Make the VP selection on the merits!

The political impact of the Veep is overrated; the substantive stakes are underrated

My first-ever Slow Boring take on Kamala Harris, published in July of 2021, said she should take more moderate positions on issues and use lots of moderate-coded rhetoric.

The context then was that I thought she wanted to position herself for a future presidential run, and I thought her past experience and existing skill set put her in some ways in a very bad position to win. The problem, as I defined it then, is that winning statewide office in California is very challenging due to the large size of the state. But the challenge is that you have to be really good at appealing to hard-core partisan Democrats. Not to swing voters, not to disengaged sporadic voters, and not to cynical eye-rolling leftists, but to the hard of hard-core Democratic Party establishment types who decide which of dozens of plausible figures gets to become Attorney General or US Senator. Harris was really really good at this, which was how she came to be Vice President, and the breathtaking speed with which she locked down the nomination over the past few days, despite longstanding concerns about her electability, confirms that she continues to be really good at it. In terms of intra-Dem power politics, she’s a superstar.

But her campaign faces a basic problem.

Most voters think Donald Trump is too conservative and Joe Biden is too progressive. Trump has been trying to assuage these voters’ fears, while Democrats just replaced Biden on the ticket with someone who is stereotyped as left-wing (Black, female, from California) and who did in fact take further-left stances than Biden’s during the 2020 primary. I nonetheless advocated for Harris as a stronger candidate than Biden, since this is a problem that Harris can address while Biden clearly lacked the capacity to reassure people about this age or deftly address any concerns about his views or policies.

Now, though, Harris has to do it.

So far, all we know about her campaign is the rumors swirling around the Veepstakes where the optimistic read — elaborated on by Jonathan Chait — is that a rumored choice that focuses heavily on white male governors of swing states or red states indicates that she “understands the assignment.” This may be right and I hope that is true. But I want to make a few cautionary flags. One is that VP selections are not magic and in fact they rarely have any kind of electoral impact at all. The other is that VP selections often have large substantive impact, and that presidential nominees frequently err by overrating short-term political needs relative to long-term substance. Which is just to say that if Harris wants to catch some of Roy Cooper’s crossover voter appeal, she should hire Cooper’s staffers and take their advice on the kinds of position-taking and rhetoric that appeal to swing voters. She should pick a running mate who she wants to take over and lead the party in the future.

The biggest mistake presidents make

Abraham Lincoln was America’s greatest president, but his successor, Andrew Johnson, was one of the very worst. Yet, Lincoln is the man responsible for putting Johnson in the White House — selecting an 1864 running mate who did not reflect Lincoln’s views on crucial issues because he was trying to assemble a de minimus pro-war coalition to defeat the Peace Democrats.

Note that in most respects, this was the right idea for 1864.

Giving cabinet jobs, patronage, and military commissions to War Democrats was a smart approach for a Republican running, in the middle of a war, for re-election against a Democratic opponent who was prepared to sue for peace. But the American vice presidency is a weird office. In a parliamentary system, “Deputy Prime Minister” is a courtesy title that accrues to someone who holds another cabinet position. In a coalition government, it normally goes to the leader of the junior coalition partner. But the substance of the coalition agreement is that the junior partner runs ministries and presumably gets to set policy in those areas of responsibility.

The 1864 selection is an unusually high stakes example, but versions of it happen pretty regularly. Barack Obama, for example, selected Joe Biden as his running mate in 2008, in part because he believed Biden would be too old to harbor his own continued presidential aspirations (oops). Dwight Eisenhower, who never liked, respected, or trusted Richard Nixon, nonetheless eventually put him in the White House by selecting him as his vice president. FDR had a good successor in Harry Truman on the ticket in 1944. But his prior vice president was a sort of loopy leftist, and the one before that was a pretty hard-core conservative who didn’t agree with him about anything.

The common thread in all of this is that presidential nominees use the VP selection to put out some kind of political brushfire, even though the substantive stakes in the selection are potentially very high and it’s extremely unusual for a voter to be persuaded by a vice president.

