Progressive Groups Urge Biden to Pick Warren in Open Letter That Doesn’t Address Race
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A pair of progressive organizations have sent an open letter to former vice president and current Democratic nominee Joe Biden urging him to select Massachusetts Senator Elizabeth Warren as his running mate, conspicuously failing to address race in the text.
On Tuesday, RootsAction and Progressive Democrats of America sent an open letter to the Biden campaign to lobby on Warren’s behalf, but the letter made no mention of the current racial reckoning roiling the country in the wake of the police killing of George Floyd, or the fact that such a selection would result in an all-white ticket:
Dear Vice President Biden,
As the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee, your choice of a vice-presidential candidate will be critically important in the run-up to the general election. If you want to unify the party and take back the White House, then you should choose the running mate best suited to those goals: Elizabeth Warren. Senator Warren is deeply qualified to be our next vice president, bringing decades of experience and a track record of leadership on issues from the Green New Deal to fighting corporate greed and corruption – issues that excite the progressive voters you’ll need to win the White House. Few senators have fought harder and more consistently for the kinds of structural reforms that would lift up working-class families and communities.
Senator Warren has also proposed some of the most comprehensive policy plans to deal with the consequences of the coronavirus pandemic. She has the tenacity and expertise to help ordinary Americans steer through this crisis, and she’d be ready to govern on day one. For all of these reasons, we’re asking you to choose her as your vice president. Biden-Warren would represent a unity ticket, one capable of generating enthusiasm from across the Democratic Party and beyond – and defeating Donald Trump in November.
Warren’s standing in the veepstakes has taken a hit in the past few weeks, particularly when Minnesota Senator Amy Klobuchar publicly withdrew herself from consideration and urged Biden to select a woman of color. Klobuchar’s announcement came after a personal conversation with Biden, and closely followed the last big open letter to lobby for Warren.
That effort illustrates the difficulty facing Warren supporters, because when that letter did address the subject, it did so by arguing that a diverse ticket was unnecessary because Biden is “already strong” with those groups, and by presenting Warren as an expert on racial justice.
And one of the letter’s signatories, Prof. Laurence Tribe, was ostentatiously criticized for presenting a Black nominee as “cosmetics.” He later apologized.
At the time that letter was written, Warren led the field among Democratic voters, but her standing with Black voters had cratered, placing her fourth behind Sen. Kamala Harris, former Georgia legislator Stacey Abrams, and Atlanta Mayor Keisha Lance Bottoms.
Since then, Harris has taken the overall lead for the VP spot, although there has been a significant increase in voters undecided on whom Biden should select.
Warren is still the runner-up among both Black voters and overall, but the prospect of an all-white ticket in the midst of the current racial reckoning is an elephant in the room that Warren’s supporters appear to be having a tough time getting around.
