CNN's Alayna Treene reported on Monday morning that Donald Trump has narrowed his shortlist of potential vice presidential running mates to just three candidates. The report came after Trump previously indicated that he had made his choice. I’m skeptical of the shortlist that has been offered, and I highly suspect that Trump’s selection isn’t on this list.
“There’s so much speculation right now and a lot of anticipation over who Donald Trump is going to ultimately select. And this is the language we’ve heard Donald Trump say for a while, he’s often said that he knows who his choice is going to be,” Treene reported. “However, from my conversations with Donald Trump’s team, they’re still not completely—or they haven’t come to a formal decision yet—on who he is going to select as his running mate. What I do know is that he has really narrowed his list to three top contenders: That is Doug Burgum, J.D. Vance, and Marco Rubio, all people that they believe currently are at the top of his list.”
I'm just not buying it — and I'm not the only one who thinks it will likely be someone else. Matthew Dowd, the former chief strategist for the Bush-Cheney 2004 presidential campaign, who has since become an anti-Trumper, doesn't think so either.
"The Biden campaign would be foolish to think that that’s the list that Donald Trump is ultimately going to pick from," Dowd told MSNBC's Ana Cabrera. "It may be, but I think their campaign process is going to be 'Well, we’ll deal with that when this person comes out.' Because I still believe, of those three picks, I still believe that somebody not on that list would be a better pick than those three."
Dowd claims that he believes this is all of them have said something bad about Trump at one point in the past. Of course, Kamala Harris basically called Joe Biden a racist for working with segregationist Democrats to oppose busing and also said that she believed the women who accused him of inappropriate sexual behavior, yet he still picked her.
Flashback: Kamala Harris Said She Believes Women Who Accused Joe Biden of Sexual Misconduct
Dowd is kidding himself if he thinks that past criticism of party nominees has any impact on whether that person will be selected as a running mate if that person has the potential to boost the ticket.
"So I think we all have to just wait and see because, as Donald Trump says, it’s in his own mind and the mind of Donald Trump is not something easy to fathom," Dowd continued. "So I still think it could be somebody off that list.”
His reasoning may be wrong, but I think the list is a ruse — mostly because the best option of the three is Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) and I don’t see Trump changing his official residency to accommodate Rubio on the ticket to avoid the 12th Amendment problem.
That leaves Burgum and Vance.
Burgum is another wealthy businessman who may bring money to the table, but not the balance you really want on a ticket. As for Vance, he underperformed in his election to the U.S. Senate in 2022. As of right now, I’m not comfortable leaving a vacancy in the Senate in Ohio — a state that last reelected Sen. Sherrod Brown (D) in 2018 despite voting for Trump two years earlier.
So whenever we find out who Trump has chosen, I suspect we'll be surprised.
