The South Dakota governor, Kristi Noem, said on Sunday that Donald Trump should pick a woman to be his running mate amid reports that her fellow Republican’s shortlist is nearly all men.
“I think that that would be beneficial, according to the polling that I’ve seen for him and a lot of swing states, is that having a woman that is helping his campaign makes a difference,” she told Dana Bash during an interview on CNN’s State of the Union. “One in four Republican women haven’t made up their minds because they want to have a woman talking to them about the issues they care about. And women aren’t monolithic. They don’t care about just one issue.”
Noem’s comments come amid reports that the former president’s campaign for a second term in the White House is vetting possible picks. Only one of them, congresswoman Elise Stefanik of New York, is a woman.
Others include senators JD Vance, Marco Rubio, Tim Scott and Tom Cotton. The North Dakota governor, Doug Burgum, congressman Byron Donalds, and Ben Carson, the former secretary of housing and urban development, are also reportedly under consideration.
Noem gave the interview from Wausau, Wisconsin, where she has been stumping for Trump.
Until recently, Noem was considered a top possible pick for the No 2 spot on the Republican ticket for November’s election. But her chances reportedly fell significantly after she published a story in her recently published memoir about killing her dog.
She said on Sunday that she did not know if she was under consideration.
Asked whether she had regrets about publishing that story, Noem suggested that she did not.
“That story’s a 20-year-old story of a mom who made a very difficult decision to protect her children from a vicious animal that was attacking livestock, and killing livestock, and attacking people,” she said. “So it’s in the book because it was difficult for me.”
When Bash tried to press her further, Noem cut in and said “we’ve covered this”.
Noem’s book also exposed her to criticism after she needed to retract an anecdote about meeting Kim Jong-un – and then feeling “underestimated” by the North Korean dictator during the encounter.
The Dakota Scout newspaper was the first to report how Noem’s account of meeting Kim during a prior stint as a congresswoman was unlikely to have happened. Within days of the Scout’s report, Noem said: “This anecdote shouldn’t have been in the book, and as soon as it was brought to my attention, I made sure that that was adjusted.”
