Which Running Mate?

The one unsettled question from the presidential rematch from hell is: Who will Trump choose as his running mate, given that Mike Pence ruled himself out by doing his job in January 2021?

At RealClear Politics, Trumpist Sean Trende goes through his best guess at a top ten, ranking them according to how well they would help Trump's electoral cause.

First, the good news: both leftist gadfly Tulsi Gabbard and J.D. Vance, who took all the wrong lessons from his hardscrabble childhood, rank only seventh and eighth.

Either would cause me to consider a vote for Biden, rather than merely abstaining, as I currently plan to do. Gabbard would be a foreign policy disaster even in relatively good times, which these aren't; and Vance hastens a completion of Trump's changing of the guard of the GOP to not even pretending to care about personal or economic freedom.

(Of the latter, perhaps a silver lining would be that he could bring about the humiliating defeat the Republicans probably need to come back from the brink and become an actual alternative to the Democrats...)

Trende's winner is "Little Marco" Rubio, because he'd help secure Florida's electoral votes and, in Trende's MAGA reckoning:

He's reassuring to suburbanites, and beloved of anti-anti-Trump [sic] Republicans. He sounded Trumpian themes on working class woes before Trump.

Doug Burgum (Image by Office of the Governor, State of North Dakota, via Wikimedia Commons, license.)

Trende's probably thinking about voters like me here.

For what it's worth, I wasn't impressed with how Rubio folded like a cheap lawn chair after Trump nicknamed him in 2016, less impressed at how Trumpian he sounds these days, and about equally disappointed and alarmed at his turn to theocratic social democracy.

That man has lived up to his nickname, and might also provoke an outright Biden vote from me.

Trende rounds out his top three with Glenn Youngkin (way too religious) and Doug Burgum of North Dakota, whom I know little about, but of whom I currently do not have an unfavorable impression.

Given the ages of both presidential candidates, and the nightmare possibility of the vacuous Kamala Harris becoming President, Trump's pick is a much more important consideration for the immediate future than it would ordinarily be, but even here, it's not as simple as has to be better than Kamala Harris, as low a bar as that might be.

-- CAV