I don't want to go too far down the anti identity rabbit hole here. It clearly has some salience. But I think Harris is an illustration of just how overrated it can be. She never caught on with black voters during the primary, for what seem to me like a combination of unfamiliarity, weak retail politics, and pretty straightforward class based reasons. Biden on the other hand did by being the moderate candidate with most name recognition. Now, I think he probably also bought himself a lot of credibility by being the loyal VP of the first black president, so there's a sprinking of an identity issue. But there's this idea that if candidates don't check some identitarian box they face insurmountable odds with people in those demographic groups and it's just not true. At a certain point it becomes condescending and I think that's a big part of where the grumbling about Harris comes from, even if the issues with her have now also become overstated, which I agree is the case.
The summer of 2020 was a nutty time though, and a large % of Democrats were sincerely buying into a philosophy that said it would be racist/sexist *not* to pick a highly-qualified black woman if one is available (and one was). So Biden was playing identarian politics not to pick up black voters, but to pick up/placate elite college-educated "antiracist" voters (black & white but mostly white).
The first trans politician I've seen who might have a chance is Sarah McBride in Delaware, who is running for the US House. She's 33.
She's probably too much of a Democratic Party machine politician to actually get to the White House (Biden and HW Bush are the only machine politicians to get there since the modern primary started), but she's not completely implausible in 30 years time.
This is the really important point. The Venn diagram of Black people & women vs. people where having a Black woman as VP was Very Important to them is not an exact overlap.
I think the problem is that they face insurmountable odds with staffers who proclaim to be self-appointed representatives of their own demographic groups, despite being out-of-sync with and well to the left of their demographics' median voters.
In that respect, Harris herself is most emblematic of the problem. I don't suspect she herself is as dedicated an identitarian as she's often accused of, but OTOH she's demonstrated a distinct and damning pattern of being not timid at all about embracing others' identitarian claims in support of herself, to the point of engaging in rank tokenism. She allowed herself to become a standard-bearer for the too-online-staffer set, at the exclusion of relying on basically any other strength - like, say, per Matt, the leeway to use her platform and identity to embrace moderate rhetoric. She's a one-trick-pony who failed upward into the VP slot and now short of a politically suicidal resignation can't dislodge herself without causing major damage to the party.
I don't think it's easy to win the race for San Francisco DA. I think it is even harder to win the statewide DA race in a state with 39 million people. And even harder to win one of two senate seats, again in a state with 39 million people. I think it's even harder for a woman and POC to do all those things [given American history and culture].
I don't think VP Harris has made all the right political choices, but I think she is exceptionally talented, and not a 'one-trick-pony'
Sure, I agree. The VP job is weird and hard to quantify it's impact. But I'd say one of the most important parts is ensuring your ticket wins - and here, Biden/Harris beat Trump/Pence in 2020. I don't know how you quantify her impact on that, but she certainly played some role.
I wish Al Gore had picked FL Sen. Bob Graham as VP - we knew FL was a EV-rich state that was going to be close even before election day, and Bob Graham was a popular FL politician. This doesn't pass Matt's test about the future Democratic leader, but I would take a win in 2000 with a sub-par VP pick.
I haven't looked at any analytics but my guess is Sen Kaine was also not a great VP pick. So I'm not trying to say VP Harris is now or ever was the optimal VP pick, but I think she has strengths and we could do a lot worse - which is a a boring assertion and I'm sure everyone here agrees with me since finding a worse VP candidate is a low bar.
Tbf, given what we now know about Lieberman, Graham was probably an improvement - Lieberman turned out to be on the right-fringe of the Democrats over Iraq. Of course, that might not have mattered if he'd been elected as there might not have been an Iraq War (indeed, possibly not a 9/11).
But on "VP picks who turned out terrible after the fact for reasons the President couldn't have known at the time", Edwards has to be the top one.
Lieberman was picked because he gave Gore some cover on the Monica Lewinsky stink that stuck to him as Clinton's VP. Because what the US wanted, the Gore campaign concluded, was a preening moralistic prig.
Bob Graham was also chair of the Senate intelligence committee with keen interest in foreign affairs, later wrote a book IIRC detailing 21 specific points where US intelligence should have but failed to stop the 9/11 plot.
No idea if as VP entering office in January 2001 he would or could have done anything as VP to stop 9/11, but there's an argument that if anyone would have done better, it would have been him.
I think you've got a solid point here that she helped hold the party together. I'm just not sure she could have done that job better than anyone else.
Like, even assuming that Biden was still under the blackmail threat to pick a Black woman, there would have been at bare minimum Stacy Abrams, for instance. Picking her would have carried the additional benefit of locking down Georgia and probably helped avoid having to have those two Senate races go to runoffs. OTOH, she may have been percieved as "too Black" on a national ticket and kind of backfired with white swing voters, but that's a topic for another debate -- and kind of demonstrates that there IS a healthy debate to be had here, not just a dead end where Harris "was always the ONLY option".
With all we know now, the idea that Abrams would have been a better VP pick than Harris isn't very compelling to me. Great voter registration organizer, so I hear, but that's about it.
When you say she certainly played some role…I mean, it's conceivable that the role she played was negative. Even on a World Series-winning team there can be liabilities. And even if she wasn't a liability, there's no particular reason to think she did more for the ticket than another candidate would have. The fact of the ticket winning an election that polling suggested could be a landslide doesn't prove that Harris had a high value over replacement.
I agree, that's why I said it's hard to quantify their impact. I'd say especially so since she's from CA and it's not like you can point to helping in home swing state. (Surprisingly few modern VPs come from swing states, IMO).
The truth is always going to be the top of the ticket matters more. We can talk about the impact Lieberman, Edwards, and Kaine played in their tickets losing, but obviously they had far less impact than choices made by Gore, Kerry, and Clinton. But I'd still say a winning VP has a better chance of playing a positive role than a losing VP.
I'm not even sure what you think you're arguing against, because I didn't even elucidate the statement. I certainly didn't argue that it wasn't hard to do all those things.
FWIW, I meant that she was a one-trick-pony in the sense that her national platform is mostly based on online organizing among staffer types. She rose through the ranks of the CA Dem party, which is no mean achievement -- more than most of us here can claim to in our own careers -- but let's not mistake that for her having the sort of political savvy of, say, Gretchen Whitmer. She won bare majorities in friendly jurisdictions. She didn't build any great political organization; rather, mostly benefited from strong pre-existing CA state Dem ones -- and the only time she ever was challenged to build one (the 2020 primary), she utterly faceplanted, exiting before a single vote was cast in Iowa.
Her strongest base of support was a bunch of staffer and The Groups types on Twitter calling her a "rIsInG dEmOcRaTiC sTaR!!!111", which, as it turns out, is NOT a viable substitute for a real-world political organization. Her best asset at this point is national name ID from failing upward from the primary into a VP spot; she can't point to a single major policy success since being CA's AG, which was 6 years ago.
This is closer to where I am. I think she is a competent enough operator in a deep blue state, and it is not nothing that she was able to climb the rungs in CA. However it's a totally different ballgame at the national level and I've never seen any indication she was ready for it. The result was falling into a weird and probably very unnatural zone for her between the moderate lane and the radical lane then due to the zeitgesit and absence of any particular brand having a bunch of out of touch staffers and media types guide her into a total dead end. I temper this of course with my belief that she is a lot less consequential to Biden's fortunes than the Discourse would suggest. We're very deep into 'nothing to talk about season' with respect to 2024.
Yeah, I have to admit that although I have some pretty strong opinions here, the path forward is pretty predetermined. It's just mostly objections and complaints I have about how the process has worked out in all these suboptimal ways - I'd like to see better processes going forward.
I think it's telling that she needed a bunch of staffers and party insiders to basically blackmail Biden into picking her. If there's nothing else justifying your selection besides "a bunch of party insiders will make life hell if you don't pick the Black woman" and various platitudes about how you're "qualified" (look, EVERYONE is "qualified" at this level, we're mostly just quibbling over who goes over-and-above here), then that kind of reflects badly on your ability as a politician. I suspect she ALSO won Biden over on a personal level, and that he kinda respected that she was willing to hit him so hard in the debates, but the blackmail was what got her into the room with him in the first place.
As I suggested elsewhere, I think the boldest move (resign and challenge Newsom, hijack his housing push and claim credit for it in the 2028 primary) is the best path towards rehabilitating her resume. Despite all the shade and disparagement here, I *want* her to succeed, and I truly do believe she can still do good things for the country and party; I just want her to do so by recognizing the dead end she backed herself into, and avoiding that in the future.
What shocks me about all this is the extent to which there wasn’t any kind of plan on her part, just out-and-out opportunism.
And before anyone brings up Obama’s rank opportunism in running in 2008, the difference is that however unprepared he was, he had *a* plan. Harris was just kind of pivoting into the highest slot she could work herself into after screwing up a run she wasn’t prepared for - because anyone outside of Twitter would have told her that she didn’t have a ground game to beat anyone with, and being a RiSiNg DeMoCrAtIc StAr on Twitter wasn’t enough of a ground game to win with. By contrast, Obama made a run he wasn’t prepared for, won by actually building a damned ground game, and only THEN had to pivot on actual policy.
I'd say I more plainly recited her resume and added commentary winning those races is hard. Maybe you think it's easy and you could do it better than she did, idk.
I disagreed with your point, which I agree you didn't elucidate what it meant, I was just going off what you wrote and what I interpreted.
Tbh, not that I think it matters or that you care, but I found your response "wow, hump her resume much?" crude and unpleasant. There's no shortage of people (and yes, almost entirely men) being crude and unpleasant in internet comments sections, but I only infrequently write in SB because I hope I can find something better. And you seem annoyed at my response - so I'll try to remember to not respond to your SB comments, and it seems we will both be better off.
>> Maybe you think it's easy and you could do it better than she did, idk.
Uhh, I didn't say that?
>> Tbh, not that I think it matters or that you care, but I found your response "wow, hump her resume much?" crude and unpleasant.
I thought it was witty and acerbic. Trust me, I'm not an asshole, I just play one on TV (badly). I apologize if I crossed any lines; for future reference, you can generally assume that I'm trying to be funny. When I'm angry, I condemn things; I'm not angry right now, I'm just criticizing someone who I think deserves a lot of criticism (KH) precisely because she ignores so much constructive criticism that would be extremely valuable in her career.
I'd be sad if you felt you needed to ignore me going forward; I consider myself one of the relatively easier assholes to get along with around here. For one thing, unlike some folks, I don't go around overindexing on various culture-war complaints and seeing evil leftist activists behind every policy failure. Rather, I generally try to reconcile and synthesize different perspectives, defend unpopular ones, and hold people to account for being unreasonably worked up over shit, even if I sympathize with their basic complaints. I just also do it very aggressively and adamantly, because I strongly believe in forging a path towards a better politics.
Again, you have my apologies for coming on a bit strong there. It was just a joke, though.
I’m of the firm belief that generally when people I oppose are wrong, they’re wrong in ways that rarely require me to impugn their personal conduct. Harris’s failing brand of liberalism, poor organizational skills, and general hackery disprove themselves; whether she also benefited from favoritism is the LEAST interesting objection to her IMO.
You mentioned, approvingly so it seemed, how she "rose through the ranks of the CA Dem party." I wasn't making an objection, but was merely pointing out that she had some well-connected help climbing that greasy pole.
“I don't suspect she herself is as dedicated an identitarian as she's often accused of…”
Well…
“She gestured at some of the art she’d brought in, on loan from various galleries and collections, describing each piece in terms of the artist’s background rather than its aesthetic qualities—Indian American woman, African American gay man, Japanese American. ‘So you get the idea,’ she said.”
I think that’s at most merely evidence of the sort of ambient identitarianism that predominates on the left these days. A LOT of critic types do the exact same stuff in the highest circles of culture.
What I don’t see from her is the sort of bare-knuckled tokenism of her supporters. She seems largely content to let them make those appeals on her behalf while personally straddling a more traditionally meritocratic, mainstream-multicultural-assimilationist view (albeit with a strong left liberal tint) like Obama and Reagan.
I think it was underrated Biden performed well with older devout Black voters because he had a cultural and spiritual argument to make that resonated with many of them. If you ever listened to a few of his campaign rallies, Biden would talk like a version of Jordan Peterson who didn't follow campus issues and believed in God. He shared his struggles, his life setbacks, he put it all out there. And he says that he gets it, and we've all had losses, but he understands we can all do a bit better too.
Marianne Williamson once lamented nobody talks spiritually in the Democratic party anymore, not like Bobby Kennedy, the kinds of heroes her generation grew up with. She was mostly correct except for one guy. Biden was selling a version of that not a lot of people were paying attention to. But for the ones who did, it mattered.
My "problem" has nothing to do with Kamala Harris per se. My problem is that in every presidential election for the rest of forever, there will be one expectation that one half of the Democratic ticket will be non-male, non-white, or both -- creating a sort of Lebanon-style political situation where the President must always be a Maronite Christian and the Prime Minister must always be a Sunni Muslim. Sure, it more or less keeps the peace, but it leaves a bad taste in the mouth.
I think one of the points Matt was trying to get across is that VP picks have been made based on short term "identity politics" considerations for forever and that not nearly enough consideration is given to the fact that a) 20% of VP(s) becoming President is actually quite high b) a large number of VPs become the Party's standard bearer in future elections.
What's changed is nature of what counts a identity politics (and let's face it. Race based identity politics has been a feature of American and colonial politics since, dare I say it, 1619). As Matt was alluding to, Andrew Johnson was put on the ticket in 1864 for basically identity politics reasons; he was a border state Southerner. He was NOT chosen due to long term considerations about how best to advance a) Lincoln's second term agenda b) Lincoln's long term vision for the Republic post Civil War. And America suffered for it as Johnson is definitely one of the villains as to why Reconstruction was less successful than maybe it could have been (arguably the worst political decision Lincoln ever made*.
To take a modern example. Matt alluded to the choice of Sarah Palin. I know her selection has been documented pretty extensively in books like "Game Change", but it's really hard to argue her selection wasn't made for "identity politics" reasons. The hardcore base of the GOP distrusted McCain. And specifically, they distrusted how committed he was to the social conservative side of the Party's platform. The selection of Palin was clearly made in part to mollify the religious right.
*That or putting George McClellan in charge of the Army of the Potomac. Although apparently McClellan was actually quite good at making the Army into an actual professional force. Just an absolutely terrible and overly timid battlefield general).
Re: Palin, they also thought that "we have a woman" would counter the "first black presidential candidate", which is identity politics in the modern sense
Yes social conservative is not an identity. But let's be real, when we say "social conservative" we mean Christian right. Yes I know there are Orthodox Jewish voters and (it seems) conservative Muslim voters who do (or may) vote GOP in part due to having similar views regarding LBGTQ rights, family structure, abortion etc (hence why technically "social conservative" is probably more appropriate). But in regards to the driving force behind GOP social conservative politics it's clearly driven by the Christian right. It's been a pretty big identity in modern American politics since late 70s? Heck probably before that. Big difference today is pre 70s the "identity politics" aspect was in large part anti-Catholic orientation whereas today conservative Catholics are part of the same coalition.
In fact on that vein, there is very much an "identity politics" aspect as to why Italian American and Irish American voters were traditionally Democrats pre 80s. Heck Joe Biden being a Democrat is in part a legacy of that orientation. I would say being Catholic has been one of the most important aspects of identity in the entire western worlds since...Martin Luther? Since The Crusades? Since the schism between the Catholic and Greek Orthodox church?
I went to a local meeting if democrat’s during the 2020 presidential primary. The two most insufferable camps were the Bernie folks and the Harris folks.
The Bernie folks did their usual shtick about being not sufficiently liberal with a hint of “maybe there is another reason you don’t like Bernie *cough* jewish”
The Harris folks lead with the accusations of sexism and racism with very little emphasis on policy.
In liberal politics you always expect some amount of insufficient identity allegiance but I was surprised by how hard the Harris people went.
That was just one meeting of about 60 people at a pizza place in early 2019 though. I actually miss those get togethers but liberals have gone hard on the “no in person” gatherings thing since Covid (unless outdoors) and we haven’t had one of those meeting since. Which is a shame.
Some people had so little personality and sense of self that they seem to have adopted this as a facet of theirs. It's honestly sad at this point, I feel bad for them.
When I visited the Bay Area in the summer of 2022, I was happy to see that most people had moved on. Going to a Giants game where everyone was acting normal was so much needed fun.
They have held a few out door things but everything else I've seen has been "zoom" meetings. I hate zoom meetings so much. They have made very work call a zoom meeting and I miss talking to someone without having to be on camera.
It's more that identity politics is in some ways more valuable to white liberals than it is to actual minority voters.
Or at least it has its limitations with Black voters. Black voters, more than anything, want to win and so there's a degree of pragmatism to their selection of Biden.
"Black voters, more than anything, want to win and so there's a degree of pragmatism to their selection of Biden."
Where does the idea that Black voters want to win more than other voters comes from? Seems like that should be supported by some sort of evidence because "want to win" is pretty hard to measure but beyond the default assumption that all voters "want to win". I want to win when I vote! You probably do, too.
In Obama's presidential memoir he notes that he was polling behind Clinton in South Carolina until he won the Iowa caucuses — then he jumped into the lead, because Black voters saw that he could actually win the general since he won over lots of white voters.
Fair, that's an example. But I don't think it's doing much for the general case. Doing well in Iowa is a huge deal for any candidate, especially, the one with less name-recognition. Campaigns tank or soar after Iowa routinely. And doing well with white voters wasn't really a question for Biden or one that Black voters would pay more attention to should Harris find herself primarying.
As long as Black Democrat voters are to the center of White Democrat voters (true since 2016? or so?) we can probably expect that they would prefer the more centrist candidate who is more electable and a more "pragmatic" choice for the general election. I think that basic and well-supported electoral dynamic is getting confused with some kind of vague notion of "desire to win"
Obama ran to Clinton’s left in 2008. My read of the Iowa/South Carolina saga is that Black voters really wanted to elect the first Black president, but not at the expense of risking the general election. Which is distinct from just being more centrist that white Democrats.
