“On the Holmes Front,” with Frank Holmes
The 2020 presidential election is just four months away, and Democrats don’t know who Joe Biden will choose as his vice presidential running mate …
But they know who they do not want on the ticket. A new USA Today/Suffolk University poll shows that U.S. Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., is the least popular potential veep on the Democratic roster, hands down.
One in five Democratic voters say Warren is “not acceptable” to be one heartbeat away from the presidency — and she has the highest negatives of all 11 possible candidates on the survey.
In all, 72 percent of Democrats said it’s important for Biden to pick a woman “of color,” and the most popular choice is Sen. Kamala Harris. Stacey Abrams, who failed in her bid to be elected governor of Georgia, also ranks high.
But Warren, the ultraliberal once thought to be the frontrunner for her party’s presidential nomination, now scrapes the bottom of the barrel with her own party. Still, her lack of popular support hasn’t stopped more than 100 of her supporters, including Jane Fonda, from signing a letter urging Joe Biden to tap Warren as his running mate this fall.
Her backers reminded Biden that the Massachusetts senator raised a cool $6 million for his campaign chest in one night, and they brag about her “scholarly studies” explaining “economic fraud.”
But “fraud” is also her biggest problem, even with her allies. People just don’t think she’s trustworthy.
A string of personal and professional lies and inauthentic statements has dogged her credibility for years. The Foundation for Accountability and Civic Trust (FACT), a nonpartisan watchdog, ranked Warren as one of the most dishonest politicians in 2018 and accused her of illegally cashing in on the Brett Kavanaugh confirmation hearings.
That was before the Democratic presidential primaries got underway, and Warren really wilted under scrutiny.
A DNA test revealed that Warren has only 1/1024 Native American ancestry. Instead of apologizing, she doubled down by insisting she is really a Cherokee, but even her allies weren’t buying it. NBC reporter Jonathan Allen said that Sen. Warren “perpetrated some level of fraud” at Harvard by falsely telling faculty she was “Cherokee” and abusing the Ivy League school’s Affirmative Action program.
The more Democratic voters got to know Warren, the less they liked her.
A CNN poll found Warren was the only candidate out of the more-than-two-dozen Democratic presidential hopefuls whose negatives were higher than her positives.
She constantly sidestepped questions about whether her socialized medicine program, “Medicare for All,” would raise taxes. She got caught red-handed lying about getting fired from her “dream” job because she was pregnant. A TV interview from years earlier caught her admitting she tried teaching but thought to herself, “I don’t think this is going to work out for me.” Warren’s lies just continued to pile up, as she lied to a black woman who told her, “I read that your children went to private school.” “No, my children went to public schools,” Warren said. But her son, Alex, went to two elite private schools in Texas and Pennsylvania, and Warren’s campaign eventually admitted that “her son went to public school until fifth grade.”
Even her own family has had enough of her truth-twisting shenanigans. Her three brothers—David, Don, and John Herring—can’t stomach the whopper the senator told when she claimed the family was so poor that their father worked as a janitor.
While the family mostly kept quiet in public, privately they were seething that their sister would lie about her own dad for political gain. Pamela Winblood, a longtime friend of David’s, told The Boston Globe that “he said, ‘My dad was never a janitor.’”
And Warren may never be vice president.
Biden has said he will announce his running mate in August. “There are a number of women of color” on the short list, he said at a speech in Wilmington, Delaware. “There are Latino women. There are Asian. There are — across the board.”
Whoever Biden chooses will have to inject some excitement into the race.
With Biden either hiding or stammering his way through his limited media appearances, he’s not likely to drum up more confidence with the average voter.
Meanwhile, Donald Trump would love to run against Biden and the senator he calls “Pocahontas.”
If the polls are right, that’s the one team that could guarantee Trump four more years in the White House.
Frank Holmes is a veteran journalist and an outspoken conservative that talks about the news that was in his weekly article, “On The Holmes Front.”