So much for the Biden-Beto ticket

| 12:12 pm EDT March 15, 2019
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For the past several weeks, various prominent online news publications have been pushing the notion that Joe Biden and Beto O’Rourke were going to enter the 2020 election as a tag team, with Biden as the presidential nominee and Beto as the preordained running mate. Palmer Report pointed out that nothing works that way, but these Biden-Beto articles have nonetheless gotten a ridiculous amount of traction.

On Thursday, Beto O’Rourke entered the 2020 presidential race, finally proving that there is obviously no Biden-Beto preordained ticket. Also, duh. Why would any candidate be stupid enough to announce a running mate from day one? It would be a middle finger to supporters of every other candidate, because they’d all be ruled out as potential running mates from the start. It would be one of the most laugh-out-loud idiotic mistakes in the history of American politics, which is why no one ever does it.

So why was the media making up such nonsense? The short answer: because they could get away with it. Neither Biden nor Beto had entered the race yet, meaning they could make up anything they wanted about how these two candidates were going to enter the race. Because people either loved or hated the idea, these articles got a ton of play across social media, despite having been made up out of thin air.

Now that Beto has entered the race and shattered the Biden-Beto fictional narrative, some prominent news outlets are now publishing fiction about Biden entering the race with Stacey Abrams as his preordained running mate. That’s not a surprise; these are the two most prominent names who haven’t yet entered the race, so it’s easy to just make things up about them.

Of course it’s entirely possible that Joe Biden could win the nomination, and that he could then pick Beto O’Rourke – or Stacey Abrams – as his running mate. But entering the race as some kind of tandem? Sorry, but that’s just not a real thing. The people publishing this crap know better. It’s a callback to the 2016 democratic primary, when the media wrote fake stories about everyone from John Kerry to Michael Dukakis preparing to enter the race. It’s made-up nonsense for the sake of ratings and page views. Buyer beware.