Joe Biden took months to decide he wouldn’t run for president — but he was sold on Elizabeth Warren as his running mate from the start, people familiar with the situation told POLITICO.

And he still thinks the Massachusetts firebrand would be Hillary Clinton’s best choice to replace him as the nation’s No. 2 in January 2017.


Biden, a stalwart Democrat who has veered leftward in recent years — but, as a centrist senator, voted to scuttle the Glass-Steagall prohibitions on banks engaging in speculative investments — favored Warren because he needed a partner to capture the wave of anti-bank, anti-establishment anger raging to his left.

Warren, a freshman senator from Massachusetts, who supports breaking up the big banks and re-imposing 1930s-era Wall Street regulations to prevent another global financial crisis, was Biden’s “only real choice,” according to an official he spoke to at the time.

Biden — who told an interviewer on Tuesday that he considered running for president because he believed he was “the best” person for the job — took his hat out of the ring in late October 2015, citing the stresses on his family following the death of his son Beau.

But he’s recently told associates that Warren would be an equally smart pick for Hillary Clinton, who has been sharply criticized for refusing to publish the transcripts of her high-paid speeches to the elite banking firm of Goldman Sachs.

Biden, a senior Democratic official said, first mentioned Warren as a possible running mate during his earliest strategy sessions with a team of advisers that included friends Mike Donilon, Steve Richetti and Ted Kaufman; Donilon, the person said, was particularly enthusiastic about it.

And Biden broached the idea, almost matter of factly, to Warren during a much-hyped lunch meeting at the vice president’s residence on the grounds of the Naval Observatory last September.

Biden, according to a person briefed on details of the meeting, told Warren he wanted her to be his running mate “during the conversation” but didn’t explicitly ask her to commit to the slot or endorse his candidacy. Warren, the person told POLITICO, was “noncommittal” but “not displeased.”

At that meeting, she delivered a clear-eyed assessment of Biden’s own chances, according to a staffer who was given a read-out of the conversation, telling the vice president that he had little chance of positioning himself to the left of Clinton, given his own three-decade record of moderate compromise in the Senate.

Warren conceded — prophetically in retrospect — that Clinton would face a progressive backlash but she informed Biden that his record on Wall Street was little better than that of the woman he hoped to topple as front-runner. As a senator, Biden, like Clinton, had supported a 2001 bankruptcy bill that Warren vehemently opposed; her advice to Biden was that, to appeal to the left, he would need to start talking right away about Wall Street reform.

A spokesman for Warren declined to comment on the matter. A Biden spokeswoman said she didn’t want to comment on internal discussions.

But Kaufman, a former Delaware senator and Biden’s longtime aide and confidant, said Warren was a subject of discussion within Biden’s inner circle as he pondered a presidential run.

“She’s someone that was discussed,” Kaufman said. “She’s clearly someone anyone would consider.”

But Kaufman cautioned that the discussions “never got to the point” of making any promises about the role she might play on a potential Biden campaign. “We were still deciding if he was going to run or not,” he said. “She’s obviously someone you want to talk to.”

The revelation of Biden’s interest in Warren is timely: The Massachusetts senator, who has not yet endorsed a candidate for president, has been careful to avoid any statement that would indicate she favored ideological soulmate Bernie Sanders over the more centrist Clinton. But progressives have begun pitching Warren as a possible Clinton vice presidential pick to heal the divisions between the center and left of the Democratic Party after the protracted duel between Clinton and Sanders.

And Warren hasn’t entirely resisted the suggestion — in part, because it gives her leverage to influence Clinton’s potential staffing decisions in the Treasury Department and financial oversight boards.

On Wednesday, the 66-year-old former Harvard Law professor refused to rule out accepting an offer to join Clinton on the 2016 ticket, employing the kind of non-answer answer she’s used throughout much of the campaign to stay above the fray.

“We've got to get all of our nominations settled on the Democratic side,” she told the website Mic when asked the veep question. “For me, I’m going to keep doing my job every single day and I’m not thinking about another job.”

Warren — to the delight of Clinton’s staff — has recently trained her fire on Donald Trump, a move that many Clintonites interpret as evidence that the darling of the Democrats’ anti-establishment wing might be willing to accept Clinton, despite the front-runner’s deep and lucrative connections to the New York financial services sector.

Even if Warren cut a deal to endorse Clinton and serve in her administration, it’s not clear whether all of her backers — or Sanders’ steadfast supporters — would automatically jump aboard the Hillary bandwagon.

“I find it highly improbable that a leading voice in the progressive movement, whether it be Elizabeth Warren or someone else, would want to be sitting in the vice president’s office or in the Cabinet,” said Jonathan Tasini, a New York-based Sanders supporter who isn’t ready to give up the fight for Bernie. “Would Warren or any true progressive be willing to make the obvious compromises that a moderate corporate Democrat Hillary would demand? I don’t think so.”

It’s not clear whether Biden has remained in touch with Warren since their last meeting, or what he thinks of the prospects that another progressive — Sanders — would do for a Democratic ticket.

But Biden’s close advisers are still high on the idea of Warren as a running mate, whoever tops the ticket.

“Elizabeth Warren is really a great leader, and someone who is dynamic and articulate,” Kaufman said. “If you listen to what she says, it’s on point, it’s factual, it’s thoughtful. I think she would add a lot to Hillary’s ticket, to every ticket. The most important thing is governing. Warren is someone you’d like to have by your side when you’re making these tough decisions.”

For his part, Sanders seems ambivalent about being the vice presidential nominee on a ticket headed by a candidate he’s relentlessly portrayed as a puppet of the moneyed elites; he’s continued to attack Clinton’s Wall Street fundraising while leaving open the possibility of rejoining the fold after the final primary ballots are cast next month.

Earlier this year, Sanders’ senior strategist, Tad Devine, told POLITICO the campaign was open to the idea of joining a ticket with Clinton — and Sanders, earlier this week, declined to rule it out, using virtually the same language as Warren.

“Right now, we are focused on the next five weeks of winning the Democratic nomination,” Sanders told CNN on Tuesday. “If that does not happen, we are going to fight as hard as we can on the floor of the Democratic convention to make sure that we have a progressive platform that the American people will support. Then, after that, certainly Secretary Clinton and I can sit down and talk and see where we go from there.”