It was Iraq that threaded the needle for Obama. It became clear that the more "extreme" position of opposing the war was also the more popular one. This helped make Obama's other outlier characteristics race included seem like a cleaner break with the past.
What was the thinking of the Iowa voters, then? Were they getting behind him not expecting him to win overall? If his leftness vs Hillary was the clear differentiator I wouldn't necessarily expect Iowa caucus-goers to prefer him.
In any case, we're not going to have any further first Black presidents. The idea that Black voters can be counted on to always be pragmatic compared to everybody else just seems a bit under-evidenced.
Black voters have a much more realistic view of who can win -- it seems like white liberals often convince themselves that whoever they, personally, like is also the most appealing general election candidate (see, e.g., the never-ending "Bernie would have won" takes from 2016.)
But again - where do we get the idea that Black voters are immune from this type of thinking, as opposed to, say, Hispanic voters or White working class D voters or really anybody else.
The observation seems to me to be more about white liberal voters, whose opinions dominate the media and twitter and so are easy to get a feel for (although I'm not sure those opinions are really so representative of the median white liberal). But where do see that Black voters are better at predicting election results in general and why would they be?
Was Hillary a good choice in 2016? Even if you say she was, you're trying to make case based on something like 3 data points.
Like I said above, it's well-understood that the median Black D is more to the center than the median White democrat, since at least 2016 or maybe earlier. A group of more centrist voters is more likely to pick more electable candidates in the general election.
But this would be true of white working class voters, hispanic working class voters, pacific islander working class voters, etc.
Conversely, and to your point, is there any actual evidence that "there are certain things that Harris as a Black woman “can” say that Joe Biden as a white man “can’t” say — i.e., things that are moderate-coded about race and gender matters?"
What exactly is going to happen if Biden says moderate-coded things about race and gender matters? Some people will complain! But those people also complain vociferously when, e.g., Trump says right-coded things -- or, for that matter, moderate-coded things -- about race and gender matters, and this doesn't seem to stop people from planning to vote for Trump.
Whether Biden would profit from saying moderate-coded things seems to me to come down to the simple empirical question of how popular or not such things are with potential Democratic voters. I strongly suspect that the number of voters whose main focus is on the meta-level question of *who* is espousing some position is way too small to overcome the effect of that position's underlying popularity. But I could be wrong.
I think it definitely stops some people from planning to vote for Trump, which is why he's done badly among educated voters relative to previous Republicans.
I think it is reasonable to go down the identity rabbit hole. Because folks are mostly Democrats here, they don't quite see how Republicans see it when Biden was essentially forced into choosing a Black woman. I agree that Harris was qualified, but it smells bad to Republicans (and a lot of centrists) that Biden started with a racial and gender identity first, then looked for candidates. It seems like he bought a couch, then built a house to fit the couch. It just feels discriminatory, like 2 wrongs make a right. Choosing her animated the opposition.
As I've noted before, you know who was also a Democratic Senator who shown no great aptitude in winning over black voters outside of their state as Democrat's are expected too in their prior Presidential runs? Joseph Robinette Biden, before becoming VP for two terms.
Like, for all the talk of identity politics, Presidential campaigns aren't things where somebody gets 4% of the vote, but wins 25% of the Hispanic vote, or whatever. If you run a successful campaign, you get a lot of white, black, Hispanic, Asian, gay, etc. votes in a Democratic primary. If you don't, you don't, even if you're a perfect match.
I think it was valuable to have a black female candidate, and she was compelling and did some things well. think it was counterproductive to label as racist anyone who doubted her ability to excel at retail politics. I still sort of think with the right team she could do well. Too many cringey moments though.
“with the right team she could do well”. But could she? The fact that she apparently goes through staffers like a toddler goes through cheerios makes me think the issue is less the people around her and more her.
I think this is an excellent point...Early on in the primary I was pretty keen on her...that did not last long as she did a terrible job running. An earlier posted mentioned that she could be a phenomenally high performing person but still be beneath the bar as a VP or presidential candidate.
I think we are confusing good with elite. She was a good candidate at the state level but is not a great.
My understanding is that the Harris office turnover was primarily a feature of the first year or so and that her staff has been much more stable since then.
Harris needs to aggressively seize the moment and boldly recreate herself as a dynamic leader. In order to psyche herself up for the task, she should paste Matt's stirring words on her mirror and recite them as an affirmation every morning:
"Many past VPs have been picked for much worse reasons!"
I think that although it would immediately be seen as politically suicidal of her to resign, her best shot here is to resign and make a run at Newsom.
1. She's still popular in CA, enough to give Newsom a heck of a fight, and probably actually beat him.
2. Newsom's (relatively) unpopular in CA, unpopular nationally, and needs to be knocked down a peg in order to ward off his dangerous aspirations to national office. It would just plain be the most noble thing to do for the party.
3. Governing CA for a few years sets her up for a triumphant return in 2028. "I did what I thought was best for my country and my party, and look how it worked. We kept the White House in 2024. I gave Gavin Freaking Newsom the shellacking he deserved, that entitled prick. I used my VP experience to put California back on the right track. We're well on our way to leading the nation in solving the housing crisis, and I can bring this platform across the country in order to keep our cities and suburbs livable while embracing the new green economy." THAT is a strong primary pitch, stronger than anything she could muster in 2024 or 2028 just on her current resume. Certainly strong enough to give her a fighting chance against Whitmer in 2028.
[Ed: The funny part is, she'd mostly be cruising off of Newsom's hard work putting together the housing bills he has done, but at the same time, she could probably wield the coalitions and internal bureaucracy just as well as he has in order to keep the wheels of housing progress moving forward.]
I suspect his numbers ought to have recovered from his scandals by this point, but I wouldn't mistake that for enduring popularity. I think a solid majority of CA Dems would pick Harris over him.
The timing kinda sucks, I guess. It would've been easier to challenge him back in 2022 or 2021 (during the recall), but that would've been an awkward exit from the VP-ency. And now running for 2026 leaves her in the lurch for the next 2 years and barely a year or so in office before having to start campaigning for 2028. She'd be 62-63 in the 2028 primary, and 66-67 in 2032, the latter of which would be WAY too old particularly if we expect the current anti-gerontocracy sentiment to continue building steam.
There's a strong case Biden should've picked her for the Supreme Court over Ketanji Brown Jackson and should still consider her for a SCOTUS opening should one come up (though age is somewhat of an issue). As I mentioned ages ago, Harris's political record has some weird parallels with Earl Warren's (both went Bay Area DA->CA AG->CA statewide elected--Governor for Warren, Senator for Harris->VP nominee--though Warren was running mate to Thomas E. Dewey in the race where he famously defeated Truman). And there have been lots of calls in the legal community to put a Supreme Court justice who (1) did not rise through the federal courts and (2) did not attend an Ivy League law school (or Notre Dame), to combat a sense that the Supreme Court has become too much of an ivory tower. (It'll always be an ivory tower, of course, but taking a few stories off might be a good thing.)
The fatal flaw with the SCOTUS seat argument now (it would have been fine for filling Breyer's seat when it came up) is that a new VP has to be confirmed by both houses of Congress, and with the Republicans now controlling the House, they'd have a high incentive to stonewall that confirmation, just in case Biden dies and then they can get [insert whoever the hell is going to be Speaker] in the White House.
If someone wants to write a fun story: Harris gets confirmed to SCOTUS, the Republicans still can't get their act together to pick a Speaker, Biden dies and Patti Murray becomes President.
It is early January 2041, and the House of Representatives has been without a speaker for almost 18 years. In desperation, to try to finally break the impasse, both parties agree to vote for former British Prime Minister and natural-born US citizen Boris Johnson, who had moved to the US in 2024 and resided continuously in the country thereafter. However, House members could not have foreseen that, just days before the inauguration of the Unity Party ticket of President Pete Buttigieg and Vice President Ivanka Trump, Speaker Johnson would be bedridden by COVID 19 variant 3.76.a.GIV.9.i.Q.%.D(8). Nor would they have believed, even had you told them, that, after accidentally hearing the word "falafel" repeated three times in succession, John Walker Lindh's secret Taliban brainwashing would be reactivated, causing him just before noon on January 20, 2041 to hijack a commercial jetliner leaving Ronald Reagan Washington National Airport . . . .
One can infer that the author of this post came of age sometime before the 2030s as they refer to DCA by the older common name that was in use prior to its re-christening on July 26th, 2031 as Bernie Sanders Memorial Airport.
I think she'd have the best chance of doing this if Biden died and she took over in a manner that knocked all of our socks off, like a complete boss. But could she really pull this off? I hope so.
This analysis is a bit strange. Decisions are always easier in hindsight. I like Whitmer but even from the vantage point of today (much less summer 2020) it’s not totally obvious she would be doing better than Harris - VP is a thankless role whoever holds it and many many politicians struggle to scale from an effective state level leader to a national one.
And as I commented on a similar post of Nate Silvers recently, priority #1, 2, and 3 in picking a VP is winning your election. Biden clearly thought picking Harris would keep momentum strong, avoid factional infighting that could impact turnout, and help beat Trump. Despite Harris’ current unpopularity I have not seen analysis to suggest she was a drag in 2020.
Feels like you're arguing past MY's (stronger) points here. You can argue that VP priorities 1, 2 and 3 should be winning the election, but as MY pointed out, if you do win you are very likely ALSO selecting a future president, while the odds that you're VP choice is the reason you secured 40,000 extra votes in Wisconsin are extremely remote.
And maybe it's not obvious that Whitmer would have been the better choice, but MY's whole point in that section is that nobody was thinking about future elections or future leadership or even the future of the Biden 2020 campaign...they were only thinking as far as a single news cycle.
See I agree with Peter and just disagree with this. If priorities 1, 2 and 3 are winning the election — and not just any election, the most consequential election of our lifetimes (TM) — then you do the thing that will make you even marginally more likely to win the election and just ignore everything that comes after.
I don’t see how you can square the argument that you should prioritize winning but also prioritize future potential. You can only prioritize one thing!
This would make more sense if I thought that picking Harris helped win the election more than almost any other serious VP candidate - excluding Abrams who would have been worse than Harris. How did picking Harris help win the election more than Whitmer would have?
The challenge in that election is that Biden could have lost two million votes in California, and if he had picked up 100k in MI, PA and AZ his victory would have been far more secure.
Yeah agree - but why would a decline in enthusiasm based on negative coverage be limited to CA and not spread to (black) voters in PA, GA, WI, and AZ?
If you believe - as the Biden team did - that having Harris on the ticket would generate more positive coverage, then what’s the rationale for Whitmer?
Again you can quibble with that assertion. But the argument MY seems to be making is “they should have thought more about how much better Whitmer would be than Harris down the line” which IMO is a flawed premise.
There was a huge spike in COVID deaths in Michigan right around Election Day 2020 (https://vitalstats.michigan.gov/osr/CVD19/CVD19Sum.asp). What if that had happened say one month before the election? How would the sitting governor of Michigan been viewed as she tirelessly campaigned for the Biden-Whitmer ticket? Or would she have already resigned as governor, handing the baton to Garlin Gilchrist (who?) to manage this crisis? Or would she have been forced to stop campaigning in this tightrope of an election, with the prospect of Trump triumphing?
You can only maximally prioritize one thing. When you buy, say, a car, you probably balance safety, comfort, price, gas milage and a bunch of other concerns. You don't buy narrow you're selection down to only Nissan Leaf's or only the cheapest car you could possibly buy.
The entire point of MY's post (it's almost in the title) was that the VP picks have important and somewhat predictable (Biden could die, for example) consequences years after the campaign ends and those consequences should be taken more seriously.
Winning the current election is important and VP choice is part of it. But in 2020 that also seemed to be barely prioritized when compared to shorter term "winning the news cycle" thinking.
Every election is the most important consequential, btw.
Yeah that part about most consequential was a joke. But since it feels that way to the base, you really don’t want to mess around with non-electoral considerations.
My problem with the article is that pretty much everything else MY writes on this topic encourages Dems to (I’m paraphrasing) “do what you need to do and say what you need to say to win (even if you are going to enact some different policy later).”
And yet now he’s advocating a lesser focus on purely winning. Why?
Well he's still talking about winning, he's just saying don't discount future elections so much. You'd never trade a guaranteed win today for 2 guaranteed losses in the future. If you discount the future too much you're just kicking the can of electoral considerations down the road.
Well, he says in the piece that VP selection actually has a negligible impact on winning. *Caring* about winning isn't a good reason to do something unless that thing *actually helps you win.*
Sure but it’s also not clear how you’d know who is going to be the best candidate in 2028 either.
Nothing against Whitmer, but let’s not forget that in 2020 she had been governor for less than two years and won in the Democratic landslide of 2018. She had done a good job on Covid, but that has clearly lost salience. And her effectiveness over the past couple of years was unknowable at the time.
Largely because, as he pointed out, the VP selection has almost nothing to do with the election. Outside of screwing it up badly (Palin), whoever you pick is going to do virtually nothing to impact the election. So if it's pointless to select it based on the outcome of the election, you should prioritize things like "ability to be the standard bearer of the party when they're on the top of the ticket".
“Ability to be the standard bearer of the party when they’re at the top of the ticket” is pretty much unknowable eight years out, though. And it’s obviously influenced by what happens while they’re VP.
So I’d argue it’s equally pointless to select based on hypothetical future value.
Was it that obvious that there was a far superior person to be the leader of the Democratic party for the decade or so after Biden? Maybe Harris wasn't perfect, but no one else was either. Whitmer is certainly a very competent person but who knows, on the national stage she might have flamed out as badly as "great on paper" Ron DeSantis has. Steve Bullock and John Hickenlooper looked great on paper too but no one is mourning their disappearance. I had great hopes for John Fetterman but unfortunately shit happens and I don't think that anymore.
It's actually hard to know for sure who is a locked-down future leader without putting them through the fire of a national campaign.
Well, prior to being picked for VP, Harris *had already gone* through the fire of a national campaign—with a much more sympathetic electorate—and she was a total flop. So one should assume she had a negative value-over-replacement compared to any other feasible candidate.
Well, sure, and in fact *Obama picked Joe Biden precisely because he thought he wouldn't try to run for president in the future!* If he had known Biden would run for president anyway, maybe he would have picked a better standard-bearer!
But this rests on the assumption that Biden either (a) forgot to consider that his running mate might become the president in the future or (b) secretly thought in the summer of 2020 that Harris was a worse potential future President than his available alternatives. I’m not sure why we would think that either is the case.
According to Yglesias's piece that we're commenting under, the Biden team didn't consider future electability much, but to the extent they may have, they may have followed the pattern of past VP picks and put more importance on "not a threat to Biden". Isn't that basically the thrust of MY's summary of the available info on the matter?
This has to be one of the weirdest comments sections on a S/B post I've seen. It's like nobody actually read the post and is instead just commenting about Harris as VP. I'm baffled about some of the takes on here.
I don’t think we are talking about future electability, we are talking about the running mate’s potential as a future President, and right there in the (very good) Herndon piece, right after the section MY quotes you have Anita Dunn saying “It was a governing decision...Who can be president, if necessary? But really, Who can be a good partner for me in terms of governing and bringing this country back from the precipice.” The idea that they weren’t looking at the running mate as a future president seems woefully under supported in Matt’s analysis.
We are certainly talking about future electability because one of Matt's points is that the VP is very often a candidate in the future, and sometimes they win and sometimes they lose, so their electability seems relevant.
One of the immutable rules of VP selection is that the presidential nominee will never pick someone he thinks will outshine them. This is also why VPs are never more popular than the President. It's built into the job description.
Jefferson probably shouldn't count, since he was elected before the Twelfth Amendment and so wasn't "picked" in the same sense. Of course, this implies that Adams shouldn't count either.
If Whitmer had been VP, then she wouldn't have been the Gov. of Michigan for the last 3 years. Instead she'd have been showing up at awkward ribbon-cutting events not important enough for Biden.
Agree with this - hard to assume that Whitmer fulfills her sort of vague potential popularity when put in the spotlight. Running for President is just about required to properly test future VPs.
And I wound never advise a candidate running for office to think much about the VP’s potential as POTUS. Impossible to really project that - it’s a theoretical exercise. As long as the candidate meets a reasonable standard, you should worry mostly about generating excitement and not getting criticized.
I thought the stranger part of the analysis was questioning Obama’s selection of Biden. It might be on accident but he picked a winner! Seems like he should have framed this as right result wrong reason but sounded more like he was saying it was a mistake. Perhaps the ideas about obama picking him bc he wasn’t a future threat are a bit exaggerated. Obama is not known for being insecure.
“He picked a winner” seems a bit simplistic; if he had picked someone younger, that person probably would also have become a winner (maybe even winning on 2016!), with the youth to be more popular and have an easier road to being a repeat winner.
If Beau hadn't died and Hillary hadn't cut a deal with the party that it was her turn, Biden would've probably ran — and won — in 2016. https://www.slowboring.com/p/2016-important
In Biden vs. Clinton vs. Bernie 2016, Bernie isn’t buoyed by the not-Clinton vote and doesn’t catch on to nearly the same degree. I can see the case for Biden or Clinton winning. Either way, the nominee comes out of a more regular primary much better and we avoid a Trump presidency altogether.
I think that Biden would have won the general. Would he have won the primary though? Or would he and Hillary have split the "centrist" vote and Bernie won? Which leads to the interesting question - does Bernie beat Trump? I think probably not, but maybe...?
Because I think there is generally a floor of 25% for Bernie, but his ceiling is probably about 40%
If Bernie runs, then drops out and endorses Biden, I think that's actually bad for Biden. Because the likely reason is that Biden has shifted left to pick up that endorsement and those votes. But I don't really think Biden has tremendous credibility with the left the way that Bernie does, so I suspect their support isn't nearly is strong or passionate.
So then you have Biden running against Clinton who is going to hammer away at him on identity issues - he's an old white dude who failed every other time, why would this be different. She's a woman and the time for a woman president is now. I think in the Democratic primary that a winning message and she beats Biden.
Well I think for Biden to have run, Hillary would've had to sit 2016 out. But I also do think that 2016 Bernie would've beaten Trump (though 2020 Bernie would've lost).
