NEW YORK — Hillary Clinton’s short list of vice presidential options will include a woman, a top campaign official said in an interview — creating the possibility of an all-female ticket emerging from the Democratic convention in Philadelphia. 
 
 Clinton wants “the best person to make the case to the American people,” her campaign chairman, John Podesta, told the Globe. “We’ll start with a broad list and then begin to narrow it. But there is no question that there will be women on that list,” he said, adding that staffers are still focused on clinching the primary. 
 
 The development immediately injects liberal darling Senator Elizabeth Warren’s name into the growing speculation about who Clinton will choose as her running mate now that she is almost certainly on track to become the nominee. 
 
 Advertisement 
 
 Any female pairing would double down on the historic nature of Clinton’s candidacy, and Warren adds the obvious benefit of providing a bridge to supporters of Senator Bernie Sanders who are wary of Clinton’s ties to Wall Street. 
 
 Get Today in Politics in your inbox: A digest of the top political stories from the Globe, sent to your inbox Monday-Friday. Sign Up Thank you for signing up! Sign up for more newsletters here 
 
 Though the idea of a two-woman ticket seems far-fetched to many, the conventional wisdom has been upended multiple times so far in 2016. Washington insiders more typically focus on an exclusively male-centric VP list that includes names like Housing Secretary Julian Castro, Labor Secretary Tom Perez, New Jersey Senator Cory Booker, and Virginia Senator Tim Kaine. 
 
 Attention is turning to Clinton’s deliberations over a running mate after her overwhelming victory in New York on Tuesday made it all but certain that she’ll clinch the nomination. Sanders would have to win 73 percent of the delegates in remaining primary states to overtake her lead, according to a tally by the Associated Press. Then he’d face the uphill task of persuading the superdelegates — the party leaders who vote in the nomination contest and are overwhelmingly backing Clinton — to support him instead. 
 
 That makes the Democratic veepstakes question more pressing and perhaps the second most interesting Washington parlor game after the drama over who the Republicans will place at the top of their ticket. 
 
 Lacey Rose, a spokeswoman for Warren, declined to comment for this story. 
 
 Advertisement 
 
 Podesta didn’t offer names on Clinton’s list of possible women running mates, but after Clinton herself, Warren is one of the few Democratic women with national name recognition and a big following among progressives, a voting bloc Sanders has energized. Having Warren on the ticket could help Clinton stitch the party back together after a divisive primary. 
 
 Warren is a prodigious online fund-raiser who could help Clinton attract the tens of millions of grass-roots donations that have filled Sanders’ treasury. She raised $45 million for her 2012 Senate race, with 47 percent of the funds coming from small donors, according to the Center for Responsive Politics, which tracks political spending. 
 
 Warren has been wading more deeply into 2016 presidential politics in recent weeks. On Tuesday she unleashed a 12-part tweetstorm aimed at Texas Senator Ted Cruz that some perceived as an audition for the attack-dog role that traditionally falls to vice presidential nominees. 
 
 In it, she accused Cruz of whining about the sacrifices that a president would need to make. “We’re supposed to pity you because trying to be the leader of the free world is hard?!” Warren wrote. “2 words: Boo hoo.” 
 
 She’s also trained fire at Republican front-runner Donald Trump, typing a Facebook post that called him “a bigger, uglier threat every day that goes by.” (He replied by mocking the flap over her claims to Native American ancestry, and referring to her as “the Indian.”) 
 
 Advertisement 
 
 There are multiple hurdles for Warren, first among them: It’s not at all clear that she even supports Clinton. She’s assiduously hugged the sidelines of the Democratic race even after repeatedly saying she would endorse a candidate and has sparred with Clinton in the past over her corporate ties. 
 
 Jacquelyn Martin/AP Adding Senator Elizabeth Warren as a running mate could help Hillary Clinton attract the support of Senator Bernie Sanders’ backers. 
 
 And as with any senator whom Clinton might consider, there’s the balance of the chamber to consider. 
 
 Democrats are fighting hard to pick up the net gain of five seats they need to be in the majority. 
 
 That could pose a short-term problem in Massachusetts, where Republican Governor Charlie Baker would almost certainly appoint a member of his own party to fill Warren’s seat. Massachusetts law stipulates that a special election must be called between 145 and 160 days after a vacancy occurs — so the blue Massachusetts Democrats would have another crack at the seat. 
 
