I can just process “the Minnesota legislation” and “was unreasonable conservative” while clucking my tongue, but “statewide officer hold” brings me up short. Did you actually mangle “officeholder” to such an extent, or is this an inside-baseball expression for savvy readers?
I think Matt’s lukewarm appraisal is too heavily focused on ideology, and not enough on personality. Americans still want to vote for someone they can have a beer with, and Walz is the only person on either ticket that fits that bill for most Americans.
My personal take on the decision is that the argument that Shapiro has this unique ability to deliver Pennsylvania because he's from Pennsylvania is overstated. In a presidential election, people vote based on the candidate for president, not vice-president. While picking a really bad nominee (e.g. Sarah Palin) can definitely hurt a ticket by raising questions about the presidential candidate's judgement, there isn't any clear evidence that picking a vice-presidential candidate from state X actually helps the ticket in state X. (Yes, Shaprio has very high approval ratings as governor, but Trump voters who approve of his job as governor are not going to magically vote for Harris just because he's on the ticket as the VP; if anything, I would argue that partisan polarization would cause Shapiro's approval ratings among Republicans and right-leaning independents to plummet, simply as the result of being on the Democratic presidential ticket).
I'm glad some people are hearing his argument, but even if you don't like Freddie, he has a point.
All reports have Shapiro basically didn't mesh well with Kamala, and this is actually important - one could argue part of the worries over Kamala being the nominee was the frosty Biden/Harris team relationship and look into the odd things John Edwards did to become the VP candidate that made Kerry weary of him.
It's one thing to have two ambitious young pols on a ticket when they know and work well together, as Clinton/Gore seemed to be, or possibly something like Kamala/Beshear could've been. But, if you're Kamala and more importantly. Kamala's team, do you want the guy much of the Democratic centrist pundit class wanted as the nominee instead of you?
Plus, Shapiro had real non-Israel downsides _and_ Walz is a do no harm pick that has upside.
More importantly, as I said in the Substack chat, as somebody whose been using Kamala/Walz as a 2028 stand-in that can win before there were even whispers of Biden stepping down, I have to support this choice.
Yeah that's where people are getting it wrong about him not being a threat. Sure he wouldn't have tried to stage a coup. But the real "threat" is him not getting along well with Kamala and marching to his own beat. We need unity on the ticket.
Hmm. I agree it seems low upside, but I'm not as sure on "safe."
1) Walz isn't *that* old but man does he appear old. This doesn't neatly fit the narrative of an exciting page turn for the party. But, maybe it reassures older voters? Maybe?
2) Walz's record is mostly moderate, but geez has his rhetoric been left leaning lately.
3) In the same vein, choosing Walz opens a huge, grievance-laden door for Republicans to remind the country of the events in Minnesota in the summer of 2020. In that way, choosing Walz may well continue to motivate the left in a way that choosing Shapiro would not, but it may also motivate the right.
All things being equal, I'd gamble on the really charismatic best-of-his-cohort political savvy gay guy from the midwest who won the Iowa caucus over Walz if I'm not choosing Shapiro. But truthfully, I'd probably just...get over my dislike of his persona or ambition and choose the extremely popular governor of the most important state for the electoral college as my running mate.
Seems there’s an analogy to 2008. Harris wants to be seen like Obama - unusual demographic for a president. Shapiro is too much like Obama in presentation and charisma. Waltz is Biden with the odometer rolled back.
As far as Whitmer goes, you can’t have two women when there hasn’t been a female president. Obama in 2008 couldn’t run with another Black man - too much of a difference at once. If Biden had died or stepped down as VP before the 2012 election, Obama could have picked someone like Cory Booker as his running mate without too much controversy.
A lot of this seems overcomplicated to me. Isn’t the most likely explanation that being the VP candidate here is just not a super desirable role?
Like it seems obvious that Whitmer/Klobuchar just didn’t want it, not that they were excluded via being women.
