Fighter with a ‘fresh face’: What Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer could bring as Biden’s VP pick

Whitmer, who declined to comment for this story, confirmed to other outlets that she has had conversations about joining the Biden ticket, but said she is not lobbying for the job.

“I just know that, you know, you don’t run for that. That is a selection of the top of the ticket, and everyone else should be just busy doing their jobs,” she told POLITICO Playbook in late April as the coronavirus pandemic hit its peak in her state.

Whitmer has been a popular figure in Michigan for years. She climbed the political ladder, serving in the state’s House of Representatives from 2001 to 2006 and in the Michigan Senate from 2006 to 2015. In 2013, she leaped into the national spotlight during a debate on abortion in which she revealed that she had been sexually assaulted.

She ran for governor in 2018 as a pragmatic candidate promising to “fix the damn roads.” She won her race against state Attorney General Bill Schuette by a margin of nearly 10 points.

Michigan’s economy took a turn for the worse in 2019 as it faced headwinds from Trump’s trade war, the auto worker strikes against General Motors and job cuts at other car manufacturers, according to the University of Michigan.
The state was on track for a turnaround in 2020, Michigan News reported, until the coronavirus changed everything.

In February, she was selected to give the Democratic response to Trump’s 2020 State of the Union address, an honor generally reserved for the party’s ascendant members.

Whitmer again grabbed the nation’s attention in April when she called out the Trump administration for failing to provide adequate protective gear, equipment and testing to battle the virus.

Trump punched back with negative tweets. Soon, protesters, egged on by the president, showed up at the state capitol brandishing weapons and demanding an end to strict stay-at-home measures enacted by the governor as Covid-19 cases in Detroit and other areas multiplied.

The controversy, while raising her profile, could actually hurt her chances of making Biden’s final cut.

“The impact of the pandemic on Michigan and the protests in general does make it more likely that Biden will look elsewhere for a running mate,” said Joshua Spivak, senior fellow at the Hugh L. Carey Institute for Government Reform at Wagner College.

“Any reelection race is effectively a referendum on the incumbent. Choosing Whitmer may draw attention away from some of the more unpopular decisions that Trump has made,” he said.

Article source: https://www.cnbc.com/2020/06/13/biden-running-mate-what-gretchen-whitmer-could-bring-as-vp.html