Dear Mr. Trump: Your supporters have some ideas for a running mate
How about Vice President Vivek Ramaswamy?
Though not a single voter has cast a ballot for the 2024 presidential nominations yet, surely it’s not too soon to start the speculation about Donald Trump’s pick as running mate.
For starters, the general election is heading toward a rematch between Trump and President Joe Biden, but there’s basically no one in American politics who thinks Trump will repeat his vice presidential pick from 2016 (when he won) and 2020 (when he lost). That would be Mike Pence, cast out of Trump world after refusing to disrupt the Electoral College count that put Biden in the White House in 2021.
In our new USA TODAY/Suffolk University Poll, when we asked Trump supporters to name their choice for the No. 2 spot, it was Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis who finished first, at 14%.
Sorry, folks. That’s almost certainly not going to happen, given the fractured relations between the two after DeSantis emerged for a time as the most likely alternative to Trump. The former president rewarded DeSantis with the derisive nickname “DeSanctimonious.” (There also are constitutional complications from having both members of a ticket come from the same state.)
Then there’s Ramaswamy, volunteered by 10%. The entrepreneur and political newcomer has done the most of any in the field to emulate and defend Trump in the GOP debates that the former president has declined to join. Most recently, he has vowed to remove his name from any state ballot that bumps Trump.
Unlike those first two, file Ramaswamy’s name under “not impossible.”
Note that, if elected, he wouldn’t be the first Asian American to serve as vice president; that status belongs to the current officeholder, Kamala Harris. But he would be the first person since Henry Wallace, Franklin Roosevelt’s second vice president, to be elected No. 2 before he had won election to any other office.
(Trump seems unlikely to think of that as a bar. He is the most recent president to win the top job without ever having held elective office himself.)
Another pick that doesn’t seem impossible is Nikki Haley, the former South Carolina governor appointed by Trump as U.N. ambassador in his administration. In her campaign challenging him for the 2024 nomination, she has tried to navigate a line between criticizing Trump but not so much that his supporters might refuse to back her, now or later.
In our poll, 7% proposed her name. Well behind at 2% was Robert F. Kennedy Jr., now an independent presidential candidate. If chosen, it would be the first time a close member of that storied Democratic family appeared on the Republican line as a candidate. South Dakota Gov. Kristi Noem and populist provocateur Tucker Carlson were at 1%.
Not to overstate the groundswell: That means six respondents named her; five chose him.
The poll of 438 Trump voters, taken by landline and cellphone from Dec. 26-29, has a margin of error of 4.7 percentage points.
Most of those surveyed seem ready to leave the decision up to Trump. A 55% majority didn’t have an opinion.