By Jim Turner ©2024 The News Service of Florida
TALLAHASSEE — Former President Donald Trump on Monday bypassed U.S. Sen. Marco Rubio in making his vice-presidential pick, averting what could have been a major change in Florida’s political landscape.
Trump announced freshman U.S. Sen. JD Vance of Ohio as his 2024 running mate, a short time after the Republican National Convention opened in Milwaukee.
“After lengthy deliberation and thought, and considering the tremendous talents of many others, I have decided that the person best suited to assume the position of vice president of the United States is Senator J.D. Vance of the great state of Ohio,” Trump said in an online post.
The running-mate selection was one of the few anticipated moments of drama as the four-day convention opened, but the gravity of the pick increased after an assassination attempt Saturday on Trump during a rally in Pennsylvania.
Rubio, a Miami-Dade County Republican who first was elected to the Senate in 2010, was advised he wouldn’t be Trump’s pick before it was made public during an afternoon roll call of state convention delegates.
Rubio tweeted “#TrumpVance2024!!!” after Trump posted his selection.
The Florida Democratic Party responded by tweeting a photo of Rubio frowning.
Democrats also criticized Vance, a Yale-educated former venture capitalist whose best-selling memoir “Hillbilly Elegy” recalled his upbringing in the rust belt. In a prepared statement, Florida Democratic Party Chairwoman Nikki Fried described Vance as having “built his career around insulting rural Americans and the working class.”
Rubio, Vance and North Dakota Gov. Doug Burgum were reported to be on the short list of finalists.
After the shooting at the rally on Saturday, Rubio criticized the media coverage and posted online: “God protected President Trump.”
Vance blamed rhetoric from the Biden campaign. “The central premise of the Biden campaign is that President Donald Trump is an authoritarian fascist who must be stopped at all costs,” Vance wrote online.
Before Monday’s selection, Democrats and other Trump critics had raised questions about Rubio, who lost the GOP presidential nomination to Trump in 2016.
Ana Navarro, a Republican commentator and Trump critic who was part of former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush’s administration, questioned Rubio’s loyalty, pointing to a “metamorphosis” over the past three decades.
“He worked for my husband (former state Republican Chairman Al Cardenas) for a while. He was a very different Marco Rubio back then than he is today,” Navarro said in a conference call with reporters last week. “He was a very different Marco Rubio in 2016, when he was criticizing Donald Trump and attacking Donald Trump than he is today.”
If he had been chosen vice president, Rubio would have been expected to resign from the Senate and temporarily declare a new state of residency, as Trump also is a resident of Florida..
Gov. Ron DeSantis would then have been able to pick a successor to Rubio until an election could be held.
The son of working-class Cuban immigrants who in 2006 became speaker of the Florida House, Rubio is 52, telegenic and viewed as a link to suburban voters and Spanish speakers.
While Rubio was under consideration, University of Central Florida political science professor Aubrey Jewett said he would offer more positives for the Trump campaign than negatives. That included being a recognized name, having foreign-policy credentials and an ability to help Trump get his message out in Spanish in the southwest U.S.
“His potential appeal to Hispanics, not just Cuban Hispanics, but Hispanics across the country, I think that’s a pretty big positive,” Jewett said. “That’s a group that Trump has done well with, better than a lot of people thought he was going to do given his talk about illegal immigration and disparaging remarks about Hispanics and Mexicans.”
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