Shapiro seems the only candidate with a bright future who did want it. Which makes sense, hard to see how this helps any of the top tier candidates become president down the line if that’s their goal.
Oh well, it’s really not a big deal, Walz is fine.
I'm curious what "moderate her image" means in point 13. Chait wrote earlier today that he'd have preferred some other picks not DESPITE the fact that they'd annoy the left of the party, but BECAUSE they would. I've had the sense that this is your view as well, but looking around I can't actually find you expressing a view one way or the other.
What I find refreshing is Walz' ability to speak to rural and conservative voters. I think a lot of Democrats either don't have the ability or the interest to do that. I think Obama caught fire with his "there is no red America, there is no blue America" 2004 convention speech that emphasized bipartisanship and unity, not just trying to out-liberal other Dems. I think we've seen less of that in recent years, and I think Walz can help in whatever way a VP can, to bridge the gap and connect with voters who have been disillusioned by the Democratic party.
I agree with a lot of this analysis, but here are some responses and other random thoughts. Sorry for the excessive length.
1. To me the main weakness with Walz (apart from the fact that he isn't from a swing state) is that he was the candidate who left-wingers lobbied for, so now that Harris has picked him, it will be accurate to make the statement/accusation that Harris chose the guy who left-wingers lobbied for. That isn't Walz's fault. I think Walz himself is fine. But it's less than ideal to be seen giving into the demands of the more ideological wing of your coalition when you're smack in the middle of a general election campaign.
2. I agree that Walz will not do any harm in the sense of affirmative harm. But as econ nerds all know, opportunity cost is also a type of harm.
3. I agree that Harris' position-taking matters a lot more than the messaging that she could have done with this VP choice, but wouldn't it be better to do both?
4. All that said, I don't see any reason to expect Walz to perform any worse than Shapiro out on the trail. I do think Shapiro has a more impressive electoral record than Walz does. But every political candidate wears a few different hats. One is as an on-stage performer, another is as a sort of CEO or "creative director" for the campaign. From what I know about Shapiro, my sense is that his biggest strength as a politician is that he's very good at wearing the second hat. But a running mate to a presidential candidate doesn't get to wear the second hat very much. You're just a performer, and both these guys are probably equally good in that regard. (Incidentally, I think the available evidence suggests that Kamala Harris is *not* very good at being a campaign's creative director, but she's fine as a performer. She does a credible job at handling the typical big campaign set piece - speeches, debates, etc. Which is why I think it has really helped her to step into Biden's shoes so late in the race. She mostly inherited Biden's campaign staff so she doesn't need to hire very many new people or create a direction for her campaign. She just has to worry about set pieces, which she's fine at.)
5. I would defend the concept of white man's DEI. I think it genuinely would be a liability (or at least an opportunity cost) for Harris to choose a woman as her running mate. A lot of people who don't love Trump are not yet willing to commit to her because they fear she's too far left. That means different things for different people, but I believe there is a not-insignificant contingent of low-info moderately-but-only-moderately-antiwoke/problematic people out there who would interpret Harris creating an all-woman ticket as a sign that her campaign is vaguely anti-man, just as some of these same people reacted poorly to the anodyne "I'm with her" slogan from Hillary Clinton's campaign. Now, as with all other types of DEI, this DEI should only give white men a few extra points, not serve as a quota. So I could certainly consider an argument that Klobuchar or Whitmer are *such* good candidates that they outweigh the benefit of Walz's whiteness and maleness. But that's different from saying that there shouldn't be any DEI.
6. I don't think Buttigieg would have been a good choice for similar reasons as why Matt thinks Shapiro had weaknesses. Buttigieg has only ever run in one single general election vs. a Republican. (He also didn't win that election. Of course he lives in very red Indiana so it would have been unreasonable to expect him to win, but he actually ran behind the top of the ticket.) Like every other educated white-collar Democratic voter, I think Buttigieg is great on TV and an excellent debater, but I don't think that means your average person will necessarily feel the same way. We have no good data on that one way or the other. I don't think his (good) performance in the 2020 presidential primaries is much of a data point in that regard. In fact I would say there's very limited correlation in general between being a good or bad presidential primary candidate and being a good or bad general election candidate. I kind of get the sense that Matt likes any Democratic politician who was around his age at Harvard and sometimes he's right (Ruben Gallego seems pretty good from what I can tell) and sometimes I'm not so sure.
