime Democratic financier who has given to the campaign and super PACs backing Biden.
“The vice president is not the important choice for you,” he added and pointed to the struggling economy as a place Biden could focus his message.
Representatives for Biden and Warren did not return requests from CNBC for comment.
