Bill Cotterell: Vice President Rubio? Not likely, but why not?

There’s not much chance Donald Trump will choose U.S. Sen. Marco Rubio as his running mate, but the recent buzz about it is an entertaining opportunity to play “what if” in the run-up to the Republican National Convention this summer.

Weirder things have happened, especially when Florida is involved.

Could Americans put two Floridians in charge for the next four years? Would Rubio attract many of the Hispanic voters whose support, polls indicate, President Joe Biden is losing? Does anybody remember, or care about, the nasty personal things he said about Trump when they ran against each other in 2016? And if a Trump-Rubio ticket wins, who might Gov. Ron DeSantis appoint to fill a vacancy in the U.S. Senate?

But first, what about the U.S. Constitution?

Contrary to a shorthand assumption made by some political commentators, the 12th Amendment does not forbid two candidates from the state being president and vice president. It says members of the Electoral College must vote for a candidate to fill each of those offices — at least one of whom must not be from the state where those electors live.

So, if they team up and win on Nov. 5, Trump and Rubio would have a while to decide what to do before the electors meet on Dec. 17. One of them could move elsewhere or, if they won big enough, they could write off Florida’s 30 electoral votes for one of the offices.

It takes 270 electoral votes to win. Trump received 304 electoral votes when he beat Hillary Clinton in 2016, including the 29 votes Florida had then. But if he hadn’t had them, he still would have won by five votes.

Democrats are talking bravely about flipping Florida blue this year, but that’s not likely. Recent polls in a half-dozen swing states indicate that Trump might wind up with an Electoral College cushion without our ballots.

Still, it would be a foolish gamble for Trump to write off Florida, and Rubio wouldn’t bring enough to the ticket to justify the risk.

But just for what-ifs, let’s suppose a Trump-Rubio ticket carried Florida but wound up with fewer than 300 electoral votes. So, our electors could go ahead and send Trump back to the White House, then vote for someone else as vice president. It wouldn’t be Democrat Kamala Harris, so maybe they could split the state among some symbolic surrogates from other states.

If no one had 270 electoral votes for vice president, the U.S. Senate would decide. The Senate could then elect Rubio, or anyone else Trump tells Republicans to select. The Constitution only says the Electoral College can’t elect two candidates from the same state — not that the Senate can’t.

The GOP had a slightly similar situation in 2000, but the solution was much simpler. George W. Bush and Dick Cheney both lived in Texas, so Cheney re-registered in Wyoming, where he’d been elected to Congress years earlier. Three Texans filed suit over the ruse but got nowhere.

More than a dozen prominent Republican leaders visited Trump this month, each of them tactfully feigning no interest in the vice presidency while heaping praise on the nominee-in-waiting. That meant taking back nasty things some of them had said about Trump previously, but that’s not hard when in full-grovel mode at Mar-a-Lago.

Rubio’s ridicule was nastier than most eight years ago. He called Trump “the most vulgar person to ever aspire to the presidency” and a “con artist.” Without elaborating, Rubio also remarked, “You know what they say about men with small hands” — a leering first in presidential politics.

But that, as they say, was then and this is now. He was a reliable MAGA man during and after Trump’s presidency, voting against both impeachments and voting with Trump on issues.

As vice president, Rubio would be the instant frontrunner for the 2028 GOP nomination to succeed Trump. At age 53, he has a solidly conservative, scandal-free record and was easily re-elected just two years ago. There’s little or no danger of the GOP losing his seat if he opted out of it early.

And like former Vice President Mike Pence, Rubio’s personal character borders on boring — a welcome contrast to everything we know about Trump.

Florida has never produced a vice-presidential nominee, and that’s not likely to change in this campaign. But Trump and the Republican Party could do worse.

Bill Cotterell is a retired Capitol reporter for United Press International and the Tallahassee Democrat. He writes a weekly column for The News Service of Florida and City & State Florida. He can be reached at wrcott43@aol.com.

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This article originally appeared on Tallahassee Democrat: Bill Cotterell: Vice President Rubio? Not likely, but why not?