7. The efforts by some of Shapiro's anti-fans to cook up "scandals" over the last few days were pretty reprehensible and ludicrous. They reminded me of nothing so much as the fake Tara Reade scandal that leftists tried to cook up against Joe Biden in 2020. I also think they are a form of the "murder-suicide politics" that Matt decried a few months back - it's one thing to bring up real scandals against a primary opponent to test him, but it's another thing to create fake ones and package them for Republicans to use in the general election, and then cite that "baggage" as a reason for not voting for the guy.
8. I don't think the backlash against Shapiro among online progressives is *mainly* about either his Jewishness or his ideological positioning, though those things might play a part with some folks. Mainly I think it's the latest example of a broader trend that includes guys like Buttigieg, Joe Kennedy, and Conor Lamb. There's no one who online progressives despise more than the youngish, successful Democratic politician who is a square (wears a suit, went to a good college, etc). I'm not going to say that this is one the main reasons why so many of the Democratic Party's current leaders are older politicians, but it is an underrated reason for that. Young progressive voters hate square young Democratic politicians, but of course square young politicians are the young politicians who are most likely to have cross-generational appeal and thus be successful while they're still young.
Re: 1 - I think about five minutes from now, no one in the general public will remember Walz as "the guy the left wingers wanted her to pick". They do need to pick some tactical fights with the left in public over the next few months, but doing it with the VP pick right before the convention is very high risk, while it might succeed much better by doing it on an actual issue a few weeks from now.
It's a reasonable argument, although I don't think I agree. I guess I just think executing that "distancing" move is super important, and given the closeness of the race and the limited amount of time that's left, she just has to go for it when the opportunity presents itself.
I think we're all overthinking it tbh. Kamala picked him because she liked him and thought he'd make a good governing partner.
Not necessarily the best decision criterion in the current scenario, to be fair. Legendary running-mate picks have been made based on no personal warmth at all. Kennedy famously picked Lyndon Johnson, despite his family intensely disliking the guy and the two having little, culturally and on several important policy areas, in common. Roosevelt picked Truman, despite not knowing him from Adam, solely to stick it to Wallace. McKinley picked the other Roosevelt, despite considering him a hotheaded blowhard, solely because of his personal popularity. Etc.
Kerry and Edwards famously got along like chums; so did Hillary and Kaine, Gore and Lieberman. We all remember how those turned out.
Still, let's not overthink what just happened. It was largely a meeting of two minds, nothing more or less.
I'm sure Walz is fine and there may be excellent reasons unknown to us outsiders why Shapiro wasn't picked and if the Dems win in November it's all sunshine and marmalade.
But if Pennsylvania turns out to be the tipping point state and Harris loses it narrowly . . . oy vey iz mir.
I’m interested in hearing from people on this thread who grew up in white rural households on whether they find Walz relatable and charismatic. I feel like there is some pandering here that could backfire but maybe that’s because he’s not intended to appeal to me (although I am a white person who was born in the midwest). When he talks about how you can’t picture Trump throwing a frisbee to his dog and rubbing his belly does that connect?
Matt, once again: Please hire a proofreader.
I can just process “the Minnesota legislation” and “was unreasonable conservative” while clucking my tongue, but “statewide officer hold” brings me up short. Did you actually mangle “officeholder” to such an extent, or is this an inside-baseball expression for savvy readers?
I think Matt’s lukewarm appraisal is too heavily focused on ideology, and not enough on personality. Americans still want to vote for someone they can have a beer with, and Walz is the only person on either ticket that fits that bill for most Americans.