Yeah, I don't see Hillary sitting out unless she thinks she has no chance of winning and I think it would have been very hard for her to believe that.
I'm less certain either way with Bernie. If forced to choose, I think he's a worse candidate than Hillary, but maybe not?
The biggest challenge is that for the Democrats to win a third term after two with Obama, the public needs to be pretty happy with the way things are going. Bernie runs as a kind of repudiation of Obama's approach and I think if the public is in on repudiating Obama, they vote for a Republican. Lot of uncertainty in that particular race though.
Biden had a lot more Washington experience, especially in the Senate, than Obama. I think Obama was planning on relying on Biden to help steer things through Congress. Not unlike Bush picking Cheney for his greater DC experience, especially in foreign policy.
I am disappointed by the furtherance of this identity quota stuff - the "I will choose a woman for X" and "I promise to fill this seat with a black person" etc. Biden has done it twice, mind you -- with Harris and then with Ketanji Brown Jackson. Gavin Newsom has also done it and I think there's a good chance it'll become a norm on the Democratic side not only to keep track of these little quotas but to do so in such a public, pre-arranged way. That's the part that especially gets me. What's the benefit of announcing in advance that you are limiting your pool? Doesn't it undercut the choice from the get-go -- even when they are clearly qualified -- by making them into an "affirmative action" candidate? That's a whole idea that most Americans dislike, and it adds that extra sprinkle of doubt about whether you picked the best person. Even if identity politics factors into your choice (because it will), why make it so darn explicit? You box yourself in and you don't do the selection any favors.
Not to mention, in the private sector, we don't do this. For various reasons, we don't publicly announce that the next manager we hire is going to be Latino or LGBTQ+ or a disabled veteran or whatever, even if we are sensitive to the idea of representation in our ultimate selections. And the reality is that normie voters look at picking a VP or a cabinet member or SCOTUS appointee that way too: they see it as a job and most bristle at such an explicit quota system.
Can people please stop with this silly rejoinder. First, it fails on the count of whataboutism. Second it ignores the question of degree and context. For a conservative to promise to finally appoint the first woman ever for scotus , with women being 50% of the population, isn’t the same as for a liberal governor (Newsome) to promise to appoint the *second* female black senator from his state (3% of population).
No. The principle involved overrides your reverse engineered justifications as to why Saint Ronnie shouldn't be called out for publically eschewing individual accomplishments in favor of quota-style slot filling.
Please try to read before you respond. In the real world "principles" don't exist in a vacuum. That was precisely my point. And I think I saw you in SB for a while now, no? If nothing else being a subscriber here should disillusion you from the simple black-and-white worldview according to which justifying one action of one republican president makes one a gop groupie ("Saint Ronnie"). Some of us try to think for ourselves.
It was also wrong when Reagan did it. However, it's easier to pull such a maneuver when you're not the party that's associated with affirmative action and identity group representation. It's a weakness and stereotype for Democrats that they are seen as thinking first about identity and then about competence, that they are "for" hiring less qualified applicants who can check a special box. Why amplify the negative perception?
The only explicit promise Biden made with his VP selection was to pick a woman which I think is basically net neutral or even slightly positive from an electoral point of view: women are half the population and slightly more than half of the electorate.
OK, but then the George Floyd / BLM summer happened. And because he had already limited himself to a woman, Biden then had to square that unnecessary self-imposed limitation with a new political reality: sudden heavy pressure (from people who would've voted for him anyway) for his pick to be a black person. He would have had more flexibility had he not proclaimed the sex limitation up front.
I just fail to see the political upside of announcing ahead of time that you are going to limit yourself. You can still pick the woman, the black person, the deaf Korean-American lesbian, whatever. But at least make it look like you were choosing based on competence and not identity, especially when that's something Dems have a bad rep for? Joy Reid could still gush over the Kamala selection on MSNBC either way, but you at least avoid the negative perception of explicitly making the identity tick box the reason for the pick. Regular voters wonder whether you passed over someone better. And they know that you've openly, vocally, brazenly pre-discriminated, which is something they know they can't do at their own jobs. "I want the absolute best person for this role" is something that frankly codes as more...American value-wise to a normal voter than "I will only hire a woman" or "I will only hire a black person."
Going back and looking at media coverage, I see you are correct that Biden himself technically only committed to nominating a female VP candidate, but there were also tons of news stories about how John Lewis, Jim Clyburn, and other senior black political figures were pushing Biden to specifically nominate a black woman, so I think that bleeds over into people's perception about what Biden promised to do (especially when he ultimately did nominate a black woman).
% of population does not directly translate to % support, if it did we'd see women winning over half of every election a woman candidate enters, worldwide.
A counterfactual where there was a large Hispanic advocacy movement arguing "there are more of us, how come you are only picking Black people for stuff!" would certainly be interesting to ponder IMO
It's only a matter of time before we get there if Dems keep doing this. All these groups will be keeping score -Asian, Latino, gay, trans, disabled, Native/indigenous, "neurodiverse" and so on. FWIW I believe this was already part of the debate when Newsom made his first Senate appointment (Padilla) to replace Harris; there was some tension between Hispanic and black activists both pushing for someone representing their identity group.
I suspect the Democrats benefit there from the combination of (1) the Latino electorate being more divided by national origins and (2) basically anyone who once upon a time would have been pushing a unified "Chicano" identity also being down with the "progressive stack" for office holding. (Similar to the way many Asian-American civil rights groups are pro-affirmative action even when the application of it is shown to unambiguously hurt their own nominal constituents.)
Catherine Cortez Masto, the senior Senator from Nevada, was on the VP shortlist. She bowed out. I don’t seem to recall any really big skeletons in her closet (though a Nevadan can fill me in on this). I am inclined to believe that Harry Reid (RIP) begged her to stay on as Senator, because Nevada was/is pretty swingy and there was no guarantee at the time that a Democrat replacing her would be re-elected.
I think there is, usually, an unspoken rule that selecting a VP won’t put a Senate seat in danger. When Biden was picked as Obama’s running mate, Chris Coons was slotted into the vacancy with neither fanfare nor risk. Tim Kaine was a similarly safe pick for HRC, and Cheney for Bush II. Before that, it gets a little harder to predict because ticket-splitting was still a thing.
And Carter likely would have beaten Reagan to the punch, but unfortunately for him, he became the only president in history to serve a full term without getting an opportunity to nominate a SCOTUS justice.
I figured he'd appointed Amalya Kearse to the Second Circuit to set her up as a possible SCOTUS pick.
I suspect that if Marshall had managed to stay on the Court until Clinton's inauguration, Kearse would have been his likely pick: he hadn't formally committed to picking a woman, but there is reporting that he'd promised Hillary that he would. And he obviously couldn't pick a white person to replace Marshall - even the Republicans understood that the court couldn't revert to being nine white people after having had a non-white person on it.
Kearse was the only non-white woman on a Circuit Court of Appeals at the time.
Shirley Hufstedler was the judge that got the most speculation for Carter.
And today that I learn that Clinton did consider Kearse for AG. And Kearse is still alive today, so that would have been a massive change in place of RBG if Clinton went that route independent of Marshall.
As someone who wants to keep Trump far away from the presidency, I need Harris to be more popular. But she needs to want to help herself. The Herndon piece opens with a claim that her speech at the Munich security conference was perceived by her team as an opportunity for a reset but was hampered by a “stilted” delivery. Assuming that’s true, there is no excuse for a high profile prepared speech to be stilted- you re-write, or rehearse, or both until it’s not. Later in the piece Herndon asks an extremely reasonable (and predictable) question: she had written a high profile book about criminal justice but now she doesn’t seem to want to talk about that issue - is that true and why- her response was to cross-examine HIM. That was a great opportunity for her to tell a compelling story about how her background makes her the ideal person for this moment blah blah blah but instead she wants to litigate the question.
I feel a little bad for her- by many accounts she was a terrific senator, and one of the primary reasons for that were her considerable skills at hearings and questioning witnesses. Unfortunately those are skills that are utterly irrelevant for both the VP and presidential roles where you literally never get to do that. In the Herndon piece she even mentions that she isn’t a “pretty speeches” kind of person (and Herndon notes that a lot of people think that is an important part of the job). I suspect that she liked being senator a lot more than being VP. Certainly I assume she gets a great thrill every time she is introduced as “Madame Vice President” - but the day to day actual work - it doesn’t look like she’s having fun. Given her reluctance to clearly stake out a position that isn’t 100% safe (yes, we know she’s a champion for voting rights. I bet she’s against kicking puppies too) I wonder whether she would like the actual work of being president. She probably could have been senator for California for as long as she wanted - she was good at it and she seemed to like it - but she gave that up, to accomplish what exactly?
It’s interesting to contrast her to Barack Obama - who also spent a short time on the senate, but didn’t appear to be as accomplished a senator as she was. He apparently hated being a senator and couldn’t wait for an opportunity to actually lead. He led in some good ways and bad but the point was he actually wanted to do it. I’m not so sure about Harris.
I remember being struck that she seemed to litigate or challenge the premise of /every/ question Astead asked, at least of the ones we saw the back-and-forth on. Possibly selection bias for what parts made it in as dialogue, but still grabbed my attention
I was most struck by the line that she feels she “shouldn’t have to justify herself”--I can understand an accomplished black professional *feeling* that way, but “justify yourself” is the main job of every candidate for political office.
Agreed- and I think she has surrounded herself with people who are telling her that all the criticisms of her are rooted in racism/sexism so it’s all illegitimate. And sure- some of the hits are unfair but some of them aren’t and there are things she can and should do to address it.
I’m an accomplished professional who is not black and I don’t like feeling like I have to “justify” myself, but that’s part of life for everyone who chooses a performance-based career path.
I remember in 2008, there was a great deal of party strife about picking a Senator for the nomination. Senators just don't win the presidency. And at the time, this was true.
Barack Obama was a sufficiently competent executive that I think we may have over-corrected, because they *aren't* similar jobs. The GOP decided they were fine with Senator (albeit former Governor) Mitt Romney, of course. Later, I cannot imagine Berdinald Sanders running an effective administration (just look at who he elevated in his campaign), and I later worried the same about Warren and now Harris.
If you're looking to another branch of government, what the executive really needs is a certain, ah, ... skill in throwing staplers when some staffer screws the pooch, not tapping your sister to manage your campaign..
And I remember observing at one point during the 2008 primaries, when McCain locked up the GOP side, and Obama/Hillary were still duking it out, that we were guaranteed to have our first sitting senator become president since JFK.
Making laws and executing laws are different skill sets. Few House members have also been elected straight to the presidency. It shouldn't be suprising that the majority of presidents have first been vice presidents, governors, cabinet secretaries, and generals.
The “1/5 of presidents die (or resign) in office” statistic is a little bit misleading.
It’s very likely that Harrison, Taylor, Garfield and McKinley would have survived with modern medicine. Lincoln would have lived if he’d had any bodyguard whatsoever.
Perhaps Roosevelt and Harding wouldn’t have died if they’d been taking regular medication for their cardiovascular health? Less certain.
Of course Nixon would have resigned in any case, but only Kennedy seems to me like a president whose number had obviously come up.
Ironically, the question of succession has reasserted itself, now that the last two presidents (and perhaps the next one) have been so incredibly old. But that seems like a fluke. Presidents just aren’t pegging out like they used to.
Of course it’s worth mentioning that we had a few near misses too. Eisenhower dying of a heart attack, or Reagan getting assassinated would have been more significant if their Veeps hadn’t been basically competent and simpatico.
On the other hand, FDR had been assassinated in Chicago in 1933 we’d have had President Garner — and then we’d be sorry!
The very first assassination attempt on a president would have been highly impactful had it succeeded, and it's amazing it didn't. Andrew Jackson has someone come up to him at point blank range with two pistols, but both of them misfired.
I had to look that one up. I was hoping that the attempt had been during Jackson’s first term, so we could ponder the question “who would have been a nastier president, Jackson or Calhoun?” I could go either way.
But unfortunately, Jackson would have been succeeded by Van Buren, who was also pro-Indian Removal, anti-Bank, and in favor of expanded suffrage. Apart from having a president who was less of a would-be caudillo, I don’t think it would have made too much difference.
LBJ had almost as many heart attacks as Dick Cheney, if he'd won in 1968 it seems damn likely he would've died in office given that he had one in 1972 and 1973 after retiring
Even Kennedy would probably have been OK with modern Secret Service protection. Of course, modern Secret Service protection only exists because of Kennedy's assassination, so that's not useful as a counterfactual - but it is useful when thinking about modern Presidents.
But if the Secret Service could keep both Obama and Trump alive, then I think a successful assassination is remarkably unlikely.
In terms of health, how often does someone famous (and therefore wealthy enough to have elite healthcare) die unexpectedly anymore? People that die young tend to either die from reckless behaviour (drugs or dangerous sports or dangerously handling some sort of vehicle) or from a disease that takes a while to kill them (cancer, mostly). Both heart attacks and strokes are mostly survived these days - at least for people with access to high-quality medical treatment.
I tend to the view that any President in decent health and who won't go over 80 in their term in office is very unlikely to die in office - they might get cancer, but even most people with cancer get a couple of years from diagnosis, so you'd have to be very unlucky to catch cancer just after taking office.
Of course, once you get to people over 80, rapid deteriorations become much more common. Not everyone will be Henry Kissinger.
Sure, absolutely they do, and people aren't immortal.
All I'm really saying is that the historical rate of death for Presidents is not representative of the likely modern rate - unless we keep electing people in their mid-eighties, anyway!
At least two of the three Presidents to die in office could have been saved relatively easily by modern medicine, Harding might have been (congestive heart failure is not untreatable, but people still do die of it). All four of the assassinations would have been stopped by the modern Secret Service.
If you look at, say, the Wikipedia notable deaths list, then there are very few people dying before their mid-to-late seventies, and (excluding violent or drugs deaths, which we're presuming don't apply to Presidents), those few are nearly all cancer, strokes or heart attacks. Heart attacks and strokes are rarely fatal if the response is fast enough - but most people are not continuously monitored with rapid medical response at all times, so they can die before the medical response arrives (even if 911 responds quickly, someone has to be there to call 911). That is true for Presidents, though. There would be an immediate medical response if a President had a heart attack or a stroke now; they have some sort of monitoring at all times (probably just something like a heart-rate monitor overnight). Cancer usually gives enough warning these days for a President to step down at the next election.
I'm not saying there's no way a President dies in office any more, but that it's far less likely than it was 50 years ago.
USSS has the HAMMER team specifically for this, in addition to White House doctors and Walter Reed/Bethesda Military Medical Center; it's tactical ambulance that you can see in a POTUS motorcade.
"The Hazardous Agent Mitigation Medical Emergency Response Team (HAMMER) supports the agency’s protective mission through chemical, biological, radiological and nuclear (CBRN) detection and intervention, emergency medical support and rescue/extrication capabilities. HAMMER members receive extensive training in emergency medicine and CBRN hazards. To accomplish their mission, HAMMER personnel utilize a variety of systems to monitor for potential threats."
Heck, Harrison and Taylor probably would have survived with modern *sanitation* and plumbing. There was an article in WaPo some years back that concluded Harrison died, not from pneumonia, but from cholera, typhoid, or some kind of similar water born illness. (Of course his medical treatments did not help - he was bled, and given enemas, and medications that included ammonia and turpentine.)
There was a giant lake of raw sewage not far from the White House, and it contaminated the water used to supply the building. Harrison and Taylor were battle-hardened old soldiers, but when they drank the water (or ate the cherries), to the grave they went.
Found the original article in an academic journal “Clinical Infectious Diseases.” We’re all nerds here. Go forth and read and be happy for sanitation, plumbing, and no lakes of raw sewage: https://academic.oup.com/cid/article/59/7/990/2895539
I don’t like or dislike VP Harris. I just kind of forget she is around. I think this is part of Biden’s “don’t worry too much about who is running the ship” vibe. There have been weeks where I haven’t thought about what is going on in the White House.
This is a blessing after 4 years of daily insanity.
There was a moment early in her vp-ship where journalists tried to promote her as future of party and criticized Biden for giving her the border crisis as her issue bc it was a quagmire that would leave her less popular maybe even Matt mentioned this or just the general idea that Joe should give her some issues to build a platform on? But I think the “she is just not talented enough”crowd ended up winning out but then left us with who IS the future of the party issue. Come one Corey booker u know how to talk I think he is positioned to be the talented candidate more than Kamala if he decides to be the level headed moderate who will still fight the progressive fight guy. Such a talented speaker and knows how to “go high when they go low” and whatnot. But I was called stupid when I kept telling people Biden will be the best candidate in 2020 and I think he still is for 24.
Matt lays out the screamingly obvious route for Harris to take, but she appears to shun all thoughts of taking it. Explaining this might not be very important. My family and I saw all 20 Dem pres candidates at the Iowa Steak Fry in late 2019. Harris was startlingly bad on stage. Each candidate had 10 minutes. She CLEARLY had nothing prepared. It was hideously embarrassing. I realized she was just waiting to drop out. Then on local TV she did an interview with an Iowa politics reporter and again, awful. He asked her why she had spent so little time in Iowa. She responded by saying with Letterman style sarcasm, "Well, I'm HERE." Message: I hate Iowa. Don't be fooled. She's just a terrible retail politician, a walking disaster. She's not just sort of average. I have nothing against her, she's smart, she had a safe Senate seat, she got where she was in large part by knowing the right people in a one-party state and running TV campaigns, which is how California works. Biden screwed his party by pick8ng her, he's a genius, he can't be dumped because of her even if it were possible.
I’m a high school debate coach. Harris seems weirdly uncomfortable with public speaking for a national-level politician and criminally awful with ad libbing. Too often she sounds like a student giving a book report on a book she’s never read.
I’ve heard the multiple stories of her lack of preparation and it shows. If I were advising Harris, I would tell her to ignore her “brief” from Biden and start speaking anywhere that would take me. And I would tell her to cut the crap and read the pre-written speeches, probably through the end of her term. I would stop media interviews for the time being as well - she is turning herself into the Democrat Sarah Palin.
