Abrams: Let's face it, a white man probably won't win the Democratic nomination in 2020

So much for the Joe Biden-Stacey Abrams team-up. In order to pick the Georgia gubernatorial runner-up as the lower half of the Democrats’ 2020 presidential ticket, Biden would have to first win the nomination. Abrams told CBS This Morning that this is the year of the woman and/or minority candidate, which might make things awkward for her negotiations with Biden:

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When asked if this was the year that a woman and/or minority candidate “ends up being the nominee,” Abrams replied, “I believe so.” In fact, it sounds more like Abrams might take aim at the top half of the ticket instead:

Abrams — who recently said she has not ruled out a presidential bid — told reporters on “CBS This Morning” that the country needs to “start evolving what the face of leadership looks like.”

“I think the presidency is about reasserting who we are as a nation, our capacity for cohesion, and our ability to talk about marginalized communities and those who are outsiders without excluding the majority,” she said.

Earlier this month, rumors emerged that Biden invited Abrams to lunch to discuss the possibility of joining his ticket in his not-yet-launched presidential campaign. When asked about the conversation Wednesday, Abrams did not give a clear answer.

“We talked about a lot of things,” she said, “but that was not the core issue.”

CBS highlighted Abrams’ direct comments on her potential run for the top spot, in which she pushed back indirectly against all the VP talk:

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Stacey Abrams, a rising star in the Democratic party, who narrowly lost her race for Georgia governor in November, didn’t explicitly rule out joining the already packed Democratic field of 2020 presidential contenders, telling “CBS This Morning” on Wednesday that her successes in “transforming the electorate” in her home state shows she’d be “just as capable of becoming the president of the United States as anyone running” right now.

That’s almost certainly not true. Abrams may be making an impact on the conversation around the nomination at the moment, but so is Eric Swalwell. Neither of them have a track record in or out of politics that is particularly compelling, not even the supposed “transforming” of Georgia’s electorate — where, don’t forget, she lost in a cycle where other Democrats prevailed (and a couple didn’t in neighboring Florida). Abrams doesn’t have a political resumé that could compete with others already in the race, and she doesn’t have any other kind of non-politics resumé for an argument as an alternative, outsider candidate. Trump and Howard Schultz built fortunes in the private sector, for instance, and John Hickenlooper did pretty well as an entrepreneur before gaining two terms as Colorado’s chief executive.

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Of all the Democrats in the race, Joe Biden has the longest political resumé, of course. He’s been ensconced in Washington since before Watergate. Biden’s big problems in this cycle are his age as well as his pallor. Or who knows? Maybe Uncle Joe isn’t really an old white guy after all. Joe Biden argued in the 1970s that he knew what it felt like to be a “token black or a token woman” after being told he was too young to run for office:

When exactly does “woke” circle back around to “cultural appropriation”? Asking for a friend from Delaware who’s been in Washington for the past 50 years or so …

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