Game on

A few horserace-ish thoughts now that the Harris/Walz ticket is set.

1)Leaving aside all the demographic/political considerations in a VP pick, the question of who the candidate likes and feels comfortable with always matters. The reporting suggests Harris and Walz hit it off, and if Shapiro and Walz were otherwise neck and neck, that could have made the difference. Not everything in politics is a result of 12-dimensional chess.

2)By far the biggest argument in Shapiro’s favor is that he is a very popular governor in Pennsylvania. The data folks believe that, in their home states, VP nominees add in the ballpark of a percentage point to the ticket. President Biden won Pennsylvania by 1.2 points in 2020. And since Democrats’ path to 270 electoral votes without the Keystone state is daunting, to say the least, you can see how tempting it would have been to put Shapiro on the ticket. This is in addition to the fact that he’s generally regarded as a talented politician and effective communicator. Probably the only other major Democratic politician who could plausibly be seen as decisive in winning a swing state is Michigan’s Governor Gretchen Whitmer. And she wasn’t in consideration.

3)I think the ideological differences between Walz and Shapiro have been somewhat overstated. As I wrote in my last post, Walz has a really impressive progressive record as Minnesota governor, especially given the razor thin margins he was working with in the state legislature. Shapiro has only been governor for a year and a half, but he’s tried (and sometimes succeeded) in pushing through some of the policies, including universal free lunch and expanded family-based tax credits, that have become standard for Democratic governors, including Walz, who are not completely blocked by a Republican-dominated legislature (as is the case in Wisconsin, North Carolina and Kentucky, for example). And Shapiro has also had a GOP-controlled state senate to contend with.

4)Shapiro, of course, became a lightning rod over his views on Israel/Palestine and campus protests. From the perspective of intra-party politics, his condemnation of those protests and, especially of soon-to-be fired Penn President Liz Magill, after bad-faith hearings in the US Congress led by great replacement sympathizer Elise Stefanik, likely hurt his chances. Otherwise, Shapiro’s views are probably not very different than Walz’ or Harris’ - it’s now common for Democrats to condemn Netanyahu while otherwise signaling their strong support for Israel. And VPs don’t drive policy anyway. If a President Harris does assume office in 2025 and if she meaningfully changes the course of US policy in the region, as I pray she would, it won’t matter who her VP is. Ultimately, the real problem for Shapiro, I suspect, is not so much about the particulars of what he has said in this arena. Instead, the worry was likely that if he were to become the VP nominee, his previously stated positions and his inevitable attempts to walk them back or qualify them, would drive negative news cycles and take attention away from the foibles of Trump and his running mate. That and other potential scandals that were bubbling up in recent days were likely decisive in sidelining Shapiro. Put another way, at least as far we know so far, there’s less oppo meat on Walz.

5)The conventional wisdom on VP nominees is that, the slight home state advantage notwithstanding, their overall impact on the race is not significant. Of course, I confidently asserted the day after the June 27 debate that the conventional wisdom is that debates don’t typically matter. Oops. So, maybe this time, with a compressed campaign timeline, and the battle still on to define the Democratic nominee, the VP aspirant matters more to create an impression of the ticket in the minds of voters, especially those who are less settled in their views. If that is the case, Walz brings certain advantages. It will be impossible for Republicans to plausibly attack *him* as some sort of elitist. Relatedly, Walz also been exceptionally good as a plain-spoken advocate both for liberal policy priorities and in his rip-roaring attacks on the GOP ticket. The successful entrenching of the Walz-inspired “weird” jab reflects, among other things, his instincts for speaking to audiences in accessible terms. Some saw Shapiro as more moderate. But I suspect that wouldn’t have mattered much in the campaign because, as a Jewish Democrat with a law degree from Georgetown, he would have been easy to paint as one of those liberal elites. Optically and stylistically, the Harris campaign may have viewed Walz as a better counterbalance to the San Francisco/coastal elite/liberal charge.

6)There has also now been an unmistakable trend in the polling in the past ten days (insert all relevant polling caveats here). Harris has been leading by between 2-4 points nationally in almost every poll in that time span. In the critical Blue Wall states of Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania, she has erased what had been small Trump leads and now has small leads in each. And this is before what will likely be further improvement in her numbers at the Democratic National Convention, which kicks off in thirteen days. All of which is to say that, with a better polling picture than anticipated, and with room for further gains, the Harris campaign may have calculated that they can win Pennsylvania regardless, at which point Walz more clearly benefits the ticket then Shapiro.

7)With 91 days to go, Democrats’ chances of winning the presidency are better than they’ve been at any time this year. As yet unforeseen events can, of course, reset the race again. This race is going to get much nastier. But what was going to be an uphill climb is now a very winnable race.