2016 US.Presidential election update: Donald Trump should pick Ivanka as his running mate

As a service to you, the reader, a surprisingly convincing argument that you may find useful to impress your friends at Memorial Day barbecues.

At some point, Donald Trump needs to designate the person who will serve as his second-in-command should he win the presidency this November. Predicting the person who will be tapped to serve as a candidate's vice president is always a tricky affair, thanks to the general opacity of the decision-making process. For Trump, there's an added layer of obscurity; the simple unpredictability of the guy coats the whole thing with another layer of thick black paint.

So who's it going to be? He's mentioned looking for someone with experience on Capitol Hill, and he and his staff have had a sort of muddled presentation on the merits of choosing a demographically friendly subordinate. Which seems quite possibly to be the role his pick will play: The manager of the restaurant, dealing with the quixotic owner. Perhaps that's ungenerous, but his new current No. 2, Paul Manafort, told the Huffington Post that the VP would "do the part of the job [Trump] doesn’t want to do."

With that in mind, allow us to propose the person who I believe would be Trump's best VP choice both politically and personally: His daughter, Ivanka Trump.

Let's dismiss the obstacles at the outset. Ivanka is currently 34 years old, below the 35-year-old threshold demanded by the Constitution. The good news is that her birthday is Oct. 30 -- just about a week before Election Day.

A bigger stumbling block is that both Ivanka and Donald share the same home state. Fans of the 2000 election may remember concerns over George W. Bush and Dick Cheney both hailing from Texas, in apparent contradiction of the 12th Amendment's prohibition against both candidates being from the same state. It ended up not being important, thanks to a court's decision that December thatCheney was a resident of Wyoming.

But the amendment's criteria are also often misunderstood. What the amendment says is that members of the Electoral College "shall meet in their respective states and vote by ballot for President and Vice-President, one of whom, at least, shall not be an inhabitant of the same state with themselves." So it's not that the candidates can't both be from the same state; it's that theelectors from that state can't vote for both, as Politifact noted last year. That adds a hurdle to a Trump-Trump candidacy, but not an insurmountable one. It means that Trump needs to win the presidency by at least 32 electoral votes (one more than the number from New York state) in order to serve with his daughter. (If this rabbit hole isn't deep enough, here's what might happen next.) But, as Ken Fowler pointed out on Twitter, that's only if Trump won New York -- which seems unlikely

Source