Joe Biden is being pressured by his donors not to pick Elizabeth Warren as his running mate. Biden, though, appears to be shrugging off any suggestion that Warren shouldn’t be involved with his potential administration.
Big money donors are pressuring Joe Biden to not choose Sen. Elizabeth Warren as his running mate, even while the centrist former vice president tries to appeal to progressive voters.
Biden and his team, according to people familiar with the matter, have heard from many donors in the business community about who they think would be best to be chosen as his vice presidential nominee.
Those conversations have recently included attempts to push the campaign away from picking Warren and encouraging the choice of other candidates purportedly on his list, such as Sens. Kamala Harris and Amy Klobuchar, and Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer. Many Biden contributors spoke on the condition of anonymity as these conversations, both with Biden and among his associates, were in private.
„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“ said a longtime fundraiser for Biden who is regularly in touch with him.
„She would be horrible. He would lose the election,“ said a Wall Street executive who was once backing others running in the Democratic primary and later joined Biden’s donor ranks.
Biden has started the vetting process of selecting a vice presidential candidate while he practices social distance in his Delaware home. His campaign has gone entirely virtual during the coronavirus pandemic. On Thursday, it announced the creation of a VP vetting committee, which includes former U. S. Sen. Christopher Dodd and Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti. Dodd was the longtime CEO of the Hollywood lobbying organization the Motion Picture Association of America.
Donors concerned about a Biden-Warren ticket are worried about a range of issues, from Democrats potentially losing her seat in the Senate to Warren being possibly too divisive on the campaign trail against President Donald Trump.
Other financiers have privately encouraged Biden to hold back on choosing a running mate and focus on issues connected to Americans‘ struggles with the coronavirus, which has infected more than a million in the U. S. and cost the economy more than 30 million jobs.