She needs to start laying down a record of speaking with confidence for herself and her ticket, especially given Biden’s age, his penchant for early “lids,” and his increasing struggles with public appearances. The American people respond to the appearance of competence, and Harris’ word salads aren’t cutting it.
"Barack Obama picked [Biden] to be VP because Obama thought Biden wouldn’t run for president in the future."
Was THAT widely reported? That was not why I though Biden was good pick. He had serious centrist credentials, is Catholic, and had foreign policy experience. Exactly what make him a good choice as candidate in 2020.
Harris could have been a good choice, too, if she had chosen to be Ms smart policing, smart border control, merit based immigration (recruit more people like her parents!). Regretfully, Biden should replace her with someone else to play these roles.
I actually think this is where you have to get more fatalistic about the Democratic party. The reason Harris won't talk about merit-based immigration isn't because she isn't aware of the topic (like smart but tough policing), but because she's a reasonably experienced politician aware it's not what the Democratic party is for.
I think it's more "Biden won't spend the entire second term manoeuvring to become President afterwards".
Which, to be fair, was true. This also applied to Cheney and very much didn't to the previous two second-term VPs, ie Gore and HW Bush.
That seems to be an important priority for Presidents - that their VP won't be spending a lot of time trying to be a candidate for the succession. Now, perhaps that's selfish, but I suspect that they would say that it interferes with them actually running the country in the second term.
Great framing. One thing the Times piece doesn't touch on is the fact that Harris pointedly criticized Biden during the debates and by selecting her, Biden was essentially saying, "it's politics, I'm not taking that personally." As you say, this was a case of picking someone within the mainstream of Democrats who also had the advantage of her identity.
The funny thing about Obama picking Biden because he was too old to run was (a) it essentially made Hillary the consensus choice in 2016 since she was on paper a stronger candidate than he was, and (b) it speaks to the weakness of the 2020 Democratic field that Biden was able to declare late and become the consensus candidate (though as has been pointed out in this space in the past, approval or ranked choice voting in the primary would've obviated the Bernie conundrum since there's no way he would've been the front runner).
I think Biden was picked for more reasons than just being too old to run. Obama also was transmitting reassurance that he was going to anchor his administration in a moderate orientation, which was important given concerns at the time about whether Obama was too far to the left. I'm sure there might have been a sprinkling of identity politics with it too, but the important message was that this was going to be a mainstream ticket.
Also there was the fact that Obama was young and inexperienced according to some critics...Biden was seen as bringing foreign policy expertise to the table.
I agree. I also think part of what’s contained in the “not a threat” section of picking Biden is maybe he convinced Obama he would spend his energy at elevating Obama rather than himself, which he delivered on for 8 years. If that’s what is meant by “not a threat” it is not at all exclusive with being future of party.
I feel like this piece ignores the elephant in the room in terms of Kamala Harris helping win the election, despite quoting it in the piece:
> On Aug. 11, the day the campaign announced Harris as the running mate, it raised $26 million in 24 hours.
Kamala Harris is a well-connected Democrat from one of the richest states in the union. I absolutely believe that voters don't really care about the VP pick, but *donors* definitely do, and ad dollars produce votes even if the VP's personality doesn't, so I don't think you can just wave away being "met with enthusiasm" as if it's only about minimizing complaining.
There was going to be massive, massive fund raising for the Democratic candidate regardless of whom the nominee or their VP was because the opponent was Trump. Biden was the first candidate to raise over a billion dollars and raised over 200 million more than Trump.
I guess I just have no problem with “short term” thinking in this case.
Biden’s goal was to win an effectively 50/50 election against Trump. He made what he thought was the best move to do that (by generating enthusiasm / reducing complaining). He cared less about what happened beyond that. I think that’s fine!
Think about it this way: let’s posit that Whitmer is objectively a better politician / presidential candidate in 2028. But when she’s chosen as VP, there is a risk (unclear how material, but non-zero) that the Black vote shifts slightly (~2 pts) away from Biden and towards Trump. Biden ultimately wins by 44K votes combine across Georgia, Wisconsin and Arizona. That shift, if it materializes, costs him the election. In this hypothetical, the risk with Harris is zero. Is Whitmer the right call in that case? I’d argue not.
You can certainly dispute whether it’s true that Harris would actually generate the most enthusiasm of the VP options. But IMO there’s nothing wrong with the thought process that says “let me make a pick to win this election and figure everything else out later.”
It was only a 50/50 election in hindsight. Polling was overwhelmingly in Biden’s favor. And in any case the idea that generating enthusiasm is more important to winning than not alienating undecideds needs more scrutiny.
Actually, my other comment granted a point that I don’t want to grant: it doesn’t make sense to treat every election as 50/50, because not every election is 50/50. If Obama in 2008 made a pick that prioritized the immediate win above all else, even though he was obviously an overwhelming favorite, that would have been malpractice, akin to risking an injury to a key player in the service of winning a game you’re leading by double digits. You can’t just approximate all elections to a tie in order to support the idea that short-term gain is the only relevant factor.
No, if the reporting linked in the article was correct, he considered another factor, “who will be unlikely to run for president in the future and therefore less of a problem in my administration.” Matt doesn’t like that reason either, but it is not related to winning the election. At any rate, I’ll stand my my comment: to the extent Obama ranked winnability over other considerations for a nearly unlosable election, that was malpractice. And it may have foretold other failures, such as making the stimulus too small because he didn’t like the optics of making it bigger.
Okay, fine, but then we're still left with the question of whether Harris actually was likely to be the best candidate from a winnability standpoint—and to such an extent that all other liabilities were irrelevant.
Biden said “I want to choose the person who will help me win”
MY says “you should additionally look at who would be the best candidate in 2028” and other amorphous factors
I think Biden is right and MY is wrong. Did Biden actually choose the best person to help him win? Who knows! But it’s a totally justified way of thinking about the pick.
I think that Harris got caught up in the leftward shift of most of the party. Since being savaged by the Bernie left it seems as though she has decided not to let that happen again, so no tough truths from her, thany you very much.
A lot of her “unlikeability” can be chalked up to hewing very much to the progressive party line (using all the right identity words), at a time when many voters are turned off by progressives.
How much might relate to the infighting of her team? Seems like her sister and campaign mgr were really at odds at a point in her career when it was really important to solidify her framing of big issues and she just kinda whiffed.
I think that is a stealthy source of her low approval. She's getting all of the trashing from the right that an AOC would get with none of the support fromm the progressive left.
Yeah, I think that's correct: the right regards her as being an embodiment of the progressive left, the progressive left is still in sheezacop mode.
I think there's a good argument there for her moving to a more centrist image/positioning; she can't win over the left, but there are lots of people for whom a prosecutor who thinks that crime is a serious problem is a positive image: but the only people who have that image of Harris are the sorts of Defund lefties who think it's a bad thing.
In the NYTs piece she very consistently answers that question and others like it with defensive vagueness: "be more specific" or "what do you mean by that".
Maybe the NYTs wanted to do a hit piece or something, but if not, and that's the only way she can (not) answer those questions, then that's very annoying as a voter.
Yeah the attacks on Biden in the primary are pretty unforgivable.
If a Black woman publicly called me a racist in order to help her get ahead for a promotion, I don't know that I could ever not be pissed. And that's what she did to Biden.
Kamala Harris did not decide her race or sex but she did decide not to have children. This decision is near the core of her identity and repudiates the values of most normie voters. Even Hillary understood she needed to have a kid to avoid looking like an out of touch career woman.
Children need not be biological but the experience of raising children (biological or not) is deeply defining for anyone who undergoes it. I’d argue it’s actually one of the stickiest, most ingrained identities there is to be a parent. I do not think any parent who has raised small children up to adulthood would consider having adult stepchildren even remotely comparable. Now whether that would affect a persons ability to govern and therefore should impact your vote is debatable (maybe they have more difficulty empathizing with parents and prioritize child friendly policies less?) - I personally wouldn’t give it much weight. But for people who think it’s important, it’s silly to act like her experience at a stepmother to adult children should or would have any influence.
There are also about five billion other articles, both scholarly and "popular" about how male candidates don't have nearly as much baggage with voters relating to having children or the ages of their children.
Yup. As an issue that voters may respond to either unconsciously or consciously despite its irrelevance, I guess it could be discussed, but that’s thin cover for pretending a woman is supposed to have kids to be a good leader!
Yeah, she seems really into being a grandmother. Perhaps she wanted more kids. Who knows. This all seems very personal and does not have that much bearing on being able to be a leader. Although after reading Michelle Obama's book, I have a little bit of reluctance about voting for candidates who have young children since it doesn't seem like a very good situation for young families.
Has she written a biography or publicly acknowledged the decision not to have children? Genuine question. I'm thinking maybe she just didn't fall in love or meet the right man during her childbearing years? Life can sneak up on one.
Female candidates in general are trolled for their entire identities, no matter what choices they make. These studies focusing on one aspect of female candidates prove the rule. Female candidate X made lifestyle choice Y, do voters view them unfavorably? The answer is always yes.
In one sense yes, but also it's obviously something that's important to a lot of the voting public, and would be a stupid hill to die on, trying to pretend that such a concern doesn't or shouldn't exist.
Obviously it's not insurmountable (Cory Booker, Tim Scott, etc), but it also seems obvious that voters perceive the absence of a "normal" 2.5 kid American family as more of a concern for a female candidate.
I don't want to sound condescending in saying this. But when I was in college I probably would've thought the same thing. When you're 40 and have a bunch of 40-year-old friends, the notion that childlessness would register with a significant fraction of the voting public might feel more intuitive. Not necessarily as an explicitly thought-through "issue," but more as a matter of mood affiliation. Like that some voters who would've been enthusiastic about the same candidate if she had a family will just feel vaguely blah and unconvinced by her without one.
I’m 40 and have plenty of childless friends. It is fairly common, especially among women (of whom roughly 1/3 are now unmarried at 35). The idea that they are weird outliers isn’t aligned with reality.
Yea I think you’re totally wrong here. This is a huge issue especially for women. There is inherent suspicion amongst many women for those who chose a life path without them. I’m saying this as someone who doesn’t feel that way but who knows many many people would (and that includes highly educated, Democratic, career women).
I think you are whistling past the graveyard on this, Milan. It might not be enough people to ultimately make a difference, but there's absolutely discussions about to what extent having children (and of what ages of children) helps or hurts candidates and it's suggested that childless candidates -- including Democrats -- specifically have to go out of their way to try to communicate their pro-family positions in the absence of having their own children: https://www.nytimes.com/2018/09/12/us/politics/women-midterms-children.html
Not weird at all if your goal is to maximize your odds of winning elections:
"[V]oters rate childless female candidates substantially lower than childless male candidates, mother candidates, and father candidates. Childless women also lose the traditional “female advantage” on child-care and children's issues.
Now that study was published in 2010, so maybe attitudes have changed, but I've definitely seen plenty of reporting over the years indicating that childless female candidates are penalized compared to female candidates with children (particularly older children -- per that same study, having *young* children hurts female candidates relative to male candidates with children of the same age).
Yeah I think this actually shows that Cory Booker and Tim Scott aren't serious about wanting to be president. If they really wanted it they would have found /someone/.
She was 49 when she was introduced to her husband.
I think that sentence is an entire and complete answer to the question of why she didn't have children - and I also think that having been a single mother would have been more disqualifying among the sorts of people who care about these sorts of things.
I think this handwaves her relationship with Willie Brown (he was 60 and somewhat still married) when she was 29. There's an unflattering aspect of her career trajectory that started with Willie Brown placements and then his endorsement for SF DA in 03. But to me - she clearly prioritized her career over motherhood.
Maybe a good strategy for improving Kamala Harris's image is we could have David Abbott say really gross and sexist shit about her and it will make her seem more sympathetic. It’s working really well on me right now.
I just did, too. If people dislike Harris on policy grounds or other professional issues, that’s one thing. But to slut-shame her is sexist, not to mention outdated.
I would argue that amongst traditional types the fact that she didn’t meet a husband until a more advanced age is not exonerating on the child issue. I could see it being read as “she didn’t prioritize meeting someone but instead was soullessly focused on her career”.
I wonder if there is a way she could honestly describe the situation that wouldn't sound bad: From what I can tell, the honest version is that she met a whole bunch of men who weren't husband material over many years.
The problem is "I had a load of boyfriends for 30+ years until I finally found the one I fell in love with" does not sound great, even though I suspect there are a bunch of women who will sympathise a lot with her.
You only have to look at the way that Taylor Swift and her many bad boyfriends (and her songs about them) gets treated as a joke to realise that "I've been trying to find the right guy" doesn't work.
My brother constantly comments about how Taylor Swift's love life seems so crazy and how absurd it is that her songs are all about exes. He simultaneously listens to 90s era Emo music where the guys are singing all about their exes and failed relationships.
I always find that disconnect to perfectly encapsulate the different sexual expectations b/n famous men and women in American society.
You say that Kamala Harris didn't choose her race, but I suspect that the fact that she has a white husband and (to the extent that they are understood to be hers) has white kids makes her seem less black. I remember people saying that Michelle helped Barack seem more like a part of the black community. Kamala has basically done the opposite with her personal life.
An excellent Matt take. I’m coming out of it all even more impressed with Biden. Given the perverse structural incentives and bad historical record that Matt outlines so well, and in light of the absolute collective insanity of 2020, Harris really was a reasonable choice. Biden has rarely made a totally indefensible or unreasonable move and that says a lot. Unfortunately his sober, understated record, although ostensibly what the nation wanted (normalcy soul of nation etc) risks being his undoing.
I don't want to go too far down the anti identity rabbit hole here. It clearly has some salience. But I think Harris is an illustration of just how overrated it can be. She never caught on with black voters during the primary, for what seem to me like a combination of unfamiliarity, weak retail politics, and pretty straightforward class based reasons. Biden on the other hand did by being the moderate candidate with most name recognition. Now, I think he probably also bought himself a lot of credibility by being the loyal VP of the first black president, so there's a sprinking of an identity issue. But there's this idea that if candidates don't check some identitarian box they face insurmountable odds with people in those demographic groups and it's just not true. At a certain point it becomes condescending and I think that's a big part of where the grumbling about Harris comes from, even if the issues with her have now also become overstated, which I agree is the case.
The summer of 2020 was a nutty time though, and a large % of Democrats were sincerely buying into a philosophy that said it would be racist/sexist *not* to pick a highly-qualified black woman if one is available (and one was). So Biden was playing identarian politics not to pick up black voters, but to pick up/placate elite college-educated "antiracist" voters (black & white but mostly white).
Fortunately I think the fever has mostly broken.
It's also fairly notable that the "Kerry/Edwards is the last all-white male Democratic ticket" people are mostly white.
Yeah I'm willing to bet $$$ that we will not see another Democratic ticket of two straight white cisgender able-bodied males in our lifetimes.
I think there is a reasonable chance that we will never see another Republican ticket with 2 white males.
I'm willing to bet $$$$ that we will not see a non-cisgender nominee in our lifetimes.
I dunno, how many years you think you got left? :P
The first trans politician I've seen who might have a chance is Sarah McBride in Delaware, who is running for the US House. She's 33.
She's probably too much of a Democratic Party machine politician to actually get to the White House (Biden and HW Bush are the only machine politicians to get there since the modern primary started), but she's not completely implausible in 30 years time.
I would only bet a very small amount, but I could see it happening, and we're about the same age.
IIRC that ticket over-performed the fundamentals!
This is the really important point. The Venn diagram of Black people & women vs. people where having a Black woman as VP was Very Important to them is not an exact overlap.
I think the problem is that they face insurmountable odds with staffers who proclaim to be self-appointed representatives of their own demographic groups, despite being out-of-sync with and well to the left of their demographics' median voters.
In that respect, Harris herself is most emblematic of the problem. I don't suspect she herself is as dedicated an identitarian as she's often accused of, but OTOH she's demonstrated a distinct and damning pattern of being not timid at all about embracing others' identitarian claims in support of herself, to the point of engaging in rank tokenism. She allowed herself to become a standard-bearer for the too-online-staffer set, at the exclusion of relying on basically any other strength - like, say, per Matt, the leeway to use her platform and identity to embrace moderate rhetoric. She's a one-trick-pony who failed upward into the VP slot and now short of a politically suicidal resignation can't dislodge herself without causing major damage to the party.
"one-trick-pony"
I don't think it's easy to win the race for San Francisco DA. I think it is even harder to win the statewide DA race in a state with 39 million people. And even harder to win one of two senate seats, again in a state with 39 million people. I think it's even harder for a woman and POC to do all those things [given American history and culture].
I don't think VP Harris has made all the right political choices, but I think she is exceptionally talented, and not a 'one-trick-pony'
She’s exceptionally talented among human beings; that’s different from being exceptionally talented among VP candidates.
Sure, I agree. The VP job is weird and hard to quantify it's impact. But I'd say one of the most important parts is ensuring your ticket wins - and here, Biden/Harris beat Trump/Pence in 2020. I don't know how you quantify her impact on that, but she certainly played some role.
I wish Al Gore had picked FL Sen. Bob Graham as VP - we knew FL was a EV-rich state that was going to be close even before election day, and Bob Graham was a popular FL politician. This doesn't pass Matt's test about the future Democratic leader, but I would take a win in 2000 with a sub-par VP pick.
I haven't looked at any analytics but my guess is Sen Kaine was also not a great VP pick. So I'm not trying to say VP Harris is now or ever was the optimal VP pick, but I think she has strengths and we could do a lot worse - which is a a boring assertion and I'm sure everyone here agrees with me since finding a worse VP candidate is a low bar.
Tbf, given what we now know about Lieberman, Graham was probably an improvement - Lieberman turned out to be on the right-fringe of the Democrats over Iraq. Of course, that might not have mattered if he'd been elected as there might not have been an Iraq War (indeed, possibly not a 9/11).
But on "VP picks who turned out terrible after the fact for reasons the President couldn't have known at the time", Edwards has to be the top one.
Lieberman was picked because he gave Gore some cover on the Monica Lewinsky stink that stuck to him as Clinton's VP. Because what the US wanted, the Gore campaign concluded, was a preening moralistic prig.
