Senator Marco Rubio addressed being passed on as Donald Trump's running mate for the presidential elections, highlighting that at least he won't have to leave Florida to remedy the Constitution's 12th Amendment, which forbids two members of a ticket being from the same state.
"I get to stay in Florida too, by the way. That's awesome," Rubio said at the end of his comments at a breakfast meeting held by the Republican Party of Florida during the Republican National Convention in Milwaukee. The comment was an unsolicited no sequitur, according to Florida Politics.
While final choice of Ohio's JD Vance as Trump's running mate is not a direct result of Rubio's residency, the issue did seem to play a role in the decision, with Trump and other officials bringing it up when discussing the process.
"You do that, and it makes it more complicated. There are other people that don't have that complication," Trump said in a recent interview. "Now, it's fairly easily fixed, but you have to do something with delegates, or there has to be a resignation, you know, et cetera, et cetera. So it's not like picking some people where it's very easy, where there is none of that."
Had Trump chosen Rubio, electors from Florida could have not voted for both Trump and Rubio under the Amendment. But it would have been fine for electors from the other 49 states to vote for both. Since that would have been a non-starter, Rubio would have probably had to move states.
Eric Trump gave a similar argument during the RPOF meeting, calling Rubio an "incredible guy" but saying the issue created "a real problem... a constitutional problem."
"Were there workarounds for that, you know, send somebody out of state or something? Yeah. I mean, if they're right, I think you could have gotten around that if you really had to. But that's a problem having two people from the exact state," he added.
Trump ended up choosing JD Vance, preventing Rubio from becoming the first Latino to be part of the presidential ticket in one of the country's two major parties. He was among those vetted as potential VPs and analysts highlighted his potential appeal to to fellow Latinos, which has been one of his goals along the campaign trail.
Vance, in turn, grew up in Jackson, Kentucky and Middletown, Ohio. He first came into the public eye with his best-selling memoir in 2016 "hillbilly elegy," where he described childhood as consumed by poverty and abuse.
After high school, Vance joined the Marines and served as a public affairs marine in Iraq. He would eventually go to Yale Law School, where he met his future wife, Usha Vance, a litigator for a law firm based in San Francisco and Washington D.C.
After graduation, he moved to California for a job in venture capitalism until 2022, when Ohio's Republican senator Rob Portman decided not to run for re-election, pushing him to campaign for the job.
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