My personal take on the decision is that the argument that Shapiro has this unique ability to deliver Pennsylvania because he's from Pennsylvania is overstated. In a presidential election, people vote based on the candidate for president, not vice-president. While picking a really bad nominee (e.g. Sarah Palin) can definitely hurt a ticket by raising questions about the presidential candidate's judgement, there isn't any clear evidence that picking a vice-presidential candidate from state X actually helps the ticket in state X. (Yes, Shaprio has very high approval ratings as governor, but Trump voters who approve of his job as governor are not going to magically vote for Harris just because he's on the ticket as the VP; if anything, I would argue that partisan polarization would cause Shapiro's approval ratings among Republicans and right-leaning independents to plummet, simply as the result of being on the Democratic presidential ticket).
I think Matt is grossly underestimating the excitement that’s going to be to generated by the prospect of electing the first Lutheran vice president
Stop killing the vibes. I wish this man was heading the ticket.
Wherein, Matt perfects the fine art of damning with faint praise.
I'm glad some people are hearing his argument, but even if you don't like Freddie, he has a point.
All reports have Shapiro basically didn't mesh well with Kamala, and this is actually important - one could argue part of the worries over Kamala being the nominee was the frosty Biden/Harris team relationship and look into the odd things John Edwards did to become the VP candidate that made Kerry weary of him.
It's one thing to have two ambitious young pols on a ticket when they know and work well together, as Clinton/Gore seemed to be, or possibly something like Kamala/Beshear could've been. But, if you're Kamala and more importantly. Kamala's team, do you want the guy much of the Democratic centrist pundit class wanted as the nominee instead of you?
Plus, Shapiro had real non-Israel downsides _and_ Walz is a do no harm pick that has upside.
More importantly, as I said in the Substack chat, as somebody whose been using Kamala/Walz as a 2028 stand-in that can win before there were even whispers of Biden stepping down, I have to support this choice.
Yeah that's where people are getting it wrong about him not being a threat. Sure he wouldn't have tried to stage a coup. But the real "threat" is him not getting along well with Kamala and marching to his own beat. We need unity on the ticket.
Hmm. I agree it seems low upside, but I'm not as sure on "safe."
1) Walz isn't *that* old but man does he appear old. This doesn't neatly fit the narrative of an exciting page turn for the party. But, maybe it reassures older voters? Maybe?
2) Walz's record is mostly moderate, but geez has his rhetoric been left leaning lately.
3) In the same vein, choosing Walz opens a huge, grievance-laden door for Republicans to remind the country of the events in Minnesota in the summer of 2020. In that way, choosing Walz may well continue to motivate the left in a way that choosing Shapiro would not, but it may also motivate the right.
All things being equal, I'd gamble on the really charismatic best-of-his-cohort political savvy gay guy from the midwest who won the Iowa caucus over Walz if I'm not choosing Shapiro. But truthfully, I'd probably just...get over my dislike of his persona or ambition and choose the extremely popular governor of the most important state for the electoral college as my running mate.
Seems there’s an analogy to 2008. Harris wants to be seen like Obama - unusual demographic for a president. Shapiro is too much like Obama in presentation and charisma. Waltz is Biden with the odometer rolled back.
As far as Whitmer goes, you can’t have two women when there hasn’t been a female president. Obama in 2008 couldn’t run with another Black man - too much of a difference at once. If Biden had died or stepped down as VP before the 2012 election, Obama could have picked someone like Cory Booker as his running mate without too much controversy.
A lot of this seems overcomplicated to me. Isn’t the most likely explanation that being the VP candidate here is just not a super desirable role?
Like it seems obvious that Whitmer/Klobuchar just didn’t want it, not that they were excluded via being women.
Shapiro seems the only candidate with a bright future who did want it. Which makes sense, hard to see how this helps any of the top tier candidates become president down the line if that’s their goal.
Oh well, it’s really not a big deal, Walz is fine.
