Who Harris should choose as VP

Brought to you by science!

Upgrade to paid to help keep America Explained going through this chaotic election year.

When they’re picking a vice presidential nominee, presidential candidates tend to focus on three things. The first is home-state advantage - the idea that they can boost their chances of winning a crucial swing state by picking someone from that state. The evidence for this is mixed, with some studies finding basically no evidence that it is true and others finding that it can account for something like a 1-3% shift in the final result, which is highly significant given how close swing state votes usually are. Other studies find that the idea of home-state advantage is only true under certain conditions, such as when the state is very small or the candidate is a well-known and popular quantity in their home state.

The second consideration is demographic and ideological balance. Kamala Harris has been subjected to a lot of attacks for being a “DEI vice president” (DEI stands for diversity, equality and inclusion - basically implying she was picked as a form of affirmative action, not because of her inherent talents). But the idea of picking a VP to “balance” the ticket is as old as joint tickets themselves.¹ Most vice presidents have been picked because of some combination of their demographic, regional and ideological characteristics. Barack Obama picked Joe Biden because he was a reassuring old white guy, and John McCain picked Sarah Palin because she was thought to provide him with credibility with populist conservatives.

The third consideration is whether the person could one day be president. Constitutionally, vice-presidents actually do almost nothing except sit there and wait for the president to either die or finish out their terms. True, some presidents choose to give their vice-presidents a lot of power or influence - Dick Cheney is probably the most prominent modern example - but voters are mainly weighing up the vice president on the basis of whether or not it seems like they would be able to do the job of president one day. That places a premium on experience and seriousness.

By these criteria, it’s easy to see why Donald Trump made a dumb choice when he picked J.D. Vance as his own running mate. Vance doesn’t bring anything electorally - he comes from a state, Ohio, which the Republicans are going to win anyway, and he performed way behind the average Republican in that state in his own Senate race. He brings no ideological balance to the ticket, because he quite literally reinvented himself to be a Mini-Me of Donald Trump. He also has virtually no governmental experience and comes across as an un-serious person, making it hard to imagine him in the top job.

So how can Kamala Harris avoid the same pitfalls?

Harris is apparently currently vetting 12 possible vice presidential candidates according to CBS, although you find different names in different media outlets. Let’s split them into groups:

• Governors: Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro, Michigan’s Gretchen Whitmer, Roy Cooper of North Carolina, J.B. Pritzker of Illinois, Andy Beshear of Kentucky and Tim Walz of Minnesota.

• Senators: Mark Kelly from Arizona.

• Representatives: Cedric Richmond, who was a Louisiana representative and chair of the Congressional Black Caucus and then an official in Biden White House.

• Biden admin officials: Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg and Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo.

If you look at these names, you see most have already been chosen with the three criteria I outlined above in mind. The list is heavy on governors with moderate reputations who have been electorally successful in purple or red states. They’re all white except for Richmond, and most of them are men. As a result, they all bring ideological and demographic balance, to a greater or lesser extent.

There are some outliers, however. Buttigieg, Raimondo and Richmond don’t offer any useful home-state advantage. Raimondo was the governor of Rhode Island, a safely blue state. Buttigieg comes from Indiana, a red state - and the highest office he held there was mayor of a blue town, South Bend. Richmond hails from Louisiana, a state that Democrats are not going to win.

That leaves us with Shapiro, Whitmer, Cooper, Pritzker, Beshear, Walz, and Kelly.

Given their broad equality on the other criteria, let’s parse this by home-state advantage. Walz is from Minnesota, which has been a safely blue state but is showing disturbing signs of a possible flip. You could argue that Walz would help shore up the Democrats in a troublesome state, but the fact is that if Harris loses Minnesota, the chances of her winning the presidency are small anyway - it seems unlikely she would lose Minnesota but then win the three key midwestern swing states of Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin. So picking Walz would evince a deeply defensive mindset, and one likely to lead to defeat. Pritzker, the governor of Illinois, seems unwise for a similar reason - why choose the governor of a deep-blue state when you could go on the offensive somewhere else?

At the opposite end of the spectrum is Roy Cooper, the incredibly popular governor of North Carolina, a state narrowly won by Donald Trump in 2020. If Trump loses North Carolina in 2024, his path to the White House narrows - but not fatally. For Democrats, North Carolina is a nice-to-have state, but it’s outweighed in importance by the Midwestern trifecta. Harris (I just typed “Biden” first lol) can lose Arizona, Nevada, Georgia and North Carolina and still win if she keeps those three. So going for North Carolina rather than trying to bolster her chances in the Midwest would be an offensive, risky move. The same is true to an even greater extent of Beshear, who as governor of Kentucky is not bringing any useful home state or even home region advantage.

That leaves Whitmer, Shapiro and Kelly. I don’t know what the consequences of putting up an all-female ticket would be, and certainly a lot of people would say that the country isn’t ready for Harris-Whitmer. I do think people tend to over-learn the lessons of 2016, when the issue wasn’t just that Hillary Clinton was a woman but also that she was incredibly unpopular, hated by the Democratic left, associated with the sleaze of the Clinton era, etc. Unpopularity and being female are of course somewhat connected by the unfortunate existence of gender prejudice, but it’s not like every woman in politics is as unpopular as Hillary Clinton. So would Harris-Whitmer be a risk? Yes. But Whitmer is also an incredibly popular two-term governor of a purple state with ample governing experience. If she was a dude, she’d be a no-brainer for most people.

Next up is Shapiro. He ticks a lot of the same boxes as Whitmer - popular governor of purple state, moderate reputation. He’s notably less experienced than she is - he’s only 18 months into his term - but he really is very popular. He did particularly well in some of the swing counties which will decide the election in PA. One disadvantage he has is that he really got out hard in front on the Israel campus protest issue, speaking and acting in a way which drew the ire of some younger and more progressive Democrats. Some people say picking him would cause the evaporation of the enthusiasm that Harris has sparked on the left since Biden dropped out, which seems an exaggeration to me, but there would probably be some effect.

Finally you have Mark Kelly of Arizona. Arizona is another nice-to-win rather than must-win state for Harris, but Kelly is an extraordinarily compelling figure - a former naval aviator and astronaut, very successful in a purple state, and an effective spokesman with a moderate reputation on issues like guns and immigration. He’s also an effective spokesman against political violence and extremism, given that his wife Gabby Giffords was left disabled after an assassination attempt in 2011. Again, Kelly is not popular with more progressive and Israel-focused Democrats - he caught flak for applauding during Benjamin Netanyahu’s speech to Congress this week.

I find it really hard to pick between these three final names. I think the safest options are probably Shapiro or Kelly. As I’ve written, Harris has most of her work to do to her right, not her left, and a spat or two with progressives or single-issue groups might not hurt her all that much. Whitmer would also be a good choice.

I think one of the biggest lessons of these veepstakes is that the Democrats really do have a deep bench of successful and talented politicians, and what would have been really great is if Biden had stepped down a year ago and let them fight it out in a competitive primary. But we are where we are, and Harris thankfully has some good options to choose from.

1. Before the Twelfth Amendment, passed in 1804, the Vice President was simply the person who got the second-most votes in the Electoral College. So it was like making Donald Trump president and Hillary Clinton vice-president. Understandably, this didn’t work very well - partisan divisions in the 1790s were about as bitter as they are today - and the procedure was quickly changed to the modern variant, in which presidents and vice-presidents run together on a joint ticket.