Bob Graham was also chair of the Senate intelligence committee with keen interest in foreign affairs, later wrote a book IIRC detailing 21 specific points where US intelligence should have but failed to stop the 9/11 plot.
No idea if as VP entering office in January 2001 he would or could have done anything as VP to stop 9/11, but there's an argument that if anyone would have done better, it would have been him.
Edwards! I forgot about that one, yeah. And he certainly exuded the charisma of a future Dem leader - outward appearances can be deceiving.
I think you've got a solid point here that she helped hold the party together. I'm just not sure she could have done that job better than anyone else.
Like, even assuming that Biden was still under the blackmail threat to pick a Black woman, there would have been at bare minimum Stacy Abrams, for instance. Picking her would have carried the additional benefit of locking down Georgia and probably helped avoid having to have those two Senate races go to runoffs. OTOH, she may have been percieved as "too Black" on a national ticket and kind of backfired with white swing voters, but that's a topic for another debate -- and kind of demonstrates that there IS a healthy debate to be had here, not just a dead end where Harris "was always the ONLY option".
With all we know now, the idea that Abrams would have been a better VP pick than Harris isn't very compelling to me. Great voter registration organizer, so I hear, but that's about it.
When you say she certainly played some role…I mean, it's conceivable that the role she played was negative. Even on a World Series-winning team there can be liabilities. And even if she wasn't a liability, there's no particular reason to think she did more for the ticket than another candidate would have. The fact of the ticket winning an election that polling suggested could be a landslide doesn't prove that Harris had a high value over replacement.
I agree, that's why I said it's hard to quantify their impact. I'd say especially so since she's from CA and it's not like you can point to helping in home swing state. (Surprisingly few modern VPs come from swing states, IMO).
The truth is always going to be the top of the ticket matters more. We can talk about the impact Lieberman, Edwards, and Kaine played in their tickets losing, but obviously they had far less impact than choices made by Gore, Kerry, and Clinton. But I'd still say a winning VP has a better chance of playing a positive role than a losing VP.
Wow, hump her resume much?
I'm not even sure what you think you're arguing against, because I didn't even elucidate the statement. I certainly didn't argue that it wasn't hard to do all those things.
FWIW, I meant that she was a one-trick-pony in the sense that her national platform is mostly based on online organizing among staffer types. She rose through the ranks of the CA Dem party, which is no mean achievement -- more than most of us here can claim to in our own careers -- but let's not mistake that for her having the sort of political savvy of, say, Gretchen Whitmer. She won bare majorities in friendly jurisdictions. She didn't build any great political organization; rather, mostly benefited from strong pre-existing CA state Dem ones -- and the only time she ever was challenged to build one (the 2020 primary), she utterly faceplanted, exiting before a single vote was cast in Iowa.
Her strongest base of support was a bunch of staffer and The Groups types on Twitter calling her a "rIsInG dEmOcRaTiC sTaR!!!111", which, as it turns out, is NOT a viable substitute for a real-world political organization. Her best asset at this point is national name ID from failing upward from the primary into a VP spot; she can't point to a single major policy success since being CA's AG, which was 6 years ago.
This is closer to where I am. I think she is a competent enough operator in a deep blue state, and it is not nothing that she was able to climb the rungs in CA. However it's a totally different ballgame at the national level and I've never seen any indication she was ready for it. The result was falling into a weird and probably very unnatural zone for her between the moderate lane and the radical lane then due to the zeitgesit and absence of any particular brand having a bunch of out of touch staffers and media types guide her into a total dead end. I temper this of course with my belief that she is a lot less consequential to Biden's fortunes than the Discourse would suggest. We're very deep into 'nothing to talk about season' with respect to 2024.
Yeah, I have to admit that although I have some pretty strong opinions here, the path forward is pretty predetermined. It's just mostly objections and complaints I have about how the process has worked out in all these suboptimal ways - I'd like to see better processes going forward.
I think it's telling that she needed a bunch of staffers and party insiders to basically blackmail Biden into picking her. If there's nothing else justifying your selection besides "a bunch of party insiders will make life hell if you don't pick the Black woman" and various platitudes about how you're "qualified" (look, EVERYONE is "qualified" at this level, we're mostly just quibbling over who goes over-and-above here), then that kind of reflects badly on your ability as a politician. I suspect she ALSO won Biden over on a personal level, and that he kinda respected that she was willing to hit him so hard in the debates, but the blackmail was what got her into the room with him in the first place.
As I suggested elsewhere, I think the boldest move (resign and challenge Newsom, hijack his housing push and claim credit for it in the 2028 primary) is the best path towards rehabilitating her resume. Despite all the shade and disparagement here, I *want* her to succeed, and I truly do believe she can still do good things for the country and party; I just want her to do so by recognizing the dead end she backed herself into, and avoiding that in the future.
What shocks me about all this is the extent to which there wasn’t any kind of plan on her part, just out-and-out opportunism.
And before anyone brings up Obama’s rank opportunism in running in 2008, the difference is that however unprepared he was, he had *a* plan. Harris was just kind of pivoting into the highest slot she could work herself into after screwing up a run she wasn’t prepared for - because anyone outside of Twitter would have told her that she didn’t have a ground game to beat anyone with, and being a RiSiNg DeMoCrAtIc StAr on Twitter wasn’t enough of a ground game to win with. By contrast, Obama made a run he wasn’t prepared for, won by actually building a damned ground game, and only THEN had to pivot on actual policy.
I'd say I more plainly recited her resume and added commentary winning those races is hard. Maybe you think it's easy and you could do it better than she did, idk.
I disagreed with your point, which I agree you didn't elucidate what it meant, I was just going off what you wrote and what I interpreted.
Tbh, not that I think it matters or that you care, but I found your response "wow, hump her resume much?" crude and unpleasant. There's no shortage of people (and yes, almost entirely men) being crude and unpleasant in internet comments sections, but I only infrequently write in SB because I hope I can find something better. And you seem annoyed at my response - so I'll try to remember to not respond to your SB comments, and it seems we will both be better off.
>> Maybe you think it's easy and you could do it better than she did, idk.
Uhh, I didn't say that?
>> Tbh, not that I think it matters or that you care, but I found your response "wow, hump her resume much?" crude and unpleasant.
I thought it was witty and acerbic. Trust me, I'm not an asshole, I just play one on TV (badly). I apologize if I crossed any lines; for future reference, you can generally assume that I'm trying to be funny. When I'm angry, I condemn things; I'm not angry right now, I'm just criticizing someone who I think deserves a lot of criticism (KH) precisely because she ignores so much constructive criticism that would be extremely valuable in her career.
I'd be sad if you felt you needed to ignore me going forward; I consider myself one of the relatively easier assholes to get along with around here. For one thing, unlike some folks, I don't go around overindexing on various culture-war complaints and seeing evil leftist activists behind every policy failure. Rather, I generally try to reconcile and synthesize different perspectives, defend unpopular ones, and hold people to account for being unreasonably worked up over shit, even if I sympathize with their basic complaints. I just also do it very aggressively and adamantly, because I strongly believe in forging a path towards a better politics.
Again, you have my apologies for coming on a bit strong there. It was just a joke, though.
“She rose through the ranks of the CA Dem party, which is no mean achievement -- more than most of us here can claim to in our own careers”
Most of us weren’t shacking up with Willie Brown when he was at the pinnacle of his influence in California Democratic politics.
Poor form, Ken.
I’m of the firm belief that generally when people I oppose are wrong, they’re wrong in ways that rarely require me to impugn their personal conduct. Harris’s failing brand of liberalism, poor organizational skills, and general hackery disprove themselves; whether she also benefited from favoritism is the LEAST interesting objection to her IMO.
It's absolutely typical form from Ken.
You mentioned, approvingly so it seemed, how she "rose through the ranks of the CA Dem party." I wasn't making an objection, but was merely pointing out that she had some well-connected help climbing that greasy pole.
“I don't suspect she herself is as dedicated an identitarian as she's often accused of…”
Well…
“She gestured at some of the art she’d brought in, on loan from various galleries and collections, describing each piece in terms of the artist’s background rather than its aesthetic qualities—Indian American woman, African American gay man, Japanese American. ‘So you get the idea,’ she said.”
https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2023/11/kamala-harris-vice-presidency-2024-election-biden-age/675439/
I think that’s at most merely evidence of the sort of ambient identitarianism that predominates on the left these days. A LOT of critic types do the exact same stuff in the highest circles of culture.
What I don’t see from her is the sort of bare-knuckled tokenism of her supporters. She seems largely content to let them make those appeals on her behalf while personally straddling a more traditionally meritocratic, mainstream-multicultural-assimilationist view (albeit with a strong left liberal tint) like Obama and Reagan.
As they say, don't get high on your own supply.
I think it was underrated Biden performed well with older devout Black voters because he had a cultural and spiritual argument to make that resonated with many of them. If you ever listened to a few of his campaign rallies, Biden would talk like a version of Jordan Peterson who didn't follow campus issues and believed in God. He shared his struggles, his life setbacks, he put it all out there. And he says that he gets it, and we've all had losses, but he understands we can all do a bit better too.
Marianne Williamson once lamented nobody talks spiritually in the Democratic party anymore, not like Bobby Kennedy, the kinds of heroes her generation grew up with. She was mostly correct except for one guy. Biden was selling a version of that not a lot of people were paying attention to. But for the ones who did, it mattered.
My "problem" has nothing to do with Kamala Harris per se. My problem is that in every presidential election for the rest of forever, there will be one expectation that one half of the Democratic ticket will be non-male, non-white, or both -- creating a sort of Lebanon-style political situation where the President must always be a Maronite Christian and the Prime Minister must always be a Sunni Muslim. Sure, it more or less keeps the peace, but it leaves a bad taste in the mouth.
I think one of the points Matt was trying to get across is that VP picks have been made based on short term "identity politics" considerations for forever and that not nearly enough consideration is given to the fact that a) 20% of VP(s) becoming President is actually quite high b) a large number of VPs become the Party's standard bearer in future elections.
What's changed is nature of what counts a identity politics (and let's face it. Race based identity politics has been a feature of American and colonial politics since, dare I say it, 1619). As Matt was alluding to, Andrew Johnson was put on the ticket in 1864 for basically identity politics reasons; he was a border state Southerner. He was NOT chosen due to long term considerations about how best to advance a) Lincoln's second term agenda b) Lincoln's long term vision for the Republic post Civil War. And America suffered for it as Johnson is definitely one of the villains as to why Reconstruction was less successful than maybe it could have been (arguably the worst political decision Lincoln ever made*.
To take a modern example. Matt alluded to the choice of Sarah Palin. I know her selection has been documented pretty extensively in books like "Game Change", but it's really hard to argue her selection wasn't made for "identity politics" reasons. The hardcore base of the GOP distrusted McCain. And specifically, they distrusted how committed he was to the social conservative side of the Party's platform. The selection of Palin was clearly made in part to mollify the religious right.
*That or putting George McClellan in charge of the Army of the Potomac. Although apparently McClellan was actually quite good at making the Army into an actual professional force. Just an absolutely terrible and overly timid battlefield general).
Re: Palin, they also thought that "we have a woman" would counter the "first black presidential candidate", which is identity politics in the modern sense
And in particular that it would win over Clinton loyalists/PUMAs.
"social conservative" isn't really an identity in the way being an ethnicity, gender, age or sexual orientation is.
Yes social conservative is not an identity. But let's be real, when we say "social conservative" we mean Christian right. Yes I know there are Orthodox Jewish voters and (it seems) conservative Muslim voters who do (or may) vote GOP in part due to having similar views regarding LBGTQ rights, family structure, abortion etc (hence why technically "social conservative" is probably more appropriate). But in regards to the driving force behind GOP social conservative politics it's clearly driven by the Christian right. It's been a pretty big identity in modern American politics since late 70s? Heck probably before that. Big difference today is pre 70s the "identity politics" aspect was in large part anti-Catholic orientation whereas today conservative Catholics are part of the same coalition.
In fact on that vein, there is very much an "identity politics" aspect as to why Italian American and Irish American voters were traditionally Democrats pre 80s. Heck Joe Biden being a Democrat is in part a legacy of that orientation. I would say being Catholic has been one of the most important aspects of identity in the entire western worlds since...Martin Luther? Since The Crusades? Since the schism between the Catholic and Greek Orthodox church?
I went to a local meeting if democrat’s during the 2020 presidential primary. The two most insufferable camps were the Bernie folks and the Harris folks.
The Bernie folks did their usual shtick about being not sufficiently liberal with a hint of “maybe there is another reason you don’t like Bernie *cough* jewish”
The Harris folks lead with the accusations of sexism and racism with very little emphasis on policy.
In liberal politics you always expect some amount of insufficient identity allegiance but I was surprised by how hard the Harris people went.
That was just one meeting of about 60 people at a pizza place in early 2019 though. I actually miss those get togethers but liberals have gone hard on the “no in person” gatherings thing since Covid (unless outdoors) and we haven’t had one of those meeting since. Which is a shame.
Wait, are they *still* going hard on no in person gatherings in the year 2023?
Some people had so little personality and sense of self that they seem to have adopted this as a facet of theirs. It's honestly sad at this point, I feel bad for them.
in the bay area where i'm from, a lot of people are still living like it's the pandemic
When I visited the Bay Area in the summer of 2022, I was happy to see that most people had moved on. Going to a Giants game where everyone was acting normal was so much needed fun.
that's great. you probably didn't see the people who were still stuck in their houses though haha
They have held a few out door things but everything else I've seen has been "zoom" meetings. I hate zoom meetings so much. They have made very work call a zoom meeting and I miss talking to someone without having to be on camera.
Like Sharty said, I find this sad.
interesting. i haven't heard much of the anti-semitism w/ bernie narrative (more so have heard from older jews who hate bernie's israel stances)
It's more that identity politics is in some ways more valuable to white liberals than it is to actual minority voters.
Or at least it has its limitations with Black voters. Black voters, more than anything, want to win and so there's a degree of pragmatism to their selection of Biden.
"Black voters, more than anything, want to win and so there's a degree of pragmatism to their selection of Biden."
Where does the idea that Black voters want to win more than other voters comes from? Seems like that should be supported by some sort of evidence because "want to win" is pretty hard to measure but beyond the default assumption that all voters "want to win". I want to win when I vote! You probably do, too.
In Obama's presidential memoir he notes that he was polling behind Clinton in South Carolina until he won the Iowa caucuses — then he jumped into the lead, because Black voters saw that he could actually win the general since he won over lots of white voters.
Fair, that's an example. But I don't think it's doing much for the general case. Doing well in Iowa is a huge deal for any candidate, especially, the one with less name-recognition. Campaigns tank or soar after Iowa routinely. And doing well with white voters wasn't really a question for Biden or one that Black voters would pay more attention to should Harris find herself primarying.
As long as Black Democrat voters are to the center of White Democrat voters (true since 2016? or so?) we can probably expect that they would prefer the more centrist candidate who is more electable and a more "pragmatic" choice for the general election. I think that basic and well-supported electoral dynamic is getting confused with some kind of vague notion of "desire to win"
Obama ran to Clinton’s left in 2008. My read of the Iowa/South Carolina saga is that Black voters really wanted to elect the first Black president, but not at the expense of risking the general election. Which is distinct from just being more centrist that white Democrats.
It was Iraq that threaded the needle for Obama. It became clear that the more "extreme" position of opposing the war was also the more popular one. This helped make Obama's other outlier characteristics race included seem like a cleaner break with the past.
What was the thinking of the Iowa voters, then? Were they getting behind him not expecting him to win overall? If his leftness vs Hillary was the clear differentiator I wouldn't necessarily expect Iowa caucus-goers to prefer him.
In any case, we're not going to have any further first Black presidents. The idea that Black voters can be counted on to always be pragmatic compared to everybody else just seems a bit under-evidenced.
Black voters have a much more realistic view of who can win -- it seems like white liberals often convince themselves that whoever they, personally, like is also the most appealing general election candidate (see, e.g., the never-ending "Bernie would have won" takes from 2016.)
But again - where do we get the idea that Black voters are immune from this type of thinking, as opposed to, say, Hispanic voters or White working class D voters or really anybody else.
The observation seems to me to be more about white liberal voters, whose opinions dominate the media and twitter and so are easy to get a feel for (although I'm not sure those opinions are really so representative of the median white liberal). But where do see that Black voters are better at predicting election results in general and why would they be?
Probably from actual voting behavior.
Was Hillary a good choice in 2016? Even if you say she was, you're trying to make case based on something like 3 data points.
Like I said above, it's well-understood that the median Black D is more to the center than the median White democrat, since at least 2016 or maybe earlier. A group of more centrist voters is more likely to pick more electable candidates in the general election.
But this would be true of white working class voters, hispanic working class voters, pacific islander working class voters, etc.
Double consciousness?
Conversely, and to your point, is there any actual evidence that "there are certain things that Harris as a Black woman “can” say that Joe Biden as a white man “can’t” say — i.e., things that are moderate-coded about race and gender matters?"
What exactly is going to happen if Biden says moderate-coded things about race and gender matters? Some people will complain! But those people also complain vociferously when, e.g., Trump says right-coded things -- or, for that matter, moderate-coded things -- about race and gender matters, and this doesn't seem to stop people from planning to vote for Trump.
Whether Biden would profit from saying moderate-coded things seems to me to come down to the simple empirical question of how popular or not such things are with potential Democratic voters. I strongly suspect that the number of voters whose main focus is on the meta-level question of *who* is espousing some position is way too small to overcome the effect of that position's underlying popularity. But I could be wrong.
I think it definitely stops some people from planning to vote for Trump, which is why he's done badly among educated voters relative to previous Republicans.
I think it is reasonable to go down the identity rabbit hole. Because folks are mostly Democrats here, they don't quite see how Republicans see it when Biden was essentially forced into choosing a Black woman. I agree that Harris was qualified, but it smells bad to Republicans (and a lot of centrists) that Biden started with a racial and gender identity first, then looked for candidates. It seems like he bought a couch, then built a house to fit the couch. It just feels discriminatory, like 2 wrongs make a right. Choosing her animated the opposition.