Buttigieg wanted it too and was a finalist.
I'm curious what "moderate her image" means in point 13. Chait wrote earlier today that he'd have preferred some other picks not DESPITE the fact that they'd annoy the left of the party, but BECAUSE they would. I've had the sense that this is your view as well, but looking around I can't actually find you expressing a view one way or the other.
What I find refreshing is Walz' ability to speak to rural and conservative voters. I think a lot of Democrats either don't have the ability or the interest to do that. I think Obama caught fire with his "there is no red America, there is no blue America" 2004 convention speech that emphasized bipartisanship and unity, not just trying to out-liberal other Dems. I think we've seen less of that in recent years, and I think Walz can help in whatever way a VP can, to bridge the gap and connect with voters who have been disillusioned by the Democratic party.
Have you seen him in a trucker hat and barn coat? He is middle America!
I was sold when I saw the video of him and his daughter at the state fair:
Tim Walz - “corn dog?”
Hope Walz - “I’m vegetarian.”
Tim Walz - “turkey then”
Hope Walz - “turkey is meat”
Tim Walz - “not in Minnesota”
https://twitter.com/protect_public/status/1817600273876947094
The delivery was so great in the video that I chuckled at it despite knowing the punchline already.
I agree with a lot of this analysis, but here are some responses and other random thoughts. Sorry for the excessive length.
1. To me the main weakness with Walz (apart from the fact that he isn't from a swing state) is that he was the candidate who left-wingers lobbied for, so now that Harris has picked him, it will be accurate to make the statement/accusation that Harris chose the guy who left-wingers lobbied for. That isn't Walz's fault. I think Walz himself is fine. But it's less than ideal to be seen giving into the demands of the more ideological wing of your coalition when you're smack in the middle of a general election campaign.
2. I agree that Walz will not do any harm in the sense of affirmative harm. But as econ nerds all know, opportunity cost is also a type of harm.
3. I agree that Harris' position-taking matters a lot more than the messaging that she could have done with this VP choice, but wouldn't it be better to do both?
4. All that said, I don't see any reason to expect Walz to perform any worse than Shapiro out on the trail. I do think Shapiro has a more impressive electoral record than Walz does. But every political candidate wears a few different hats. One is as an on-stage performer, another is as a sort of CEO or "creative director" for the campaign. From what I know about Shapiro, my sense is that his biggest strength as a politician is that he's very good at wearing the second hat. But a running mate to a presidential candidate doesn't get to wear the second hat very much. You're just a performer, and both these guys are probably equally good in that regard. (Incidentally, I think the available evidence suggests that Kamala Harris is *not* very good at being a campaign's creative director, but she's fine as a performer. She does a credible job at handling the typical big campaign set piece - speeches, debates, etc. Which is why I think it has really helped her to step into Biden's shoes so late in the race. She mostly inherited Biden's campaign staff so she doesn't need to hire very many new people or create a direction for her campaign. She just has to worry about set pieces, which she's fine at.)
5. I would defend the concept of white man's DEI. I think it genuinely would be a liability (or at least an opportunity cost) for Harris to choose a woman as her running mate. A lot of people who don't love Trump are not yet willing to commit to her because they fear she's too far left. That means different things for different people, but I believe there is a not-insignificant contingent of low-info moderately-but-only-moderately-antiwoke/problematic people out there who would interpret Harris creating an all-woman ticket as a sign that her campaign is vaguely anti-man, just as some of these same people reacted poorly to the anodyne "I'm with her" slogan from Hillary Clinton's campaign. Now, as with all other types of DEI, this DEI should only give white men a few extra points, not serve as a quota. So I could certainly consider an argument that Klobuchar or Whitmer are *such* good candidates that they outweigh the benefit of Walz's whiteness and maleness. But that's different from saying that there shouldn't be any DEI.