 Warren’s supporters questioned whether she’d want the post. In interviews with about a dozen people who attended a Sanders event in Queens Monday night, nearly all said they would be disappointed in Warren if she endorsed Clinton, let alone got on the ticket with her. They found the whole concept unimaginable. 
 
 “I don’t think Elizabeth Warren would accept it,” said Ben Johnson, a 27-year-old from Atlanta who traveled to New York to attend the rally, an experience he compared to attending a rock concert. “I think she feels she’s more effective in the Senate.” 
 
 More importantly, it’s not clear that Clinton needs Warren to unite the party. Many of the same activists at the Sanders rally said that even if they don’t like or trust Clinton, they prefer her to a Republican. 
 
 And while Sanders and Clinton do seem irritated with one another, the race hardly seems to be as divisive as in 2008. In that contest, Barack Obama’s campaign described Clinton as a person who “couldn’t be trusted or believed in when it comes to change.” And Clinton attacked Obama as having “neither the experience nor the wisdom” to be commander-in-chief. 
 
 Finally, since the Republican race is such a muddle, it’s difficult for Clinton’s team members to assess what qualities they would want in a vice president. Her pick to face Trump could be different than the person she’d want to face Cruz. 
 
 If the Republicans have a contested convention, Clinton’s team might not know the answer until days before the Democrats gather in Philadelphia for their nomination. 
 
 But the notion of two women on the ticket is shocking to even female leaders in the Democratic Party — some who openly guffawed at the idea. 
 
 “Men will fight to retain their dominance,” predicted Jo Anne Simon, a member of the New York State Assembly who attended a recent event in New York focused on female support for Clinton. “They can’t handle one woman on the ticket; what makes you think they could handle two?” 
 
 But aside from Warren, she was hard-pressed to come up with a name of another female who could fill the role. “There’s Maria. . . . In Washington,” she said, struggling to remember the last name of Washington state’s junior senator, Maria Cantwell. 
 
 Other prominent women in the party face constitutional hurdles. Jennifer Granholm, the telegenic former Michigan governor, was born in Canada, and therefore fails the “natural born citizen” test. 
 
 Kirsten Gillibrand, the New York senator who took Clinton’s seat when she became secretary of state, faces a constitutional muddle that makes it challenging to put two leaders from the same state on a ticket. 
 
 An outside-the-box pick could be Cecile Richards, the president of Planned Parenthood Action Fund and daughter of the late former Texas governor Ann Richards. She provided a pitch-perfect political non-answer when asked if she could imagine two women on the Democratic ticket. 
 
 “I guess anything is a possibility,” she said. “But that is way beyond anything that I’m focused on.” 
 
 One Democratic strategist even floated Republican Senator Susan Collins of Maine as a long-shot pick — as a way to appeal to suburban GOP women, particularly if Clinton faces Trump in the general election. 
 
 The Clinton brain trust has a history, though, of making unconventional vice presidential choices: In 1992, one young white Southerner picked another young white Southerner to be his running mate. 
 
 Al Gore was, at the time, called by editorial writers a “surprise pick” who “defies conventional wisdom” and one that had “nothing resembling balance in the traditional sense.” 
 
 It was labeled the baby boomer ticket. And it worked. 
 
 Annie Linskey can be reached at Annie.Linskey@Globe.com . Follow her on Twitter @AnnieLinskey ||||| LAS VEGAS — Fast approaching her final decision on a running mate, Hillary Clinton appears to be looking closely at Virginia Sen. Tim Kaine and Labor Secretary Tom Perez, say multiple people who are in regular contact with her inner circle. 
 
 But it’s another member of President Barack Obama’s Cabinet whose stock has been steadily and notably rising in recent days, vaulting him into what close Clinton friends call the “top tier": Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack. 
 
 Story Continued Below 
 
 A subject of increasing speculation within Clinton’s political orbit over the past two weeks, the former Iowa governor was also the talk of Democrats at the National Governors Association meeting in Des Moines over the weekend, said people familiar with the proceedings — especially after Donald Trump introduced another Midwestern state executive, Indiana’s Mike Pence, as his own running mate. 
 
 While Kaine, a former governor himself, is still widely regarded as the front-runner for the job by those in attendance, a handful of Vilsack’s fellow current and former Midwestern governors advocated for him behind closed doors during the proceedings, and the secretary himself suggested in conversations there that he was under serious consideration, according to individuals familiar with the discussions. 
 