As I've noted before, you know who was also a Democratic Senator who shown no great aptitude in winning over black voters outside of their state as Democrat's are expected too in their prior Presidential runs? Joseph Robinette Biden, before becoming VP for two terms.
Like, for all the talk of identity politics, Presidential campaigns aren't things where somebody gets 4% of the vote, but wins 25% of the Hispanic vote, or whatever. If you run a successful campaign, you get a lot of white, black, Hispanic, Asian, gay, etc. votes in a Democratic primary. If you don't, you don't, even if you're a perfect match.
I think it was valuable to have a black female candidate, and she was compelling and did some things well. think it was counterproductive to label as racist anyone who doubted her ability to excel at retail politics. I still sort of think with the right team she could do well. Too many cringey moments though.
“with the right team she could do well”. But could she? The fact that she apparently goes through staffers like a toddler goes through cheerios makes me think the issue is less the people around her and more her.
An integral part of succeeding in politics (as well as many other things) is picking that good team.
I think this is an excellent point...Early on in the primary I was pretty keen on her...that did not last long as she did a terrible job running. An earlier posted mentioned that she could be a phenomenally high performing person but still be beneath the bar as a VP or presidential candidate.
I think we are confusing good with elite. She was a good candidate at the state level but is not a great.
My understanding is that the Harris office turnover was primarily a feature of the first year or so and that her staff has been much more stable since then.
The larger point makes sense but fyi white, non-college D voters are still a big block of voters.
https://www.pewresearch.org/politics/2020/06/02/the-changing-composition-of-the-electorate-and-partisan-coalitions/
Crazy how fast that share is declining, but still.
Harris needs to aggressively seize the moment and boldly recreate herself as a dynamic leader. In order to psyche herself up for the task, she should paste Matt's stirring words on her mirror and recite them as an affirmation every morning:
"Many past VPs have been picked for much worse reasons!"
I think that although it would immediately be seen as politically suicidal of her to resign, her best shot here is to resign and make a run at Newsom.
1. She's still popular in CA, enough to give Newsom a heck of a fight, and probably actually beat him.
2. Newsom's (relatively) unpopular in CA, unpopular nationally, and needs to be knocked down a peg in order to ward off his dangerous aspirations to national office. It would just plain be the most noble thing to do for the party.
3. Governing CA for a few years sets her up for a triumphant return in 2028. "I did what I thought was best for my country and my party, and look how it worked. We kept the White House in 2024. I gave Gavin Freaking Newsom the shellacking he deserved, that entitled prick. I used my VP experience to put California back on the right track. We're well on our way to leading the nation in solving the housing crisis, and I can bring this platform across the country in order to keep our cities and suburbs livable while embracing the new green economy." THAT is a strong primary pitch, stronger than anything she could muster in 2024 or 2028 just on her current resume. Certainly strong enough to give her a fighting chance against Whitmer in 2028.
[Ed: The funny part is, she'd mostly be cruising off of Newsom's hard work putting together the housing bills he has done, but at the same time, she could probably wield the coalitions and internal bureaucracy just as well as he has in order to keep the wheels of housing progress moving forward.]
I really, really don't think Newsom is anywhere near unpopular enough with Democrats for this to be viable
I suspect his numbers ought to have recovered from his scandals by this point, but I wouldn't mistake that for enduring popularity. I think a solid majority of CA Dems would pick Harris over him.
Newsom is term-limited and won't run for governor again. The next gubernatorial election isn't until 2026.
I thought Newsom was term limited?
Yep, turns out his second term ends 2026. Ugh.
The timing kinda sucks, I guess. It would've been easier to challenge him back in 2022 or 2021 (during the recall), but that would've been an awkward exit from the VP-ency. And now running for 2026 leaves her in the lurch for the next 2 years and barely a year or so in office before having to start campaigning for 2028. She'd be 62-63 in the 2028 primary, and 66-67 in 2032, the latter of which would be WAY too old particularly if we expect the current anti-gerontocracy sentiment to continue building steam.
There's a strong case Biden should've picked her for the Supreme Court over Ketanji Brown Jackson and should still consider her for a SCOTUS opening should one come up (though age is somewhat of an issue). As I mentioned ages ago, Harris's political record has some weird parallels with Earl Warren's (both went Bay Area DA->CA AG->CA statewide elected--Governor for Warren, Senator for Harris->VP nominee--though Warren was running mate to Thomas E. Dewey in the race where he famously defeated Truman). And there have been lots of calls in the legal community to put a Supreme Court justice who (1) did not rise through the federal courts and (2) did not attend an Ivy League law school (or Notre Dame), to combat a sense that the Supreme Court has become too much of an ivory tower. (It'll always be an ivory tower, of course, but taking a few stories off might be a good thing.)
A SCOTUS seat is also one of the very few things you could plausibly offer a sitting Vice President to induce them to step down.
Agree, though, then he would have faced pressure to replace her as VP with another black woman (as Newsom did)
True, but perhaps there'd be countervailing pressure to find a VP who could win.
The fatal flaw with the SCOTUS seat argument now (it would have been fine for filling Breyer's seat when it came up) is that a new VP has to be confirmed by both houses of Congress, and with the Republicans now controlling the House, they'd have a high incentive to stonewall that confirmation, just in case Biden dies and then they can get [insert whoever the hell is going to be Speaker] in the White House.
If someone wants to write a fun story: Harris gets confirmed to SCOTUS, the Republicans still can't get their act together to pick a Speaker, Biden dies and Patti Murray becomes President.
The Republicans would get their act together very quickly if there was even a hint on Biden dying.
And to make the story more fun, we can repeat the observation that the Speaker doesn't have to be a House member.
It is early January 2041, and the House of Representatives has been without a speaker for almost 18 years. In desperation, to try to finally break the impasse, both parties agree to vote for former British Prime Minister and natural-born US citizen Boris Johnson, who had moved to the US in 2024 and resided continuously in the country thereafter. However, House members could not have foreseen that, just days before the inauguration of the Unity Party ticket of President Pete Buttigieg and Vice President Ivanka Trump, Speaker Johnson would be bedridden by COVID 19 variant 3.76.a.GIV.9.i.Q.%.D(8). Nor would they have believed, even had you told them, that, after accidentally hearing the word "falafel" repeated three times in succession, John Walker Lindh's secret Taliban brainwashing would be reactivated, causing him just before noon on January 20, 2041 to hijack a commercial jetliner leaving Ronald Reagan Washington National Airport . . . .
One can infer that the author of this post came of age sometime before the 2030s as they refer to DCA by the older common name that was in use prior to its re-christening on July 26th, 2031 as Bernie Sanders Memorial Airport.
"...taking a few stories off might be a good thing....."
Ideally you'd remove the lowest stories first, e.g. the first floor and basement. The upper stories will take care of themselves after that.
Easier said than done.
I think she'd have the best chance of doing this if Biden died and she took over in a manner that knocked all of our socks off, like a complete boss. But could she really pull this off? I hope so.
This analysis is a bit strange. Decisions are always easier in hindsight. I like Whitmer but even from the vantage point of today (much less summer 2020) it’s not totally obvious she would be doing better than Harris - VP is a thankless role whoever holds it and many many politicians struggle to scale from an effective state level leader to a national one.
And as I commented on a similar post of Nate Silvers recently, priority #1, 2, and 3 in picking a VP is winning your election. Biden clearly thought picking Harris would keep momentum strong, avoid factional infighting that could impact turnout, and help beat Trump. Despite Harris’ current unpopularity I have not seen analysis to suggest she was a drag in 2020.
Also, Thomas Jefferson was also VP.
Feels like you're arguing past MY's (stronger) points here. You can argue that VP priorities 1, 2 and 3 should be winning the election, but as MY pointed out, if you do win you are very likely ALSO selecting a future president, while the odds that you're VP choice is the reason you secured 40,000 extra votes in Wisconsin are extremely remote.
And maybe it's not obvious that Whitmer would have been the better choice, but MY's whole point in that section is that nobody was thinking about future elections or future leadership or even the future of the Biden 2020 campaign...they were only thinking as far as a single news cycle.
See I agree with Peter and just disagree with this. If priorities 1, 2 and 3 are winning the election — and not just any election, the most consequential election of our lifetimes (TM) — then you do the thing that will make you even marginally more likely to win the election and just ignore everything that comes after.
I don’t see how you can square the argument that you should prioritize winning but also prioritize future potential. You can only prioritize one thing!
This would make more sense if I thought that picking Harris helped win the election more than almost any other serious VP candidate - excluding Abrams who would have been worse than Harris. How did picking Harris help win the election more than Whitmer would have?
If you believe that negative coverage about Whitmer being white would have dampened enthusiasm for the ticket.
The challenge in that election is that Biden could have lost two million votes in California, and if he had picked up 100k in MI, PA and AZ his victory would have been far more secure.
Yeah agree - but why would a decline in enthusiasm based on negative coverage be limited to CA and not spread to (black) voters in PA, GA, WI, and AZ?
If you believe - as the Biden team did - that having Harris on the ticket would generate more positive coverage, then what’s the rationale for Whitmer?
Again you can quibble with that assertion. But the argument MY seems to be making is “they should have thought more about how much better Whitmer would be than Harris down the line” which IMO is a flawed premise.
I think picking a governor during the height of the pandemic would have created problems of its own.
Would you elaborate?
There was a huge spike in COVID deaths in Michigan right around Election Day 2020 (https://vitalstats.michigan.gov/osr/CVD19/CVD19Sum.asp). What if that had happened say one month before the election? How would the sitting governor of Michigan been viewed as she tirelessly campaigned for the Biden-Whitmer ticket? Or would she have already resigned as governor, handing the baton to Garlin Gilchrist (who?) to manage this crisis? Or would she have been forced to stop campaigning in this tightrope of an election, with the prospect of Trump triumphing?
You can only maximally prioritize one thing. When you buy, say, a car, you probably balance safety, comfort, price, gas milage and a bunch of other concerns. You don't buy narrow you're selection down to only Nissan Leaf's or only the cheapest car you could possibly buy.
The entire point of MY's post (it's almost in the title) was that the VP picks have important and somewhat predictable (Biden could die, for example) consequences years after the campaign ends and those consequences should be taken more seriously.
Winning the current election is important and VP choice is part of it. But in 2020 that also seemed to be barely prioritized when compared to shorter term "winning the news cycle" thinking.
Every election is the most important consequential, btw.
Yeah that part about most consequential was a joke. But since it feels that way to the base, you really don’t want to mess around with non-electoral considerations.
My problem with the article is that pretty much everything else MY writes on this topic encourages Dems to (I’m paraphrasing) “do what you need to do and say what you need to say to win (even if you are going to enact some different policy later).”
And yet now he’s advocating a lesser focus on purely winning. Why?
Well he's still talking about winning, he's just saying don't discount future elections so much. You'd never trade a guaranteed win today for 2 guaranteed losses in the future. If you discount the future too much you're just kicking the can of electoral considerations down the road.
Yeah but you can let another primary shake that out. If nobody likes Harris, she won’t win, name recognition boost from being VP notwithstanding.
Well, he says in the piece that VP selection actually has a negligible impact on winning. *Caring* about winning isn't a good reason to do something unless that thing *actually helps you win.*
Sure but it’s also not clear how you’d know who is going to be the best candidate in 2028 either.
Nothing against Whitmer, but let’s not forget that in 2020 she had been governor for less than two years and won in the Democratic landslide of 2018. She had done a good job on Covid, but that has clearly lost salience. And her effectiveness over the past couple of years was unknowable at the time.
Largely because, as he pointed out, the VP selection has almost nothing to do with the election. Outside of screwing it up badly (Palin), whoever you pick is going to do virtually nothing to impact the election. So if it's pointless to select it based on the outcome of the election, you should prioritize things like "ability to be the standard bearer of the party when they're on the top of the ticket".
“Ability to be the standard bearer of the party when they’re at the top of the ticket” is pretty much unknowable eight years out, though. And it’s obviously influenced by what happens while they’re VP.
So I’d argue it’s equally pointless to select based on hypothetical future value.
It's so hard to win 3 terms in a row for the same party anyways. Why even bother optimizing VP selection for this...
Was it that obvious that there was a far superior person to be the leader of the Democratic party for the decade or so after Biden? Maybe Harris wasn't perfect, but no one else was either. Whitmer is certainly a very competent person but who knows, on the national stage she might have flamed out as badly as "great on paper" Ron DeSantis has. Steve Bullock and John Hickenlooper looked great on paper too but no one is mourning their disappearance. I had great hopes for John Fetterman but unfortunately shit happens and I don't think that anymore.
It's actually hard to know for sure who is a locked-down future leader without putting them through the fire of a national campaign.
Well, prior to being picked for VP, Harris *had already gone* through the fire of a national campaign—with a much more sympathetic electorate—and she was a total flop. So one should assume she had a negative value-over-replacement compared to any other feasible candidate.
Same would be true for Joe Biden, twice. It’s just genuinely hard to handicap.
Well, sure, and in fact *Obama picked Joe Biden precisely because he thought he wouldn't try to run for president in the future!* If he had known Biden would run for president anyway, maybe he would have picked a better standard-bearer!
But this rests on the assumption that Biden either (a) forgot to consider that his running mate might become the president in the future or (b) secretly thought in the summer of 2020 that Harris was a worse potential future President than his available alternatives. I’m not sure why we would think that either is the case.
According to Yglesias's piece that we're commenting under, the Biden team didn't consider future electability much, but to the extent they may have, they may have followed the pattern of past VP picks and put more importance on "not a threat to Biden". Isn't that basically the thrust of MY's summary of the available info on the matter?
This has to be one of the weirdest comments sections on a S/B post I've seen. It's like nobody actually read the post and is instead just commenting about Harris as VP. I'm baffled about some of the takes on here.
I don’t think we are talking about future electability, we are talking about the running mate’s potential as a future President, and right there in the (very good) Herndon piece, right after the section MY quotes you have Anita Dunn saying “It was a governing decision...Who can be president, if necessary? But really, Who can be a good partner for me in terms of governing and bringing this country back from the precipice.” The idea that they weren’t looking at the running mate as a future president seems woefully under supported in Matt’s analysis.
If I were Anita Dunn, that's what I'd say to a reporter as well.
We are certainly talking about future electability because one of Matt's points is that the VP is very often a candidate in the future, and sometimes they win and sometimes they lose, so their electability seems relevant.
One of the immutable rules of VP selection is that the presidential nominee will never pick someone he thinks will outshine them. This is also why VPs are never more popular than the President. It's built into the job description.
Jefferson probably shouldn't count, since he was elected before the Twelfth Amendment and so wasn't "picked" in the same sense. Of course, this implies that Adams shouldn't count either.
TBH I thought “Adams doesn’t really count” when I got to that line in the piece.
That was going to be one of my first comments if I wasn't a person experiencing Westernness.
If Whitmer had been VP, then she wouldn't have been the Gov. of Michigan for the last 3 years. Instead she'd have been showing up at awkward ribbon-cutting events not important enough for Biden.
Agree with this - hard to assume that Whitmer fulfills her sort of vague potential popularity when put in the spotlight. Running for President is just about required to properly test future VPs.
And I wound never advise a candidate running for office to think much about the VP’s potential as POTUS. Impossible to really project that - it’s a theoretical exercise. As long as the candidate meets a reasonable standard, you should worry mostly about generating excitement and not getting criticized.
I thought the stranger part of the analysis was questioning Obama’s selection of Biden. It might be on accident but he picked a winner! Seems like he should have framed this as right result wrong reason but sounded more like he was saying it was a mistake. Perhaps the ideas about obama picking him bc he wasn’t a future threat are a bit exaggerated. Obama is not known for being insecure.
“He picked a winner” seems a bit simplistic; if he had picked someone younger, that person probably would also have become a winner (maybe even winning on 2016!), with the youth to be more popular and have an easier road to being a repeat winner.
If Beau hadn't died and Hillary hadn't cut a deal with the party that it was her turn, Biden would've probably ran — and won — in 2016. https://www.slowboring.com/p/2016-important
In Biden vs. Clinton vs. Bernie 2016, Bernie isn’t buoyed by the not-Clinton vote and doesn’t catch on to nearly the same degree. I can see the case for Biden or Clinton winning. Either way, the nominee comes out of a more regular primary much better and we avoid a Trump presidency altogether.
Maybe. It would have been a very painful primary race, especially with all the people thinking it was Hillary's turn.
I think that Biden would have won the general. Would he have won the primary though? Or would he and Hillary have split the "centrist" vote and Bernie won? Which leads to the interesting question - does Bernie beat Trump? I think probably not, but maybe...?
If Biden runs in 2016, Bernie drops out after getting 12% in NH, and endorses Biden.
What makes you think that?
Because I think there is generally a floor of 25% for Bernie, but his ceiling is probably about 40%
If Bernie runs, then drops out and endorses Biden, I think that's actually bad for Biden. Because the likely reason is that Biden has shifted left to pick up that endorsement and those votes. But I don't really think Biden has tremendous credibility with the left the way that Bernie does, so I suspect their support isn't nearly is strong or passionate.
So then you have Biden running against Clinton who is going to hammer away at him on identity issues - he's an old white dude who failed every other time, why would this be different. She's a woman and the time for a woman president is now. I think in the Democratic primary that a winning message and she beats Biden.
Well I think for Biden to have run, Hillary would've had to sit 2016 out. But I also do think that 2016 Bernie would've beaten Trump (though 2020 Bernie would've lost).
Yeah, I don't see Hillary sitting out unless she thinks she has no chance of winning and I think it would have been very hard for her to believe that.
I'm less certain either way with Bernie. If forced to choose, I think he's a worse candidate than Hillary, but maybe not?
The biggest challenge is that for the Democrats to win a third term after two with Obama, the public needs to be pretty happy with the way things are going. Bernie runs as a kind of repudiation of Obama's approach and I think if the public is in on repudiating Obama, they vote for a Republican. Lot of uncertainty in that particular race though.
True, and this hypothetical younger person may also have won, but I dunno John Edwards was a young competitor back then, so was Hilary.