6. I don't think Buttigieg would have been a good choice for similar reasons as why Matt thinks Shapiro had weaknesses. Buttigieg has only ever run in one single general election vs. a Republican. (He also didn't win that election. Of course he lives in very red Indiana so it would have been unreasonable to expect him to win, but he actually ran behind the top of the ticket.) Like every other educated white-collar Democratic voter, I think Buttigieg is great on TV and an excellent debater, but I don't think that means your average person will necessarily feel the same way. We have no good data on that one way or the other. I don't think his (good) performance in the 2020 presidential primaries is much of a data point in that regard. In fact I would say there's very limited correlation in general between being a good or bad presidential primary candidate and being a good or bad general election candidate. I kind of get the sense that Matt likes any Democratic politician who was around his age at Harvard and sometimes he's right (Ruben Gallego seems pretty good from what I can tell) and sometimes I'm not so sure.
7. The efforts by some of Shapiro's anti-fans to cook up "scandals" over the last few days were pretty reprehensible and ludicrous. They reminded me of nothing so much as the fake Tara Reade scandal that leftists tried to cook up against Joe Biden in 2020. I also think they are a form of the "murder-suicide politics" that Matt decried a few months back - it's one thing to bring up real scandals against a primary opponent to test him, but it's another thing to create fake ones and package them for Republicans to use in the general election, and then cite that "baggage" as a reason for not voting for the guy.
8. I don't think the backlash against Shapiro among online progressives is *mainly* about either his Jewishness or his ideological positioning, though those things might play a part with some folks. Mainly I think it's the latest example of a broader trend that includes guys like Buttigieg, Joe Kennedy, and Conor Lamb. There's no one who online progressives despise more than the youngish, successful Democratic politician who is a square (wears a suit, went to a good college, etc). I'm not going to say that this is one the main reasons why so many of the Democratic Party's current leaders are older politicians, but it is an underrated reason for that. Young progressive voters hate square young Democratic politicians, but of course square young politicians are the young politicians who are most likely to have cross-generational appeal and thus be successful while they're still young.
Re: 1 - I think about five minutes from now, no one in the general public will remember Walz as "the guy the left wingers wanted her to pick". They do need to pick some tactical fights with the left in public over the next few months, but doing it with the VP pick right before the convention is very high risk, while it might succeed much better by doing it on an actual issue a few weeks from now.
It's a reasonable argument, although I don't think I agree. I guess I just think executing that "distancing" move is super important, and given the closeness of the race and the limited amount of time that's left, she just has to go for it when the opportunity presents itself.
I think we're all overthinking it tbh. Kamala picked him because she liked him and thought he'd make a good governing partner.
Not necessarily the best decision criterion in the current scenario, to be fair. Legendary running-mate picks have been made based on no personal warmth at all. Kennedy famously picked Lyndon Johnson, despite his family intensely disliking the guy and the two having little, culturally and on several important policy areas, in common. Roosevelt picked Truman, despite not knowing him from Adam, solely to stick it to Wallace. McKinley picked the other Roosevelt, despite considering him a hotheaded blowhard, solely because of his personal popularity. Etc.
Kerry and Edwards famously got along like chums; so did Hillary and Kaine, Gore and Lieberman. We all remember how those turned out.
Still, let's not overthink what just happened. It was largely a meeting of two minds, nothing more or less.
Kerry and Edwards definitely had the best hair of any ticket in US history.
I'm sure Walz is fine and there may be excellent reasons unknown to us outsiders why Shapiro wasn't picked and if the Dems win in November it's all sunshine and marmalade.
But if Pennsylvania turns out to be the tipping point state and Harris loses it narrowly . . . oy vey iz mir.
I’m interested in hearing from people on this thread who grew up in white rural households on whether they find Walz relatable and charismatic. I feel like there is some pandering here that could backfire but maybe that’s because he’s not intended to appeal to me (although I am a white person who was born in the midwest). When he talks about how you can’t picture Trump throwing a frisbee to his dog and rubbing his belly does that connect?
My white rural midwestern family is already commenting on how much they like him.