 The timing of the surge of attention couldn’t come at a better time for the man who has been recently increasing his national media presence through a series of interviews and public events as a surrogate. Over the weekend, he went so far as to defend his foreign policy chops during a Sunday show appearance. 
 
 Clinton is likely to announce her pick in the coming days, almost certainly in the time between the Republican convention and her own — and possibly during her first general election campaign trip to Florida on Friday and Saturday, to minimize any bump in the polls Trump receives from his Cleveland convention. 
 
 The presumptive Democratic nominee has increasingly been appearing with her vice-presidential hopefuls in the days leading up to that moment, including Kaine on Thursday and Ohio Sen. Sherrod Brown on Monday, and the candidate and a gaggle of her top aides spent Friday at her Washington home to go over her options. 
 
 A handful of them — including Housing Secretary Julián Castro, Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren and Colorado Gov. John Hickenlooper — stopped by for in-person meetings, as Clinton has sought to get to know them better. 
 
 That’s not a concern for Vilsack, the single prospect who has had a long personal relationship with the former secretary of state, dating back decades before they served four years in the same Cabinet. That relationship has bolstered his boosters’ case for him in recent days, but they also note that he could stand to play a significant role as Clinton courts white working-class men — especially in rural areas — in the Midwest, a constituency she and her husband, former President Bill Clinton, are particularly concerned about as Trump targets them. 
 
 Clinton largely lost blue-collar white men to Bernie Sanders in the primary, and a Washington Post/ABC News poll released last week showed that 75 percent of white men hold an unfavorable view of her. 
 
 Vilsack demurred on Monday when POLITICO asked whether he is currently going through Team Clinton’s vetting process — “Has anyone ever answered that question?” he shot back — but he did speak in general terms about the factors that are fueling his apparent rise. 
 
 “I’m a workhorse, not a show horse,” said the former two-term governor, who has long been rumored as a potential chief of staff in a Clinton White House, echoing a line that the candidate herself often uses when talking about her work in the Senate. “Not a rock star; I’m rock solid. I’m all about doing, and getting things done. It’s not in my nature to market myself. My nature is to market what we’re doing in my department, and in my state. I don’t know if that’s the reason, but we work hard down here, and we get things done." 
 
 Vilsack — like Kaine — doesn’t have a fiery campaign trail presence and is unlikely to be the running mate chosen if Clinton and her advisers determine that she’s most in need of a high-profile attack dog to take on Trump. He’s started referring to Trump as the “Bernie Madoff of politics” in interviews, but some Democrats have started cracking that Vilsack practically makes Kaine — often cast as the boring one — look interesting by comparison. 
 
 Vilsack’s trail presence for months has been more focused on lavishing praise on Clinton. Last August, for example, Vilsack’s adoration for Clinton was on full display as he introduced her in Ankeny, Iowa, before she unveiled her rural policy platform — which he helped craft. He listed all of her accomplishments and talked about their friendship and their shared political history. His 15-minute introduction of the former secretary of state was so complimentary it was almost overkill. 
 
 “I will and my wife will always remain loyal to our friend, Hillary Clinton,” said Vilsack, the longest-serving member of the Cabinet, who’s traveled to all 50 states in that capacity but maintained a relatively low national profile, 
 
 “Talk about somebody who studies a problem, asks for advice about what will work, puts together teams, collaborates and then delivers,” Clinton said as she took the stage. “He is exhibit A.” 
 
 Yet after the presumptive Republican nominee tapped the little-known Pence over the bomb-throwing former House Speaker Newt Gingrich and New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie on Friday, many Democrats’ concern about the need for a sharp-elbowed running mate dissipated, figuring that a relatively fireworks-free Pence-Kaine or Pence-Vilsack debate would not be likely to harm Clinton’s chances. 
 
 A relatively low-key public profile, after all, ranks low on the list of running-mate concerns compared to the prospect of losing an Ohio Senate seat to Republicans if Clinton were to choose Brown. And Vilsack supporters insist he could be a net positive on the campaign trail if he began talking more about his own background, starting with his early life in a Pittsburgh orphanage. 
 
 Clinton is aware, however, of the perception that by choosing someone like Kaine or Vilsack she would be playing it safe — one reason her campaign has been happy to maintain a sense of unpredictability by keeping a long list of hopefuls in the public discussion. 
 