Biden had a lot more Washington experience, especially in the Senate, than Obama. I think Obama was planning on relying on Biden to help steer things through Congress. Not unlike Bush picking Cheney for his greater DC experience, especially in foreign policy.
I am disappointed by the furtherance of this identity quota stuff - the "I will choose a woman for X" and "I promise to fill this seat with a black person" etc. Biden has done it twice, mind you -- with Harris and then with Ketanji Brown Jackson. Gavin Newsom has also done it and I think there's a good chance it'll become a norm on the Democratic side not only to keep track of these little quotas but to do so in such a public, pre-arranged way. That's the part that especially gets me. What's the benefit of announcing in advance that you are limiting your pool? Doesn't it undercut the choice from the get-go -- even when they are clearly qualified -- by making them into an "affirmative action" candidate? That's a whole idea that most Americans dislike, and it adds that extra sprinkle of doubt about whether you picked the best person. Even if identity politics factors into your choice (because it will), why make it so darn explicit? You box yourself in and you don't do the selection any favors.
Not to mention, in the private sector, we don't do this. For various reasons, we don't publicly announce that the next manager we hire is going to be Latino or LGBTQ+ or a disabled veteran or whatever, even if we are sensitive to the idea of representation in our ultimate selections. And the reality is that normie voters look at picking a VP or a cabinet member or SCOTUS appointee that way too: they see it as a job and most bristle at such an explicit quota system.
I agree. I blame Quota King Ronald Regan for this tradition!
https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/politics/1980/10/15/reagan-pledges-he-would-name-a-woman-to-the-supreme-court/844817dc-27aa-4f5d-8e4f-0ab3a5e76865/
Can people please stop with this silly rejoinder. First, it fails on the count of whataboutism. Second it ignores the question of degree and context. For a conservative to promise to finally appoint the first woman ever for scotus , with women being 50% of the population, isn’t the same as for a liberal governor (Newsome) to promise to appoint the *second* female black senator from his state (3% of population).
No. The principle involved overrides your reverse engineered justifications as to why Saint Ronnie shouldn't be called out for publically eschewing individual accomplishments in favor of quota-style slot filling.
Please try to read before you respond. In the real world "principles" don't exist in a vacuum. That was precisely my point. And I think I saw you in SB for a while now, no? If nothing else being a subscriber here should disillusion you from the simple black-and-white worldview according to which justifying one action of one republican president makes one a gop groupie ("Saint Ronnie"). Some of us try to think for ourselves.
It was also wrong when Reagan did it. However, it's easier to pull such a maneuver when you're not the party that's associated with affirmative action and identity group representation. It's a weakness and stereotype for Democrats that they are seen as thinking first about identity and then about competence, that they are "for" hiring less qualified applicants who can check a special box. Why amplify the negative perception?
The only explicit promise Biden made with his VP selection was to pick a woman which I think is basically net neutral or even slightly positive from an electoral point of view: women are half the population and slightly more than half of the electorate.
OK, but then the George Floyd / BLM summer happened. And because he had already limited himself to a woman, Biden then had to square that unnecessary self-imposed limitation with a new political reality: sudden heavy pressure (from people who would've voted for him anyway) for his pick to be a black person. He would have had more flexibility had he not proclaimed the sex limitation up front.
I just fail to see the political upside of announcing ahead of time that you are going to limit yourself. You can still pick the woman, the black person, the deaf Korean-American lesbian, whatever. But at least make it look like you were choosing based on competence and not identity, especially when that's something Dems have a bad rep for? Joy Reid could still gush over the Kamala selection on MSNBC either way, but you at least avoid the negative perception of explicitly making the identity tick box the reason for the pick. Regular voters wonder whether you passed over someone better. And they know that you've openly, vocally, brazenly pre-discriminated, which is something they know they can't do at their own jobs. "I want the absolute best person for this role" is something that frankly codes as more...American value-wise to a normal voter than "I will only hire a woman" or "I will only hire a black person."
Going back and looking at media coverage, I see you are correct that Biden himself technically only committed to nominating a female VP candidate, but there were also tons of news stories about how John Lewis, Jim Clyburn, and other senior black political figures were pushing Biden to specifically nominate a black woman, so I think that bleeds over into people's perception about what Biden promised to do (especially when he ultimately did nominate a black woman).
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/joe-biden-john-lewis-woman-of-color-running-mate-vice-president/
https://www.cnn.com/2020/11/07/politics/clyburn-biden-black-woman-running-mate-cnntv/index.html
I mean, if people believe things that are not in fact true that doesn’t make them true.
That's an accurate statement of logic, but I'm not sure it fits well with popularism.
This is like the inverse of what George Costanza says:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vn_PSJsl0LQ
% of population does not directly translate to % support, if it did we'd see women winning over half of every election a woman candidate enters, worldwide.
A counterfactual where there was a large Hispanic advocacy movement arguing "there are more of us, how come you are only picking Black people for stuff!" would certainly be interesting to ponder IMO
It's only a matter of time before we get there if Dems keep doing this. All these groups will be keeping score -Asian, Latino, gay, trans, disabled, Native/indigenous, "neurodiverse" and so on. FWIW I believe this was already part of the debate when Newsom made his first Senate appointment (Padilla) to replace Harris; there was some tension between Hispanic and black activists both pushing for someone representing their identity group.
I suspect the Democrats benefit there from the combination of (1) the Latino electorate being more divided by national origins and (2) basically anyone who once upon a time would have been pushing a unified "Chicano" identity also being down with the "progressive stack" for office holding. (Similar to the way many Asian-American civil rights groups are pro-affirmative action even when the application of it is shown to unambiguously hurt their own nominal constituents.)
Catherine Cortez Masto, the senior Senator from Nevada, was on the VP shortlist. She bowed out. I don’t seem to recall any really big skeletons in her closet (though a Nevadan can fill me in on this). I am inclined to believe that Harry Reid (RIP) begged her to stay on as Senator, because Nevada was/is pretty swingy and there was no guarantee at the time that a Democrat replacing her would be re-elected.
I think there is, usually, an unspoken rule that selecting a VP won’t put a Senate seat in danger. When Biden was picked as Obama’s running mate, Chris Coons was slotted into the vacancy with neither fanfare nor risk. Tim Kaine was a similarly safe pick for HRC, and Cheney for Bush II. Before that, it gets a little harder to predict because ticket-splitting was still a thing.
My point is that he did not explicitly restrict himself to picking a nonwhite VP!
And Carter likely would have beaten Reagan to the punch, but unfortunately for him, he became the only president in history to serve a full term without getting an opportunity to nominate a SCOTUS justice.
I figured he'd appointed Amalya Kearse to the Second Circuit to set her up as a possible SCOTUS pick.
I suspect that if Marshall had managed to stay on the Court until Clinton's inauguration, Kearse would have been his likely pick: he hadn't formally committed to picking a woman, but there is reporting that he'd promised Hillary that he would. And he obviously couldn't pick a white person to replace Marshall - even the Republicans understood that the court couldn't revert to being nine white people after having had a non-white person on it.
Kearse was the only non-white woman on a Circuit Court of Appeals at the time.
Shirley Hufstedler was the judge that got the most speculation for Carter.
And today that I learn that Clinton did consider Kearse for AG. And Kearse is still alive today, so that would have been a massive change in place of RBG if Clinton went that route independent of Marshall.
As someone who wants to keep Trump far away from the presidency, I need Harris to be more popular. But she needs to want to help herself. The Herndon piece opens with a claim that her speech at the Munich security conference was perceived by her team as an opportunity for a reset but was hampered by a “stilted” delivery. Assuming that’s true, there is no excuse for a high profile prepared speech to be stilted- you re-write, or rehearse, or both until it’s not. Later in the piece Herndon asks an extremely reasonable (and predictable) question: she had written a high profile book about criminal justice but now she doesn’t seem to want to talk about that issue - is that true and why- her response was to cross-examine HIM. That was a great opportunity for her to tell a compelling story about how her background makes her the ideal person for this moment blah blah blah but instead she wants to litigate the question.
I feel a little bad for her- by many accounts she was a terrific senator, and one of the primary reasons for that were her considerable skills at hearings and questioning witnesses. Unfortunately those are skills that are utterly irrelevant for both the VP and presidential roles where you literally never get to do that. In the Herndon piece she even mentions that she isn’t a “pretty speeches” kind of person (and Herndon notes that a lot of people think that is an important part of the job). I suspect that she liked being senator a lot more than being VP. Certainly I assume she gets a great thrill every time she is introduced as “Madame Vice President” - but the day to day actual work - it doesn’t look like she’s having fun. Given her reluctance to clearly stake out a position that isn’t 100% safe (yes, we know she’s a champion for voting rights. I bet she’s against kicking puppies too) I wonder whether she would like the actual work of being president. She probably could have been senator for California for as long as she wanted - she was good at it and she seemed to like it - but she gave that up, to accomplish what exactly?
It’s interesting to contrast her to Barack Obama - who also spent a short time on the senate, but didn’t appear to be as accomplished a senator as she was. He apparently hated being a senator and couldn’t wait for an opportunity to actually lead. He led in some good ways and bad but the point was he actually wanted to do it. I’m not so sure about Harris.
I remember being struck that she seemed to litigate or challenge the premise of /every/ question Astead asked, at least of the ones we saw the back-and-forth on. Possibly selection bias for what parts made it in as dialogue, but still grabbed my attention
I was most struck by the line that she feels she “shouldn’t have to justify herself”--I can understand an accomplished black professional *feeling* that way, but “justify yourself” is the main job of every candidate for political office.
Agreed- and I think she has surrounded herself with people who are telling her that all the criticisms of her are rooted in racism/sexism so it’s all illegitimate. And sure- some of the hits are unfair but some of them aren’t and there are things she can and should do to address it.
I’m an accomplished professional who is not black and I don’t like feeling like I have to “justify” myself, but that’s part of life for everyone who chooses a performance-based career path.
I remember in 2008, there was a great deal of party strife about picking a Senator for the nomination. Senators just don't win the presidency. And at the time, this was true.
Barack Obama was a sufficiently competent executive that I think we may have over-corrected, because they *aren't* similar jobs. The GOP decided they were fine with Senator (albeit former Governor) Mitt Romney, of course. Later, I cannot imagine Berdinald Sanders running an effective administration (just look at who he elevated in his campaign), and I later worried the same about Warren and now Harris.
If you're looking to another branch of government, what the executive really needs is a certain, ah, ... skill in throwing staplers when some staffer screws the pooch, not tapping your sister to manage your campaign..
Minor correction: Romney became senator after 2012.
Yikes, time flies.
Only three sitting senators have won the presidency: Harding, Kennedy, and Obama.
Surprising that this is so low.
And I remember observing at one point during the 2008 primaries, when McCain locked up the GOP side, and Obama/Hillary were still duking it out, that we were guaranteed to have our first sitting senator become president since JFK.
Making laws and executing laws are different skill sets. Few House members have also been elected straight to the presidency. It shouldn't be suprising that the majority of presidents have first been vice presidents, governors, cabinet secretaries, and generals.
Makes sense.
That suggests that perhaps Amy Klobuchar might be better than some expect?
That is the joke, but yes she was in fact my dream pick for 2020.
It's ironic that good senatorial skills make for bad VP skills, since the VP presides over the Senate.
The “1/5 of presidents die (or resign) in office” statistic is a little bit misleading.
It’s very likely that Harrison, Taylor, Garfield and McKinley would have survived with modern medicine. Lincoln would have lived if he’d had any bodyguard whatsoever.
Perhaps Roosevelt and Harding wouldn’t have died if they’d been taking regular medication for their cardiovascular health? Less certain.
Of course Nixon would have resigned in any case, but only Kennedy seems to me like a president whose number had obviously come up.
Ironically, the question of succession has reasserted itself, now that the last two presidents (and perhaps the next one) have been so incredibly old. But that seems like a fluke. Presidents just aren’t pegging out like they used to.
Of course it’s worth mentioning that we had a few near misses too. Eisenhower dying of a heart attack, or Reagan getting assassinated would have been more significant if their Veeps hadn’t been basically competent and simpatico.
On the other hand, FDR had been assassinated in Chicago in 1933 we’d have had President Garner — and then we’d be sorry!
The very first assassination attempt on a president would have been highly impactful had it succeeded, and it's amazing it didn't. Andrew Jackson has someone come up to him at point blank range with two pistols, but both of them misfired.
He then proceeded to beat the hell out of the would be assassin if I’m not mistaken.
Or at least tried to with his cane, it's probably unknown as to just how much hell beating he inflicted.
He really never met a situation he didn’t believe could be solved with violence. Preferably extreme violence.
I had to look that one up. I was hoping that the attempt had been during Jackson’s first term, so we could ponder the question “who would have been a nastier president, Jackson or Calhoun?” I could go either way.
But unfortunately, Jackson would have been succeeded by Van Buren, who was also pro-Indian Removal, anti-Bank, and in favor of expanded suffrage. Apart from having a president who was less of a would-be caudillo, I don’t think it would have made too much difference.
LBJ had almost as many heart attacks as Dick Cheney, if he'd won in 1968 it seems damn likely he would've died in office given that he had one in 1972 and 1973 after retiring
Even Kennedy would probably have been OK with modern Secret Service protection. Of course, modern Secret Service protection only exists because of Kennedy's assassination, so that's not useful as a counterfactual - but it is useful when thinking about modern Presidents.
But if the Secret Service could keep both Obama and Trump alive, then I think a successful assassination is remarkably unlikely.
In terms of health, how often does someone famous (and therefore wealthy enough to have elite healthcare) die unexpectedly anymore? People that die young tend to either die from reckless behaviour (drugs or dangerous sports or dangerously handling some sort of vehicle) or from a disease that takes a while to kill them (cancer, mostly). Both heart attacks and strokes are mostly survived these days - at least for people with access to high-quality medical treatment.
I tend to the view that any President in decent health and who won't go over 80 in their term in office is very unlikely to die in office - they might get cancer, but even most people with cancer get a couple of years from diagnosis, so you'd have to be very unlucky to catch cancer just after taking office.
Of course, once you get to people over 80, rapid deteriorations become much more common. Not everyone will be Henry Kissinger.
OK, but supposing George Bush had choked on that pretzel? Or gotten hit with that shoe? These things happen!
Sure, absolutely they do, and people aren't immortal.
All I'm really saying is that the historical rate of death for Presidents is not representative of the likely modern rate - unless we keep electing people in their mid-eighties, anyway!
At least two of the three Presidents to die in office could have been saved relatively easily by modern medicine, Harding might have been (congestive heart failure is not untreatable, but people still do die of it). All four of the assassinations would have been stopped by the modern Secret Service.
If you look at, say, the Wikipedia notable deaths list, then there are very few people dying before their mid-to-late seventies, and (excluding violent or drugs deaths, which we're presuming don't apply to Presidents), those few are nearly all cancer, strokes or heart attacks. Heart attacks and strokes are rarely fatal if the response is fast enough - but most people are not continuously monitored with rapid medical response at all times, so they can die before the medical response arrives (even if 911 responds quickly, someone has to be there to call 911). That is true for Presidents, though. There would be an immediate medical response if a President had a heart attack or a stroke now; they have some sort of monitoring at all times (probably just something like a heart-rate monitor overnight). Cancer usually gives enough warning these days for a President to step down at the next election.
I'm not saying there's no way a President dies in office any more, but that it's far less likely than it was 50 years ago.
USSS has the HAMMER team specifically for this, in addition to White House doctors and Walter Reed/Bethesda Military Medical Center; it's tactical ambulance that you can see in a POTUS motorcade.
"The Hazardous Agent Mitigation Medical Emergency Response Team (HAMMER) supports the agency’s protective mission through chemical, biological, radiological and nuclear (CBRN) detection and intervention, emergency medical support and rescue/extrication capabilities. HAMMER members receive extensive training in emergency medicine and CBRN hazards. To accomplish their mission, HAMMER personnel utilize a variety of systems to monitor for potential threats."
https://www.secretservice.gov/protection/specialoperations
Everyone was worried about McCain’s age in 2008 and he made it well past the end of Obama’s two terms!
Well, "well past" is a bit of a stretch, he died a year and a half after Obama left office. Although he was still impactful in that year and a half!
Heck, Harrison and Taylor probably would have survived with modern *sanitation* and plumbing. There was an article in WaPo some years back that concluded Harrison died, not from pneumonia, but from cholera, typhoid, or some kind of similar water born illness. (Of course his medical treatments did not help - he was bled, and given enemas, and medications that included ammonia and turpentine.)
There was a giant lake of raw sewage not far from the White House, and it contaminated the water used to supply the building. Harrison and Taylor were battle-hardened old soldiers, but when they drank the water (or ate the cherries), to the grave they went.
Found the original article in an academic journal “Clinical Infectious Diseases.” We’re all nerds here. Go forth and read and be happy for sanitation, plumbing, and no lakes of raw sewage: https://academic.oup.com/cid/article/59/7/990/2895539
This comment gave me a good chuckle. Probably not something Matt thought about when writing the post but clearly true!
I don’t like or dislike VP Harris. I just kind of forget she is around. I think this is part of Biden’s “don’t worry too much about who is running the ship” vibe. There have been weeks where I haven’t thought about what is going on in the White House.
This is a blessing after 4 years of daily insanity.
There was a moment early in her vp-ship where journalists tried to promote her as future of party and criticized Biden for giving her the border crisis as her issue bc it was a quagmire that would leave her less popular maybe even Matt mentioned this or just the general idea that Joe should give her some issues to build a platform on? But I think the “she is just not talented enough”crowd ended up winning out but then left us with who IS the future of the party issue. Come one Corey booker u know how to talk I think he is positioned to be the talented candidate more than Kamala if he decides to be the level headed moderate who will still fight the progressive fight guy. Such a talented speaker and knows how to “go high when they go low” and whatnot. But I was called stupid when I kept telling people Biden will be the best candidate in 2020 and I think he still is for 24.
If Booker hadn't tried to be Bernie Sanders in 2019, he would have won the primary and the general, and we wouldn't be in this situation.
