All eyes are on the Harris veepstakes

On Sunday, CNN’s Jamie Gangel reported that Vice President Kamala Harris’ team was vetting four Democrats to be her running mate: 

• Kentucky Gov. Andy Beshear

• North Carolina Gov. Roy Cooper

• Arizona Sen. Mark Kelly

• Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro

In addition to this reporting, USA Today wrote on Tuesday that vetting materials had been requested from Cooper, Kelly, and Shapiro as well as Illinois Gov. J.B. Pritzker, Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer, Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, and former Louisiana Rep. Cedric Richmond. (They left Beshear off the list.) But for many reasons, these other candidates don’t seem like serious options: Pritzker reportedly wasn’t contacted, Whitmer just took a role co-chairing the Harris campaign and says she’s not interested in being VP, and Walz and Richmond are relative no-names. 

So let’s take a look at the pros and cons of the four candidates on the bulleted list above, and then I’ll venture my own opinion on whom I’d like to see.

First, let’s discuss why the vice presidential nominee is so important. In short, they have two primary roles: 

• Providing base service, such as appealing to core demographic groups in a way that the presidential nominee cannot.

• Filling a gap in the presidential nominee’s resume. 

Dick Cheney, the vice president to George W. Bush, was a perfect example of someone picked for base service. He played the attack dog in front of conservative audiences, while Bush pretended to be a jovial frat boy to mainstream audiences. As we all know, it worked for Bush.

Another example comes from Sen. John McCain of Arizona in 2008. Facing a deep deficit in his race against then-Sen. Barack Obama of Illinois, McCain tapped Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin to try and goose his appeal among the Republican base. It didn’t work, though Palin did go on to have her moment during the tea party days. 

Filling a resume gap can look any number of ways. Long ago, tickets looked for “geographic balance,” but those days are long gone. In 2000, Vice President Al Gore picked Connecticut Sen. Joe Lieberman as his running mate partly because of the desire to cleanse his candidacy of President Bill Clinton’s sex scandal. As we know, the ticket ultimately failed.

In the 2008 presidential cycle, Obama was perceived as a fresh face in politics, with virtually no foreign policy experience, so he tapped then-Sen. Joe Biden of Delaware to provide that expertise. I doubt there was a single voter in the country who was really hoping Biden would plug that hole, but Obama catered to the Washington, D.C., chattering class. In the end, Obama single-handedly inspired a movement that carried him to easy victory. 

More recently, in 2016, Donald Trump tapped then-Gov. Mike Pence of Indiana as his running mate, in an attempt to build credibility with a religious right suspicious of Trump’s lack of ethics and morality. And in 2020, Biden picked then-Sen. Kamala Harris of California to provide racial and gender balance in a party whose base is not white men. 

One of former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s biggest mistakes in her ill-fated 2016 run was picking Virginia Sen. Tim Kaine as her running mate. He was a fine, decent human being, but he brought little to the ticket. Virginia wasn’t quite a battleground state. Clinton held a consistent lead in polling there and went on to win it by 5 percentage points. Kaine might have boosted her a little, but she would’ve likely won it without him. What made him a bad pick was that he wasn’t particularly well known or liked by the Democratic base. He was a boring white guy when Clinton needed to shore up her base support, particularly in Rust Belt states.

One of the funny things about the Harris switcheroo is that Republicans are now acknowledging that choosing Sen. JD Vance as Trump’s running mate was a mistake. In this excellent look inside the Trump world’s shock at Biden’s withdrawal from the race, The Atlantic’s Tim Alberta includes this fascinating tidbit: 

Trump’s campaign insists that nothing has changed. [...]

But they know it’s more than that. They know that from the moment they partnered with Trump, everything they intended for this campaign—the messaging, the advertising, the microtargeting, the ground game, the mail pieces, the digital engagement, the social-media maneuvers—was designed to defeat Joe Biden. Even the selection of Ohio’s Senator J. D. Vance as Trump’s running mate, campaign officials acknowledged, was something of a luxury meant to run up margins with the base in a blowout rather than persuade swing voters in a nail-biter.

Trump picked Vance to help turn out the MAGA base—despite that no one turns out that base better than Trump. Trump’s error in choosing Vance was quickly apparent, and the day after the choice was announced, I published a story titled “Donald Trump picked the worst possible running mate.” What Trump actually needed was to expand his shrinking base of old white men. Instead, in an apparent act of hubris, he doubled down on what he already brought to the ticket.

So what does Harris need? Quite frankly, as a Black and South Asian woman, she is facing the twin challenges of overcoming racism and sexism. It’s sad to say but her running mate needs to be a white man. The reported list of contenders reflects that stark and unfortunate reality, but it is what it is. 

The second thing Harris needs is help in battleground states. The election will be decided by Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin. The rest of us? Our job is to help get the vote out in those seven states. And the VP’s job is the same. 

And for the most part, Harris’ reported short list reflects that reality. Let’s take a closer look. 

Arizona Sen. Mark Kelly

Arizona is a critical battleground state, and Kelly, 60, has an attractive bio: an Air Force pilot who flew combat missions during the Gulf War and was an astronaut. Who doesn’t love astronauts? 