 Still, sketching out the electoral map, people close to Clinton see Vilsack as a potentially useful tool as they court both the voters who eluded her during the primary and those of Iowa, a crucial swing state. 
 
 “I believe he’s always been in the circle of people that not only Hillary is considering, but I’m sure her advisers, including Bill, and others see [as] a viable running mate,” explained former Iowa Sen. Tom Harkin, also pointing to Vilsack’s roots in Pennsylvania, another likely battleground. “He’s someone who can relate to white men in rural areas, small towns and communities." 
 
 Both Iowans pointed to Ohio and Wisconsin as other strategically useful swing states where a rural focus could benefit Clinton — each of which also has a tight Senate race that could be swayed by a strong rural performance. 
 
 “I don’t want to compare myself to other people [in contention for the job], but I will tell you I’ve spoken with so many groups and I’ve represented those folks as a small-town lawyer, as a small-town mayor, as a state senator, then representing the state. I understand those folks and their struggles,” Vilsack said. “In this particular election, given the uneasiness people have about Mr. Trump in small towns where I’ve been working, there’s an openness [to Democrats].” 
 
 People in contact with Clinton’s inner circle often note that the former secretary of state and first lady — having seen two president-vice president relationships up close — is eager to find someone she can easily work with, and Vilsack’s long history with both the candidate and Bill Clinton is likely a point in his favor. 
 
 They first met over 40 years ago, when Hillary Clinton and Vilsack’s late brother-in-law, Tom Bell, worked together on the Senate Watergate Committee. They grew closer during Bill Clinton’s White House tenure, when she helped his 1998 campaign that made him Iowa’s first Democratic governor in three decades — Christie Vilsack, who works as a top official at U.S. Agency for International Development, often tells friends about the time she and her husand stayed in the White House in the late 1990s, when he was still in the Iowa state Senate. The Vilsacks and then-President Bill Clinton stayed up until the wee hours of the morning visiting over Diet Cokes. 
 
 After Vilsack ended his own short-lived 2008 presidential bid, he became a top surrogate for then-Sen. Hillary Clinton in her race against Obama. 
 
 Vilsack has already quietly been involved with her campaign in recent months, and they still speak regularly, said people close to them both: In early 2015, he directly urged Clinton to install Matt Paul — his longtime aide, and now one of Clinton’s senior traveling advisers — to run her team in Iowa after hearing that she was leaning in another direction. 
 
 The one big political blemish Vilsack has on his record is the 2010 firestorm over his firing of Shirley Sherrod, a Georgia USDA official whom the late Andrew Breitbart had accused of making racist statements that were quickly debunked. The Obama administration later apologized and offered Sherrod her job back, though she declined the offer. 
 
 The current chairman of the House Agriculture Committee, Mike Conaway, a Republican from Texas, praised Vilsack — even though he’s supporting Trump. 
 
 “He’s a capable guy. I give him good marks for what he did as secretary of ag for 7½ years,” Conaway told POLITICO. “It’s not surprising that someone of his caliber and quality would be on her shortlist.” 
 
 Catherine Boudreau and Ian Kullgren contributed to this report.
– The Wall Street Journal has revealed a list of potential running mates being vetted by Hillary Clinton, and it doesn't include Bernie Sanders. Possible future vice presidents currently in the early stages of vetting include Sen. Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts, Labor Secretary Tom Perez, Urban Development Secretary Julian Castro, Sen. Tim Kaine of Virginia, Sen. Sherrod Brown of Ohio, Sen. Cory Booker of New Jersey, Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti, Rep. Xavier Becerra of California, and Rep. Tim Ryan of Ohio. A national poll conducted by Bloomberg found Warren leads in popularity among Clinton supporters, 35% of whom wanted to see her as vice president. She was followed by Booker, Castro, and Al Franken. (Newt Gingrich was the most popular VP choice on the GOP side.) While some Sanders supporters had been hoping for a vice presidential nomination for him, Sanders himself wouldn't be interested in the position anyway, according to a source close to him. CNN reports Sanders would rather work to change the Democratic party from the Senate than be seen as a "sell-out" or Clinton's "partner." That may explain the interest in Warren, whose policies are close to those of Sanders and who could possibly bring some of his supporters over to Clinton. Bustle calls her a "shiny apple to Sanders' orange." Sources close to Clinton say the top priority for a running mate is someone who would be ready to step in as president, and that advisers aren't really looking at what a nominee does for Clinton's campaign in terms of demographics and geography.