Apologies for the lack of blogging in the last few days – another job has been taking up more of my time, and will probably keep doing so for the next month. But apart from the Olympic Games, the big news item last week was Kamala Harris’s selection of her running mate: Minnesota governor Tim Walz.
If they win the election, Walz will become the third Democrat vice-president out of just the last six to come from Minnesota (following Hubert Humphrey and Walter Mondale), an extraordinary record for a medium-sized state. The Democrats haven’t lost the state since 1972, but the last few elections have been close; they won with only 50.8% of the two-party vote in 2016, and a better but still marginal 53.6% in 2020.
The idea is that Walz will not just fortify his own state but bring some added strength to the ticket in the neighboring ultra-marginals of Michigan and Wisconsin. He also has a folksy down-to-earth sort of approach that complements Harris’s more urbane persona, and of course as a white male he brings the desired ethnic balance. So far he appears to be getting good reviews.
Prior to his selection, much of the discussion of potential candidates had focused on their politics. Although Harris is very much in the party’s mainstream, the fact that she is not only a Black woman but also from San Francisco has her inevitably tagged, by the Republicans and much of the media, as progressive and even radical. The task was to help allay fears on that score by choosing someone who would appeal to centrist voters.
In policy terms, Walz doesn’t fit that bill very well: his record in office is noticeably more progressive than Harris’s. But in terms of style he’s much more like what the Democrats think they need. He looks and sounds like the sort of person who won’t scare off rural and small-town white voters – by comparison with Donald Trump and J.D. Vance, he seems normal.
The prior favorite for the job was Pennsylvania’s Josh Shapiro, who had two big advantages: first that Pennsylvania, where he is hugely popular, is a big and vitally important state, and second that he is identifiably much more a political moderate. (Jonathan Chait presented the case for Shapiro earlier this month.) But moderation also carries a cost in the shape of less enthusiasm among the party’s activist base, especially when the Democrats are trying to maintain the high turnout of 2020.
Shapiro’s real problem was that he threatened to lose votes on opposite sides: progressives might have been put off by his strong support for Israel, an increasingly unpopular position in the US (particularly among young people of color, whom the ticket needs), and white folks in the heartland, already having to swallow the idea of voting for a Black woman, might have found a Jewish running mate a bridge too far.
I have been arguing for a long time that the defence of democracy, for which this election is critical, requires building as broad a front as possible, including those whose natural home is on the centre-right. (For that reason I would have offered the vice-presidential slot to a Republican, but the Democratic Party was never going to allow that.) There’s a real concern that Walz’s selection doesn’t aid that project.
On the other hand, that worry may be exaggerated by the habits of the intellectual class, who focus too much on policy or ideas rather than style. If Walz presents like a reassuring centrist, perhaps that’s just as good as actually being one.
Finally two side notes on the US election. Firstly in relation to my discussion last week about the effect of the electoral college, there’s now a very good piece on the subject in the Washington Post. Lenny Bronner explains that the bias in the college varies with time, and that currently it looks like being significantly less in the Republicans’ favor than last time:
According to our polling average, which ingests quality polls and past voter data, Trump is ahead in Michigan by a single percentage point. With a tied national polling average, our model shows the current electoral college bias as favoring Republicans by a single percentage point.
The second thing is the betting market, also discussed here recently. In the last fortnight it has swung strongly in the Democrats’ favor; according to Lott & Stossel’s aggregator, the odds now imply a 54% chance of Democrat victory. Perhaps more significantly, that’s not a one-off jump but rather a steady trend ever since Joe Biden announced his withdrawal.
The World is Not Enough 