Harris should make a decision on substance

The good news is that as far as I know, all the names under consideration seem like they would be reasonably good future presidents. The red flag we should note about potential future presidential candidacies is that Cooper is 67, which means that if Harris wins and serves two terms, he would be in his mid-seventies — basically a re-run of the Obama-Biden situation.

If Cooper is willing to sign a blood oath foreswearing any inclination to run for president in 2032, then I don’t have a problem with that. But it’s not something that should be left to quiet understanding. We need to really know.

But when I say that these people all seem like they would be reasonably good future presidents, I am speaking from a place of mostly lacking information. They seem, essentially, like generic Democrats I don’t have any strong opinions about. Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro has distinguished himself a little bit in my view with the way he tackled the I-95 repair and some of the actions he’s taken on occupational licensing. My personal favorite governor at this point is Jared Polis, who has really championed housing abundance and other key policies that I strongly agree with. When he was asked about this on CNN, he gave a funny and quippy answer.

But I think that’s exactly the wrong way to think about it. VP selections rarely make a difference politically. The most plausible example of one that mattered (and even this is disputed) is that Sarah Palin undermined John McCain’s reputation for integrity. I like Polis, and the reason to pick him is just that he’d be a good president.

The other age-appropriate governor who has impressed me on this front is Maryland governor Wes Moore. Lots of people think Moore could be a candidate in 2028 if Harris loses this November. And I think, precisely for that reason, he deserves serious consideration for the vice presidency now. “This person would be a good presidential candidate in the future” is the number one qualification for the job. Gretchen Whitmer, whose name was on everyone’s lips as a potential not-Harris nominee for 2024, will be a leading contender in 2028 if Harris loses, and for all the reasons she could be a leading contender in 2028, she deserves VP consideration today.

Of course, some people will argue that Moore and Whitmer shouldn’t be considered because you don’t want to run two Black people or two women. But I don’t think this makes much sense. Whatever issues Harris faces based on her identity are issues she needs to navigate with her words and actions, regardless. I don’t think conjuring up a white male running mate accomplishes that.

Avoid white boy magic

I started with Chait’s observation that Harris considering a bunch of moderate white male governors suggests that she “understands the assignment” and wants to develop a more moderate public imagine.

That seems plausible to me, and I’ve received some indication from people close to Harris that this is true. Then again, those people are seasoned political professionals, and they know who they’re talking to. The less-optimistic view of the situation would be that Harris sees all her political problems as stemming from her racial and gender identity and believes they need to be neutralized purely on that level. As I’ve said before, the perception that Harris is too liberal is certainly related to the fact that she’s a Black woman. But I don’t think it’s reducible to that. The Biden administration really has governed to the left of Barack Obama’s. And in the 2020 primaries, Harris staked out a bunch of positions to the left of Biden and to the extent that she attacked Biden personally, it was from the left.

I think voters don’t mind flip-flopping, and if Harris just adopts moderate positions and a moderate persona, most people will be thrilled.

But she does have to be prepared to face attacks that highlight some of her furthest-left remarks and the general image many people have of her. And what she needs more than a white male vice president is a considered rollout of a moderate version of herself. One that highlights her background as a prosecutor, not just to get a laugh line off against Trump or to talk about gun control, but to really defend law enforcement careers — the act of arresting, prosecuting, and imprisoning people who commit “normal” street crimes — as an honorable profession. One that emphasizes the record fossil fuel production in the Biden-Harris administration and tries to court the support of Lisa Murkowski by suggesting she’s open to revising some specific Biden initiatives that were bad for Alaska. She should pointedly muse about bringing some businesspeople and Republicans into the cabinet after she takes over, without necessarily committing herself to anything specific. She should talk about the need for deficit reduction as much — if not more so — than she talks about her desire for new investments in child care.

She can do that with Shapiro or Beshear as her running mate, or she can do it with Moore or Whitmer or anyone else. I agree, to an extent, that selecting someone like Shapiro or Beshear signals more awareness of the limits of mobilization. But if Harris wants a more moderate public imagine, she just needs to go say and do some moderate stuff. What she should do with the VP selection is set the county up with a leader who she believes in on the merits.