He’s won two hard-fought races in arguably the nation’s toughest battleground state, proving he has serious campaign chops. His wife is former Arizona Rep. Gabby Giffords, whose electoral career abruptly ended in 2011, when a would-be assassin shot her in the head at a gathering outside a Tucson-area supermarket before turning his fire on the crowd. The gunman injured 13 and killed six, including a nine-year-old girl. Few can talk as eloquently about the dangers of gun violence as Kelly and Giffords. 

If Harris chose Kelly as her running mate and won the election, his vacated seat would be filled by Arizona Gov. Katie Hobbs, a Democrat, and a special election would be held in 2026 to fill the remaining two years of the term. It would be a difficult seat to hold, though the Democratic bench in Arizona is filling up nicely. Democrats currently hold the governorship as well as the offices of secretary of state and attorney general. 

Kentucky Gov. Andy Beshear

Kentucky is one of the reddest states in the country, and 49% of the state’s population is evangelical Christian. Despite that, Beshear, 46, has twice won election as governor, showing remarkable skill and instincts while conquering some of the most inhospitable terrain for Democrats. In fact, in 2023, he even won a county where 77% of the vote had gone for Trump three years earlier, and Beshear did it without running away from his Democratic Party label or his commitment to abortion rights. 

What Beshear has going for him is his youth. This would help contrast the Democratic ticket with Trump, who is struggling to adapt to the end of Biden’s campaign after spending the entire cycle claiming that being the oldest candidate was a bad thing. 

Beshear’s main downside as a running mate is that Kentucky isn’t a swing state. Choosing him would be a bet that he could bring to battleground states whatever magic has helped him draw in Trump voters in Kentucky. And that’s likely not a great bet. One reason Beshear won reelection in 2023 was that he resisted Republican efforts to nationalize the race. Time and time again, voters are happier to cross party lines at the state level than at the national level. (It’s why you see Republican governors of deep blue states like Vermont, where Biden beat Trump by 35 points in 2020.)

If Harris chose Beshear and they won in November, his Democratic lieutenant governor would finish out his term, which ends in 2027. (Kentucky’s statewide elections are held in odd-numbered years.) 

North Carolina Gov. Roy Cooper

Cooper, 67, is wrapping up two successful terms as a popular Democrat in a slightly red-leaning purple state. North Carolina isn’t a must-win state for Harris, but its 16 electoral votes would cancel out her losing Wisconsin’s 10 votes or Michigan’s 15. (Those two are must-win states otherwise). 

Biden lost North Carolina by less than 75,000 votes in 2020, or just 1.3 points. Since 1986, Cooper has never lost an election in North Carolina, even in Republican-friendly cycles. And he got more votes in 2020—when he last won reelection—than Trump or the Republican Sen. Thom Tillis. In other words, quite a lot of Trump voters were happy to vote for him over the Republican gubernatorial candidate. That’s some powerful cross-party appeal for a candidate who has always run as an unapologetic Democrat. 

Like with Beshear in Kentucky, though, Cooper’s success could be one of those cases where voters are more open to crossing party lines at the state level—and where their reluctance to do so at the federal level might be exacerbated in this southern state by having a Black woman at the top of the Democratic ticket. Still, Cooper’s appeal could serve Harris well in other battleground states, especially with perhaps the only true swing demographic this election: college-educated suburban white women. 

Cooper is term-limited and unable to run for his current position this year (state Attorney General Josh Stein is the Democrat in the race), so if Harris taps him and they win, there is no concern about replacing him. 

Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro

Shapiro, 51, is a rising superstar in the Democratic Party. In 2022, he won his gubernatorial contest in this battleground state by nearly 15 points. Compare that to Democrat John Fetterman, who, in the very same election, won his Senate race by just under 5 points. Before becoming governor, Shapiro served as the state attorney general. And an April poll from Franklin & Marshall College pegged Shapiro as Pennsylvania’s most popular governor “in recent memory,” with a 54% approval rating among registered voters in the state. 

Shapiro’s obvious appeal is his popularity in Pennsylvania, a critical state for the Democratic ticket. While there are paths to victory without the state’s 19 electoral votes, it would be extremely difficult. And Shapiro’s sensibilities, however you might define them, wouldn’t just play in the Keystone State but could also serve the ticket well in Michigan, Wisconsin, and North Carolina. 

If Harris taps Shapiro and their ticket wins, his Democratic lieutenant governor would finish the rest of Shapiro’s term, and the next election for the position is in 2026. 

So who should she pick?

Before I started writing this story, I had mentally struck Beshear off the list. But now, after reflecting on it more, I believe any of these four would be incredible additions to the ticket. 

Beshear is likely the weakest of the bunch simply because he doesn’t directly represent a swing state. Kelly is a bit of a wild card. He would play well in Arizona, but those 11 electoral votes aren’t as critical as those in Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin—the three states most likely to decide the election. It’s not that Kelly wouldn’t play well in those states. More so, it’s that they don’t know who he is, and we don’t have time to be playing the name-recognition game. 

For me, the two best choices are Shapiro and Cooper, in that order. If I were running the Harris campaign, I would put them in a regular rotation of North Carolina, Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin, and Omaha, Nebraska (for its single but very important electoral vote)—lather, rinse, repeat. Harris could focus on getting out the party’s emerging demographic bases in Arizona, Georgia, and Nevada. Of course, she’d campaign in the midwest as well. I hope she doesn’t expect to get much sleep over the next three and a half months.

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