Campaigning in New Hampshire on Monday, former Vice President Joe Biden (shown) was asked if he would consider choosing a Republican as his running mate, were he to win the 2020 Democratic Party’s nomination for president.
Biden said that he would consider a Republican for the second spot on the Democratic Party ticket. “There’s some really decent Republicans that are out there still, but here’s the problem right now with the well-known ones: they’ve got to step up. You know what I mean? I’m not being a wise guy.”
He added that he considered it “presumptuous” to be talking about a running mate, since he has not yet won the nomination, but he did offer some thoughts anyway on what he would look for in a vice-presidential candidate. “Whomever I would pick for vice president — and there’s a lot of qualified women, there’s a lot of qualified African-Americans, there really truly are — whomever I would pick were I fortunate enough to be your nominee, I’d pick someone who was simpatico [of the same mind] with me, who knew what my priorities were and knew what I wanted to do.”
Despite his efforts to cast himself as more of a centrist candidate than many others presently running in the Democratic field, such as openly socialist Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont, and strongly left-wing Senator Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts, the truth is that Biden has a long liberal voting record as a U.S. senator. Combined with his eight years as the vice president with “progressive” President Barack Obama, one can conclude that if a running mate would have to be of the same mind as Biden, anyone who agrees to be his running mate in 2020 would just have to be a liberal, too.
That would include any Republican who joined Democrat Biden on the ticket.
There are certainly are some Establishment Republicans who could fit that requirement of being of the same mind as Biden. When Alabama Governor George Wallace ran for president in 1968 as an independent (he garnered almost 10 million votes and carried five states, collecting 46 electoral votes), he explained that while he had been a Democrat during his time as governor, it was his view that there was “not a dime’s worth of difference” between the two major parties — Democrat and Republican.
It would certainly be unusual for a Democrat to put a Republican on the Democratic ticket in 2020, but it has been floated as a possibility in the past. For example, in 2004, it was rumored that Senator John Kerry of Massachusetts considered asking Senator John McCain of Arizona to join him on the Democratic line for president. Kerry, of course, was a Democrat and McCain was a Republican. Perhaps a more serious consideration came four years later when McCain clearly wanted Democrat Senator Joe Lieberman of Connecticut to be his running mate. McCain was advised that the Republican base would not go along with putting a Democrat on the ticket, and he eventually agreed to Alaska Governor Sarah Palin — who was a Republican — instead.
In 1864, Republican President Abraham Lincoln was quite unpopular as the Civil War seemed to be destined to drag on for a good while, so as to unite all of those who favored “saving the Union,” he put former Senator Andrew Johnson of Tennessee on a “Union Party” ticket. To say that the Civil War was a highly unusual situation would, of course, be an understatement. The ticket of Lincoln and Johnson did win, but after Lincoln was felled by an assassin’s bullet, the Republicans were none too happy that a Democrat was now president. Johnson was eventually impeached by the overwhelmingly Republican House of Representatives (although he was found not guilty by the Senate).
Were any Republican to actually join Biden — or any other Democrat on the ticket next year — it would underscore what many Americans have already begun to understand: that there exists a Deep State with tentacles in both of the two major political parties. This Deep State operates more like two wings of the same political party, rather than as two political parties who are truly competing on major ideas. Whether they call themselves Democrats or Republicans, they hate President Donald Trump, who offered an actual choice — a choice in opposition to the globalism that defines most of both major political party establishments.
One might recall that during the 2016 campaign, there were the “Never Trumpers,” who not only supported any Republican in the 17-candidate field besides Trump, but many who openly supported Democrat Hillary Clinton in the general election, rather than Trump, the nominee of the Republicans.
In short, any “Republican” who agreed to join Democrat Joe Biden would be a Republican who favored the same leftist policies as the Democrats.
Even allowing for inflation, George Wallace’s “not a dime’s worth of difference” in describing the Democrats and Republicans of 1968 would still be less than ten cents to describe Biden and a “Republican” running mate.
Photo of Joe Biden: AP Images
Steve Byas is a university instructor of history and government and author of History’s Greatest Libels. He may be contacted at [email protected]
