By Zachary Gorchow
Executive Editor and Publisher
Posted: April 10, 2020 12:29 PM

The Gretchen Whitmer for vice president speculation reached a new level in the past week.

That's what an 8,000-word Tim Alberta-written profile piece for Politico, appearances on "The View" and "The Daily Show," an interview by text with the Washington bureau chief of BuzzFeed, showing up in the top three running mate possibilities of presumptive Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden's in The Washington Post and appearing with Mr. Biden on his podcast will do.

I'll also throw in a story we at Gongwer News Service had where former Governor James Blanchard, who has reach into both the Whitmer and Biden camps and generally a good sense of the political pulse, said he thinks the chance Mr. Biden picks Ms. Whitmer is 50/50 (See Gongwer Michigan Report, April 8, 2020).

I'll just state from the top I don't think Mr. Biden will pick Ms. Whitmer for a couple reasons. One, the Democratic Party is a racially diverse party, and having two whites heading the ticket seems unlikely when there are strong options like U.S. Sen. Kamala Harris of California, Stacey Abrams of Georgia, U.S. Rep. Val Demings of Florida, U.S. Sen. Tammy Duckworth of Illinois and U.S. Sen. Catherine Cortez Masto of Nevada. Ms. Whitmer herself some months ago plugged Ms. Abrams as someone Mr. Biden should seriously consider.

There's another major reason I don't think it will happen. The COVID-19 pandemic. You might have heard about it.

Unlike any of the other options above, Ms. Whitmer is the governor of a state, in charge of heading response, and in a state with the third-most cases and third-most deaths in the country.

Some of this depends on Mr. Biden's timing, but if he hews to a traditional schedule of announcing a vice presidential pick relatively close to the national convention, it's possible (let's hope) that the crisis has ebbed and life has in many ways regained a semblance of normalcy, if not entirely what it was prior to March. But it's also possible (gulp) that the situation is still bad and that the state remains in something of a crisis management mode.

If the latter is the case or if Mr. Biden moves up his selection timetable to announce his choice earlier, picking Ms. Whitmer becomes much more problematic. How would it look if Ms. Whitmer, while managing a crisis, in effect abdicated that role to start campaigning across the country for vice president? Remember, under the Michigan Constitution, once the governor leaves the state, the lieutenant governor becomes the acting governor, so it's not like Ms. Whitmer could do both jobs.

Surely part of the reason Mr. Biden is considering Ms. Whitmer is because her crisis management has impressed him. It would undercut the argument for Ms. Whitmer to pull her away from the job to which voters elected her if Michigan is still in the throes of a crisis.

If it's August, and Michigan has mostly returned to normal with school buildings set to open, workers back on the job, including at restaurants and bars, and unemployment numbers on a steep decline after peaking in the second quarter (when U-M economists project a frightening peak of 23 percent), that's different.

In the meantime, Ms. Whitmer and her team are trying to walk the line between using the national publicity to get the attention of President Donald Trump about Michigan's needs during the COVID-19 crisis and stoke the vice presidential speculation. Ms. Whitmer continues to say she has to focus on her job.

My read of the governor's approach to the national publicity is this: It (A) allows her to deliver her social distancing message to people who may not watch news programs or read the newspaper and (B) It can be used to galvanize the federal government's attention on Michigan's needs during the pandemic.

At the same time, my sense of her approach is if it elevates her in the vice presidential sweepstakes, that's fine, especially since it seems more likely she will not be the pick than she will.