It’s never wise to bet big money on the choice of a presidential nominee’s runningmate. Even with inside information, the most connected pundits are often surprised when the announcement is finally released.
But we can state with certainty who it absolutely cannot be, and not for any shortcoming of their own:
It can’t be Senator Rick Scott, Senator Marco Rubio, or, especially sorry to say, either Congressman Byron Donalds or Governor Ron DeSantis.
Why? Because they’re all from Florida.
Most Americans remember this from our junior high Constitution class, but some of us have forgotten, some of us missed the class entirely, and a lot of us had such confused teachers that we were given incorrect information in the first place. So let’s spell it out, just for the record.
The Constitution has very few requirements for the president and vice president.
- They have to be at least 35 years of age by their inauguration.
- They must have resided here in the United States for at least fourteen years (to allow for citizens who might have spent many years abroad in our military or diplomatic service).
- Since the 22nd amendment, they cannot have already served more than one and half terms as president (to prevent the possibility of another situation like Franklin Delano Roosevelt, who took such advantage of the power of incumbency that he was reelected to a fourth term practically on his deathbed).
- They have to be Natural Born Citizens, which in the 18th century meant a person born in-country, without the cloud of dual citizenship. In practice, this is taken to mean born on US territory to both US citizen parents. (Since the candidacy of Barack Obama, this law is no longer enforced, to the bewilderment of originalists. Many today even close their eyes and convince themselves they don’t see the clause, sitting on the page in front of them in black and white).
And the two candidates usually can’t both be from the same state.
“Usually,” you ask? What’s that about?
This is where it gets interesting.
Some tell us, two candidates can run from the same state; others say no, the two candidates absolutely cannot be from the same state. In truth, it’s simple, but it’s not quite that simple.
We must remember that presidential elections were not envisioned by the Framers the way they quickly turned out. The Framers did not anticipate political parties; they hoped against hope to avoid the concept of “Tories vs. Whigs” that they saw across the Pond in England.
Our Constitution creates a concept called the Electoral College, in which each of the several states appoints a group of elder statesmen – in numbers calculated by adding the number of its representatives in the US House to its standard base of two members in the US Senate.
Today, the delegates in the Electoral College are a function of the political parties. Each party provides a slate in advance of the election, who will blindly cast their state’s votes, if their candidate wins the state in the General Election. But at the beginning, there was just to be one slate, a group of wise, nonpartisan elders who were plugged in enough to know lots of the nation’s politicians, and could be trusted to choose well from the available pool.
One of the greatest concerns was that this new country needed a geographically diverse government, so they put in a simple safeguard: no state delegation could vote for a ticket in which both the president and vice president came from their own home state. The meaning of this changed slightly when the selection process for the vice presidency was remade during the Jefferson administration, but the basic rule remained unchanged.
So, what this really means is that a presidential ticket can legally include both presidential and vice presidential candidates from the same state, and all of the states except their own could legally vote for them.
We have fifty states at present; that means that 49 states could vote for a Trump/DeSantis or Trump/Donalds ticket.
But one state could not: Florida.
In practice, therefore, you could run a ticket in which both are from the same state if you know that you wouldn’t win that state anyway.
And you could run a ticket in which both are from the same state if you know that you will win without that state.
But you can’t possibly dare to run a ticket in which both are from the same state, if you know that you might need that particular state.
And it is universally agreed that the Republican path to the White House absolutely requires Florida’s 30 votes, just as the Democratic path absolutely requires California’s 54. We could no more see a Trump-Rubio ticket from the Republicans than a Newsom/Pelosi ticket from the Democrats.
Some will say that there’s a loophole: you just have to move!
And yes, that can be done, but politically, it has to be a legitimate option.
Look back on the summer of 2000, when George W. Bush selected Dick Cheney as his runningmate. Both lived in Texas at the time.
Partisans pushing the nominations of Congressman Donalds or Governor DeSantis can point to 2000, and shout “Remember Dick Cheney in 2000! He lived in Texas and just moved to Wyoming so he could run with George W Bush!”
But that is a misunderstanding of the Bush/Cheney situation.
George W Bush was born in Connecticut but was then raised in Midland and Houston, Texas; his career and his political service were all in Texas. He was the Texas Governor when he ran for President. He could not possibly move anywhere else; Texas was his only logical base.
By contrast, Dick Cheney was an almost lifetime Wyoming politician, having served as a Congressman, White House Chief of Staff, and Defense Secretary all while registered in Wyoming. He had just lived in Texas for five years, for business reasons (as chief executive of the Texas company Halliburton).
Dick Cheney could therefore legitimately re-register at his property in Wyoming when the need arose. It wouldn’t look like carpet-bagging; it was a legitimate return to normalcy.
All the Floridians being proposed for Vice President in 2024 have to stay in Florida. They are all currently serving office-holders, and would have to give up their seats immediately if they re-registered in another state. Besides, they have all been associated with Florida for so long, none of them have a logical alternate state to switch to, as Cheney did.
Ron DeSantis and Marco Rubio are lifelong Floridians; while Rick Scott was born in Illinois and Byron Donalds was born in New York, both have lived in Florida so long that neither could logically return to their remote home states.
But what about Donald J. Trump? Could he switch states?
Yes, he could have, in any other time.
President Trump is a New Yorker. If ever a man was associated with the Big Apple, it’s him. But the political establishments in both the city and state of New York have declared war on him, and are aiming all the power of state and local government directly at his heart. If he were to re-register as a New York taxpayer, the tax impact would be crippling on its own, and on top of that, and New York’s array of kangaroo courts would sue or arrest him on countless fabricated charges if he set foot there again as a resident.
So President Trump has to stay in Florida as well. He too has no choice.
Hence our unavoidable conclusion: the Republican Party has a deep bench, with Congressmen, Senators and Governors all over the country worthy of consideration as President Trump’s runningmate – but everyone from Florida is simply impossible.
However good some of them may be, everything they bring to the ticket couldn’t possibly make up for losing those thirty electoral college votes.
Copyright 2024 John F Di Leo
John F. Di Leo is a Chicagoland-based international transportation and trade compliance professional and consultant. A onetime Milwaukee County Republican Party chairman, he has been writing a regular column for Illinois Review since 2009. His book on vote fraud (The Tales of Little Pavel) and his political satires on the current administration (Evening Soup with Basement Joe, Volumes I, II, and III), are available in either eBook or paperback, only on Amazon.
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