Hillary Dominates Your Picks for a 2016 Ticket

7) Martin O'Malley
The governor of Maryland may not be the flashiest Democrat being nudged to run for commander in chief in 2016, but he is one of the strongest allies for LGBT Marylanders. In addition to lobbying passionately for marriage equality, which voters finally approved last week, O'Malley has helped raise money for LGBT-related causes like stopping bullying in schools. O'Malley said in a September interview with The Advocate that getting African-Americans (who make up about a third of Maryland's population) to support marriage equality would be crucial to victory in his state. “I think there are very few groups of people in the United States who are as fundamentally fair and understanding as African-American people are, given their history, and yet at the same time, they are also a very religious people with a rock-solid faith in God, and if they did not have that faith they wouldn’t have survived as a people,” he said. “And so these conversations are all about reconciling those fundamental beliefs, and I think the same evolution has happened among Catholic people.”