This piece appeared in The Sunday Times 4 August 2024
Kamala Harris is expected to name a Democratic running-mate in the coming days. Does it matter who presidential candidates pick? Or are the “veepstakes”, the parlour game beloved of Washington politicos, no more than an entertaining sideshow?
Campaigns like to think that a running-mate from a must-win state can add a critical edge, which is one of the main reasons why Josh Shapiro, the popular governor of Pennsylvania, has been touted as a possible vice-president to Harris. A favourite line of pundits in recent days is that Shapiro “could help Harris win Pennsylvania,” the state without whose 19 electoral college votes she probably can’t become president. For veepstakes junkies, the most famous example of a vice-presidential pick designed to win a crucial state was John F Kennedy’s selection of the Texan Lyndon Johnson in 1960. Kennedy and Johnson did not much like each other, but after his squeaker of an election win Kennedy was sure his vice-president had made the difference by “delivering” him Texas.
Pundits also love to debate which contender will most appeal to electorally significant demographic groups. Walter Mondale, a Democratic presidential candidate, explained that when he picked Geraldine Ferraro to be the first female vice-presidential candidate on a major party ticket in 1984 — at a point when he was ten points behind Ronald Reagan — he thought her selection might be a game-changer by inspiring women. For Harris, the first woman of colour to run for president, the demographic she is thought to need help with is white, rural, midwestern men — the kind of guy you’d meet at a backyard barbecue or a college football game in much of America — a description that perfectly fits the Minnesota governor Tim Walz, who therefore, his backers suggest, could help Harris electorally.
The problem, though, is this is not how voters behave. The political science research is unequivocal: the direct impact of a vice-presidential selection is minimal. There is no statistically significant number of voters who make a positive choice to vote for a ticket because they like the running-mate, either because of their state or their gender or any other characteristic. According to Christopher J Devine and Kyle C Kopko, the scholars who have done the most research on this topic, the survey data doesn’t even support the assumption that Johnson made a difference to Kennedy’s win in 1960. The women energised by the Mondale-Ferraro ticket in 1984 were those who were going to support the Democrats anyway.
Even so the VP pick resonates because of what the choice says about the nominee. Specifically, do they have the judgment to avoid someone who actively harms the campaign?
John McCain would probably have lost to Barack Obama in 2008 even had he not selected the untested Alaska governor Sarah Palin, but that decision did not help. In 1972 the Democratic nominee George McGovern’s running-mate, Thomas Eagleton, became so mired in scandal that he resigned from the ticket, an episode that reinforced a narrative of chaos around the Democratic campaign. McGovern went on to lose to Richard Nixon in a landslide.
Beyond that there are two circumstances in which the selection of a running-mate becomes particularly important, and both apply this year. First, if the presidential nominee is regarded as risky in any way, their vice-presidential pick can provide reassurance. And second, if they are old, there is more attention than usual on the presidential capabilities of the running-mate who would take over in the event of their death.
In 1980 Ronald Reagan was not only then the oldest candidate to run for president but was also regarded by many voters as extreme. So it was a great asset to the Reagan campaign that the boringly mainstream George HW Bush appeared alongside him. For entirely different reasons, Obama’s campaign team in 2008 wanted to “balance” the inexperienced first African-American candidate with a white political veteran from a working-class background — and “Scranton Joe” Biden, then 65, fitted the bill.
This year Trump’s fans will vote for him anyway, but a sober, traditional vice-presidential candidate may have eased concerns among wavering traditional Republicans, as the earnest evangelical Mike Pence, Trump’s first term vice-president, was designed to do.
In the Ohio senator JD Vance, however, Trump has chosen someone who seems almost as capable of generating outrage as Trump himself. By repeatedly attacking the “childless cat ladies” — who supposedly lead the Democratic Party — for having no stake in the future of the country, Vance may have thrilled a narrow segment of the Trumpian base, but at the cost of offending America’s 22 million childless women under 40. His apparent obsession with the subject has struck many voters as “weird”, in the viral phrasing of Walz. Vance, who privately pondered whether Trump was “America’s Hitler” before becoming unswervingly loyal to him, has done the opposite of balancing the ticket.
This would matter in any year, but because Trump would be 82 years old by the time he finishes his second term, his vice-presidential pick is under even more scrutiny. If Vance cannot reset his public image, he may be discarded like Eagleton in 1972. After all, although Trump never admits he made a mistake, he really hates losers.
For Harris, the real challenge is finding someone who will reassure voters that she has a direct line to “middle America”. Uniquely in modern times, Harris has won the nomination without a primary campaign, so she is still relatively unknown and her pick is by far the most revealing decision she will have made. There is nothing she can do to fend off Republican attacks on her as a “radical progressive” from San Francisco. But her running-mate choice signals what kind of campaign she intends to run, and what kind of president she wants to be. Picking Shapiro, who has worked across the aisle with his political opponents in Pennsylvania, would be an indication that she is prioritising disaffected Republican voters. Walz’s reassuring presence would give her someone who could tell her what midwestern dads think. Mark Kelly, the Arizona senator and former astronaut, could bolster her credentials on the fraught issue of the number of people illegally crossing the Mexican border.
Being vice-president is an excruciatingly odd role — just a heartbeat, or one too many Big Macs, away from the highest office, but with no constitutional power besides breaking tie votes in the Senate. “In this role, I am nothing, but I may be everything,” said the first holder of the office, John Adams; Lyndon Johnson claimed he only accepted Kennedy’s offer to be his running-mate after looking up the number of presidents who had died in office. “I’m a gambling man, darlin’,” he told a journalist, “and this is the only chance I got.”
Yet the role of vice-president has expanded since Johnson’s time. Joe Biden was fond of saying that he was “the last person in the room” when Obama made a decision. And so the running-mate selection often works best when voters also sense that there will be an effective governing partnership in the White House. Al Gore did not bring any new states into play for Bill Clinton in 1992, but the two Baby Boomers gave the impression that they would be an energetic team from a new generation.
Voters’ views of vice-presidential selections are in some ways more sophisticated than the veepstake punditry allows. They don’t vote for women just because they’re women, nor a Pennsylvanian because they’re Pennsylvanian. But who each nominee wants as a political partner nevertheless sends a powerful message to voters. In a year in which one candidate is old and uniquely divisive and the other is new and relatively untested, in a race that looks like it will come down to tiny margins, either or both of these decisions may prove decisive.
Adam Smith: Historian 