The woman who managed former President Donald Trump’s successful 2016 presidential campaign publicly advised him Monday to pick a non-White person as his running mate.
Kellyanne Conway said Monday that Mr. Trump should look to expand his voting coalition this time around and that a minority running mate would help.
“If I were advising Mr. Trump, I would suggest he choose a person of color as his running mate, depending on vetting of all possibilities and satisfaction of procedural issues like dual residency in Florida,” she wrote in an op-ed column for the New York Times.
Ms. Conway said this would not be an affirmation-action choice and she derided President Biden’s 2020 pick of Kamala Harris as someone who only ticks off certain identity boxes.
“Not for identity politics a la the Democrats,” she wrote, “but as an equal, helping to lead an America First movement that includes more union workers, independents, first-time voters, veterans, Hispanics, Asian Americans and African Americans.”
Ms. Conway noted early in the piece that “politics is the art of addition, not subtraction — let alone distraction” and her political logic was that “Mr. Biden is seeing losses in core constituencies of the tenuous coalition he scaffolded together in 2020.”
She added that “Mr. Trump clocks impressive numbers among African American and especially Hispanic voters — particularly men — in many head-to-head polls against Mr. Biden. As with female voters in 2016, Mr. Trump need not win a majority of minority voters to be elected president so much as eat into Mr. Biden’s margins.”
As Mr. Trump’s 2016 campaign manager, Ms. Conway has bona fides. She noted in the column that she had advised him to pick Mike Pence as his running mate.
While it ended poorly after the Jan. 6 riots, the choice of Mr. Pence — a man with a strong conservative governing record and personal religious faith — helped shore up support among evangelical Christians unsure then about a man with no governing experience and known best as a celebrity tycoon with no overt religiosity.
Ms. Conway name-dropped numerous minorities as fitting her other criteria, though a couple such as Sen. Marco Rubio and Rep. Byron Donalds are fellow Florida residents.
Among the other names she cited are Sen. Tim Scott of South Carolina, former HUD Secretary Ben Carson, and businessman and former primary rival Vivek Ramaswamy.
• Victor Morton can be reached at vmorton@washingtontimes.com.
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