Matt lays out the screamingly obvious route for Harris to take, but she appears to shun all thoughts of taking it. Explaining this might not be very important. My family and I saw all 20 Dem pres candidates at the Iowa Steak Fry in late 2019. Harris was startlingly bad on stage. Each candidate had 10 minutes. She CLEARLY had nothing prepared. It was hideously embarrassing. I realized she was just waiting to drop out. Then on local TV she did an interview with an Iowa politics reporter and again, awful. He asked her why she had spent so little time in Iowa. She responded by saying with Letterman style sarcasm, "Well, I'm HERE." Message: I hate Iowa. Don't be fooled. She's just a terrible retail politician, a walking disaster. She's not just sort of average. I have nothing against her, she's smart, she had a safe Senate seat, she got where she was in large part by knowing the right people in a one-party state and running TV campaigns, which is how California works. Biden screwed his party by pick8ng her, he's a genius, he can't be dumped because of her even if it were possible.
I’m a high school debate coach. Harris seems weirdly uncomfortable with public speaking for a national-level politician and criminally awful with ad libbing. Too often she sounds like a student giving a book report on a book she’s never read.
I’ve heard the multiple stories of her lack of preparation and it shows. If I were advising Harris, I would tell her to ignore her “brief” from Biden and start speaking anywhere that would take me. And I would tell her to cut the crap and read the pre-written speeches, probably through the end of her term. I would stop media interviews for the time being as well - she is turning herself into the Democrat Sarah Palin.
She needs to start laying down a record of speaking with confidence for herself and her ticket, especially given Biden’s age, his penchant for early “lids,” and his increasing struggles with public appearances. The American people respond to the appearance of competence, and Harris’ word salads aren’t cutting it.
Good advice. It's not to late to salvage viability. But that day isn't too far off, either.
"Barack Obama picked [Biden] to be VP because Obama thought Biden wouldn’t run for president in the future."
Was THAT widely reported? That was not why I though Biden was good pick. He had serious centrist credentials, is Catholic, and had foreign policy experience. Exactly what make him a good choice as candidate in 2020.
Harris could have been a good choice, too, if she had chosen to be Ms smart policing, smart border control, merit based immigration (recruit more people like her parents!). Regretfully, Biden should replace her with someone else to play these roles.
I actually think this is where you have to get more fatalistic about the Democratic party. The reason Harris won't talk about merit-based immigration isn't because she isn't aware of the topic (like smart but tough policing), but because she's a reasonably experienced politician aware it's not what the Democratic party is for.
I think it's more "Biden won't spend the entire second term manoeuvring to become President afterwards".
Which, to be fair, was true. This also applied to Cheney and very much didn't to the previous two second-term VPs, ie Gore and HW Bush.
That seems to be an important priority for Presidents - that their VP won't be spending a lot of time trying to be a candidate for the succession. Now, perhaps that's selfish, but I suspect that they would say that it interferes with them actually running the country in the second term.
Agreed! I feel like Matt's point about "oops" on Biden is partly misleading. Biden specifically DIDN'T run in 2016 (oops!).
Yes, it would be good _now_ if he were younger and more inclined to run, but Obama's pick actually did accomplish the proximate goal.
Great framing. One thing the Times piece doesn't touch on is the fact that Harris pointedly criticized Biden during the debates and by selecting her, Biden was essentially saying, "it's politics, I'm not taking that personally." As you say, this was a case of picking someone within the mainstream of Democrats who also had the advantage of her identity.
The funny thing about Obama picking Biden because he was too old to run was (a) it essentially made Hillary the consensus choice in 2016 since she was on paper a stronger candidate than he was, and (b) it speaks to the weakness of the 2020 Democratic field that Biden was able to declare late and become the consensus candidate (though as has been pointed out in this space in the past, approval or ranked choice voting in the primary would've obviated the Bernie conundrum since there's no way he would've been the front runner).
I think Biden was picked for more reasons than just being too old to run. Obama also was transmitting reassurance that he was going to anchor his administration in a moderate orientation, which was important given concerns at the time about whether Obama was too far to the left. I'm sure there might have been a sprinkling of identity politics with it too, but the important message was that this was going to be a mainstream ticket.
Also there was the fact that Obama was young and inexperienced according to some critics...Biden was seen as bringing foreign policy expertise to the table.
Obama was inexperienced - he had never served as an executive at any level and had not even served a full term in the Senate.
That's precisely why my father (a moderate Republican) said he was willing to vote for Obama in 2008.
I agree. I also think part of what’s contained in the “not a threat” section of picking Biden is maybe he convinced Obama he would spend his energy at elevating Obama rather than himself, which he delivered on for 8 years. If that’s what is meant by “not a threat” it is not at all exclusive with being future of party.
I feel like this piece ignores the elephant in the room in terms of Kamala Harris helping win the election, despite quoting it in the piece:
> On Aug. 11, the day the campaign announced Harris as the running mate, it raised $26 million in 24 hours.
Kamala Harris is a well-connected Democrat from one of the richest states in the union. I absolutely believe that voters don't really care about the VP pick, but *donors* definitely do, and ad dollars produce votes even if the VP's personality doesn't, so I don't think you can just wave away being "met with enthusiasm" as if it's only about minimizing complaining.
There was going to be massive, massive fund raising for the Democratic candidate regardless of whom the nominee or their VP was because the opponent was Trump. Biden was the first candidate to raise over a billion dollars and raised over 200 million more than Trump.
I guess I just have no problem with “short term” thinking in this case.
Biden’s goal was to win an effectively 50/50 election against Trump. He made what he thought was the best move to do that (by generating enthusiasm / reducing complaining). He cared less about what happened beyond that. I think that’s fine!
Think about it this way: let’s posit that Whitmer is objectively a better politician / presidential candidate in 2028. But when she’s chosen as VP, there is a risk (unclear how material, but non-zero) that the Black vote shifts slightly (~2 pts) away from Biden and towards Trump. Biden ultimately wins by 44K votes combine across Georgia, Wisconsin and Arizona. That shift, if it materializes, costs him the election. In this hypothetical, the risk with Harris is zero. Is Whitmer the right call in that case? I’d argue not.
You can certainly dispute whether it’s true that Harris would actually generate the most enthusiasm of the VP options. But IMO there’s nothing wrong with the thought process that says “let me make a pick to win this election and figure everything else out later.”
It was only a 50/50 election in hindsight. Polling was overwhelmingly in Biden’s favor. And in any case the idea that generating enthusiasm is more important to winning than not alienating undecideds needs more scrutiny.
Pretty much every presidential election should be seen as 50/50 going in.
Actually, my other comment granted a point that I don’t want to grant: it doesn’t make sense to treat every election as 50/50, because not every election is 50/50. If Obama in 2008 made a pick that prioritized the immediate win above all else, even though he was obviously an overwhelming favorite, that would have been malpractice, akin to risking an injury to a key player in the service of winning a game you’re leading by double digits. You can’t just approximate all elections to a tie in order to support the idea that short-term gain is the only relevant factor.
Obama did make a pick that prioritized the immediate win above all else!
He certainly wasn’t trying to pick a future leader of the party or the best candidate for 2016.
No, if the reporting linked in the article was correct, he considered another factor, “who will be unlikely to run for president in the future and therefore less of a problem in my administration.” Matt doesn’t like that reason either, but it is not related to winning the election. At any rate, I’ll stand my my comment: to the extent Obama ranked winnability over other considerations for a nearly unlosable election, that was malpractice. And it may have foretold other failures, such as making the stimulus too small because he didn’t like the optics of making it bigger.
Okay, fine, but then we're still left with the question of whether Harris actually was likely to be the best candidate from a winnability standpoint—and to such an extent that all other liabilities were irrelevant.
I totally agree!
But now you’re quibbling on choice, not process.
Biden said “I want to choose the person who will help me win”
MY says “you should additionally look at who would be the best candidate in 2028” and other amorphous factors
I think Biden is right and MY is wrong. Did Biden actually choose the best person to help him win? Who knows! But it’s a totally justified way of thinking about the pick.
I think that Harris got caught up in the leftward shift of most of the party. Since being savaged by the Bernie left it seems as though she has decided not to let that happen again, so no tough truths from her, thany you very much.
A lot of her “unlikeability” can be chalked up to hewing very much to the progressive party line (using all the right identity words), at a time when many voters are turned off by progressives.
I suspect she's not all that popular with many progressives either, because they are suspicious of her philosophical left turn.
How much might relate to the infighting of her team? Seems like her sister and campaign mgr were really at odds at a point in her career when it was really important to solidify her framing of big issues and she just kinda whiffed.
I think that is a stealthy source of her low approval. She's getting all of the trashing from the right that an AOC would get with none of the support fromm the progressive left.
Yeah, I think that's correct: the right regards her as being an embodiment of the progressive left, the progressive left is still in sheezacop mode.
I think there's a good argument there for her moving to a more centrist image/positioning; she can't win over the left, but there are lots of people for whom a prosecutor who thinks that crime is a serious problem is a positive image: but the only people who have that image of Harris are the sorts of Defund lefties who think it's a bad thing.
In the NYTs piece she very consistently answers that question and others like it with defensive vagueness: "be more specific" or "what do you mean by that".
Maybe the NYTs wanted to do a hit piece or something, but if not, and that's the only way she can (not) answer those questions, then that's very annoying as a voter.
Yeah the attacks on Biden in the primary are pretty unforgivable.
If a Black woman publicly called me a racist in order to help her get ahead for a promotion, I don't know that I could ever not be pissed. And that's what she did to Biden.
I saw the best minds of my generation spend way too much time on Twitter. Some have started walking back, some haven’t.
I recently closed my account. Time waster. If I had Matt's job maybe I could justify it.
Kamala Harris did not decide her race or sex but she did decide not to have children. This decision is near the core of her identity and repudiates the values of most normie voters. Even Hillary understood she needed to have a kid to avoid looking like an out of touch career woman.
Children need not be biological and she has stepchildren.
Children need not be biological but the experience of raising children (biological or not) is deeply defining for anyone who undergoes it. I’d argue it’s actually one of the stickiest, most ingrained identities there is to be a parent. I do not think any parent who has raised small children up to adulthood would consider having adult stepchildren even remotely comparable. Now whether that would affect a persons ability to govern and therefore should impact your vote is debatable (maybe they have more difficulty empathizing with parents and prioritize child friendly policies less?) - I personally wouldn’t give it much weight. But for people who think it’s important, it’s silly to act like her experience at a stepmother to adult children should or would have any influence.
So if raising children is important to American voters, then Trump is a dead man walking?
As noted in the study I linked elsewhere here, children play less of a role in the electability of male candidates versus female candidates: https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/politics-and-gender/article/abs/voting-for-mom-the-political-consequences-of-being-a-parent-for-male-and-female-candidates/6C0776F087D182FC85BAA1BB45645EC3
There are also about five billion other articles, both scholarly and "popular" about how male candidates don't have nearly as much baggage with voters relating to having children or the ages of their children.
Yup. As an issue that voters may respond to either unconsciously or consciously despite its irrelevance, I guess it could be discussed, but that’s thin cover for pretending a woman is supposed to have kids to be a good leader!
Did she ever live with them full time?
No. Doug's wife had primary physical custody.
QED
how old were they when she married?
17 and 22.
QED
Are we sure Hillary Clinton didn’t just, like, want a child?
Yeah, she seems really into being a grandmother. Perhaps she wanted more kids. Who knows. This all seems very personal and does not have that much bearing on being able to be a leader. Although after reading Michelle Obama's book, I have a little bit of reluctance about voting for candidates who have young children since it doesn't seem like a very good situation for young families.
Has she written a biography or publicly acknowledged the decision not to have children? Genuine question. I'm thinking maybe she just didn't fall in love or meet the right man during her childbearing years? Life can sneak up on one.
Of all the things to criticize Kamala Harris about this one is really weird: if she didn’t have biological kids that’s her private business!
Female candidates in general are trolled for their entire identities, no matter what choices they make. These studies focusing on one aspect of female candidates prove the rule. Female candidate X made lifestyle choice Y, do voters view them unfavorably? The answer is always yes.
In one sense yes, but also it's obviously something that's important to a lot of the voting public, and would be a stupid hill to die on, trying to pretend that such a concern doesn't or shouldn't exist.
Obviously it's not insurmountable (Cory Booker, Tim Scott, etc), but it also seems obvious that voters perceive the absence of a "normal" 2.5 kid American family as more of a concern for a female candidate.
I don’t think there are more than like 10 people who won’t vote for Harris because she doesn’t have biological kids but would’ve if she did.
I don't want to sound condescending in saying this. But when I was in college I probably would've thought the same thing. When you're 40 and have a bunch of 40-year-old friends, the notion that childlessness would register with a significant fraction of the voting public might feel more intuitive. Not necessarily as an explicitly thought-through "issue," but more as a matter of mood affiliation. Like that some voters who would've been enthusiastic about the same candidate if she had a family will just feel vaguely blah and unconvinced by her without one.
I’m 40 and have plenty of childless friends. It is fairly common, especially among women (of whom roughly 1/3 are now unmarried at 35). The idea that they are weird outliers isn’t aligned with reality.
Right but she’s not childless — she has two stepchildren!
Yea I think you’re totally wrong here. This is a huge issue especially for women. There is inherent suspicion amongst many women for those who chose a life path without them. I’m saying this as someone who doesn’t feel that way but who knows many many people would (and that includes highly educated, Democratic, career women).
If this is a huge issue among women, then there should be some polling data to support it.
I think you are whistling past the graveyard on this, Milan. It might not be enough people to ultimately make a difference, but there's absolutely discussions about to what extent having children (and of what ages of children) helps or hurts candidates and it's suggested that childless candidates -- including Democrats -- specifically have to go out of their way to try to communicate their pro-family positions in the absence of having their own children: https://www.nytimes.com/2018/09/12/us/politics/women-midterms-children.html
Until this thread I had no idea she didn't have kids.
I had no idea either, but now I'm frankly suspicious that media outlets may be avoiding mentioning the childless status of female politicians given the evidence that it particularly hurts them. Same study I quoted in response to Milan above: https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/politics-and-gender/article/abs/voting-for-mom-the-political-consequences-of-being-a-parent-for-male-and-female-candidates/6C0776F087D182FC85BAA1BB45645EC3
Not weird at all if your goal is to maximize your odds of winning elections:
"[V]oters rate childless female candidates substantially lower than childless male candidates, mother candidates, and father candidates. Childless women also lose the traditional “female advantage” on child-care and children's issues.
https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/politics-and-gender/article/abs/voting-for-mom-the-political-consequences-of-being-a-parent-for-male-and-female-candidates/6C0776F087D182FC85BAA1BB45645EC3
Now that study was published in 2010, so maybe attitudes have changed, but I've definitely seen plenty of reporting over the years indicating that childless female candidates are penalized compared to female candidates with children (particularly older children -- per that same study, having *young* children hurts female candidates relative to male candidates with children of the same age).
When you run for office, the demos decides what is and is not private.
I mostly agree, but with Matt out there trolling DeSantis for being short and fat, do you think he would?
No, because he hasn’t.
Yeah I think this actually shows that Cory Booker and Tim Scott aren't serious about wanting to be president. If they really wanted it they would have found /someone/.
Tim Scott being a bachelor isn’t the reason his campaign is going nowhere though.
Is that the metric? Unless it is THE cause of a candidate winning or losing then it's irrelevant?
She was 49 when she was introduced to her husband.
I think that sentence is an entire and complete answer to the question of why she didn't have children - and I also think that having been a single mother would have been more disqualifying among the sorts of people who care about these sorts of things.
I think this handwaves her relationship with Willie Brown (he was 60 and somewhat still married) when she was 29. There's an unflattering aspect of her career trajectory that started with Willie Brown placements and then his endorsement for SF DA in 03. But to me - she clearly prioritized her career over motherhood.
Maybe a good strategy for improving Kamala Harris's image is we could have David Abbott say really gross and sexist shit about her and it will make her seem more sympathetic. It’s working really well on me right now.
Full disclosure, I reported this comment.
I just did, too. If people dislike Harris on policy grounds or other professional issues, that’s one thing. But to slut-shame her is sexist, not to mention outdated.
If she uses her body in a way that advances her political ambition, she is bring whorish.
I would argue that amongst traditional types the fact that she didn’t meet a husband until a more advanced age is not exonerating on the child issue. I could see it being read as “she didn’t prioritize meeting someone but instead was soullessly focused on her career”.
I wonder if there is a way she could honestly describe the situation that wouldn't sound bad: From what I can tell, the honest version is that she met a whole bunch of men who weren't husband material over many years.
The problem is "I had a load of boyfriends for 30+ years until I finally found the one I fell in love with" does not sound great, even though I suspect there are a bunch of women who will sympathise a lot with her.
You only have to look at the way that Taylor Swift and her many bad boyfriends (and her songs about them) gets treated as a joke to realise that "I've been trying to find the right guy" doesn't work.
My brother constantly comments about how Taylor Swift's love life seems so crazy and how absurd it is that her songs are all about exes. He simultaneously listens to 90s era Emo music where the guys are singing all about their exes and failed relationships.
I always find that disconnect to perfectly encapsulate the different sexual expectations b/n famous men and women in American society.
Yes, I am curious about this too. There are lots of reasons people don't have kids. Many of them are not choices.
Her childlessness is her greatest political qualification. There can be no Hunter Bidens in her midst.
And to Milan's point about stepchildren, that still ended up fucking things up for James Madison.
You say that Kamala Harris didn't choose her race, but I suspect that the fact that she has a white husband and (to the extent that they are understood to be hers) has white kids makes her seem less black. I remember people saying that Michelle helped Barack seem more like a part of the black community. Kamala has basically done the opposite with her personal life.
An excellent Matt take. I’m coming out of it all even more impressed with Biden. Given the perverse structural incentives and bad historical record that Matt outlines so well, and in light of the absolute collective insanity of 2020, Harris really was a reasonable choice. Biden has rarely made a totally indefensible or unreasonable move and that says a lot. Unfortunately his sober, understated record, although ostensibly what the nation wanted (normalcy soul of nation etc) risks being his undoing.