The Vice Presidential pick is almost always the most obvious one – the one pundits and strategists have suggested for weeks – but not this time.
It all seemed simple enough. Pennsylvania is widely considered the tipping point state in this election, and the Commonwealth’s Democratic Governor is one of the party’s rising stars. Therefore, it made perfect sense for Josh Shapiro to be Kamala Harris’ Vice Presidential pick.
Yet she instead chose Minnesota Governor Tim Walz, who rocketed up the shortlist after some impressive media interviews and some critical support from influential Dems like Nancy Pelosi and UAW President Shawn Fain.
Why did Harris make this unexpected and unorthodox selection? Well, being obsessed with the Vice Presidency as I am, I think we can shine some light on this by looking at some recent history of the office.
The Vice Presidency is an infamously terrible job, yet ambitious politicians are still drawn to it for the obvious reason. When Lyndon Johnson was asked why he accepted the VP nomination, he responded that he’d had his staff look into it and they found nearly one in four VPs got to assume the Presidency. “I’m a gambling man, darling,” LBJ explained “and this is the only chance I’ve got.”
Of course, if you lost that gamble, you were liable to fade into a historical oblivion. So in 1976, Jimmy Carter sought to create a new model; where the Vice President would serve as a partner, albeit always as a junior partner.
Carter chose Minnesota’s Walter Mondale for this role, in part because Mondale had passed on his own 1976 campaign, stating “I do not have the overwhelming desire to be President”. As a result, Carter felt Mondale would be a loyal VP, undistracted by his own ambitions. In 2000, George W. Bush took this idea even further by picking someone like Dick Cheney, who would never run his own Presidential campaign.
Barack Obama sought to follow this format in 2008 and saw the perfect partner in Joe Biden. The one problem was that – despite telling Obama that he wouldn’t run for President again – Biden wasn’t able to let his Presidential dreams go. As one long-time Biden aide told Robert Costa: “Fish swim, birds fly and Joe Biden runs for President”.
Indeed it’s clear now that Biden believed if he did well enough as Vice President, then he could convince Obama and the rest of the party to support him for the top job. So when Obama and the Dems coalesced behind Clinton instead of him, Biden became deeply resentful, believing that he would have beaten Trump in 2016 if he was the nominee.
All of this drama set the stage for Biden’s own Veepstakes, which began with a pledge to select a female Vice President during his final 1-on-1 debate with Bernie Sanders. This VP promise was a way to appeal to newly energized female voters – those who showed up to those record-breaking Women Marches – and to wrap up the Democratic nomination.
From the beginning, then-Senator Harris was considered the front-runner for this VP spot. As the spring and summer unfolded that consensus only hardened; especially after the George Floyd protests, when Sen. Amy Klobuchar withdrew from the vetting process and publicly asserted that Biden should select a woman of color.
Klobuchar’s proclamation created an impression that the Biden team needed to pick Harris, the most prominent woman of color on their shortlist. Nevertheless, as Biden’s protracted VP selection process lingered on, his campaign began to vet long-shot choices like former National Security Advisor Susan Rice and then-Congresswoman Karen Bass. It started to seem like the campaign was looking at all the Black women who weren’t Kamala Harris.
In fact, by the end of the vetting process, reporting suggests that Biden felt closest to Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer and quietly wanted her to be his VP. Yet Whitmer didn’t seem to really want the No. 2 job, while campaign research revealed Harris to be the stronger candidate. As a result, Kamala Harris was chosen instead.
So, right from the beginning, the Biden and Harris White House relationship started off rocky. In many ways, history shows that former Vice Presidents ironically tend to treat their own VPs the worst; with Biden joining a list that already included LBJ, Nixon and Bush 41.
The core issue was that, rather than setting up Harris to succeed, Biden treated Harris the way he had been during his own Vice Presidency. Obama, of course, didn’t think he needed to prepare Biden for his own Presidential run and frequently gave him politically toxic tasks. Thus Biden saddled Harris with tough issues like Central American migration.
All of this all came to a head after Biden’s debate debacle; as the calls for the incumbent to drop out grew exponentially, while his team not-so-quietly countered that Harris couldn’t beat Trump. This put Harris in the impossible position of supporting her President publicly, while privately preparing for the possibility of her own mad sprint to Election Night.
Given all the aforementioned baggage, it’s no surprise that Harris made the Veep decision that she did.
From the very start, her campaign was floating the term “governing partner” to describe what they were looking for. We also know that some of her team were upset to see North Carolina Gov. Roy Cooper withdraw from consideration. In retrospect, Walz seems to have stepped up to fill the void left by Cooper.
For instance, during their 1-on-1 interview, Harris was reportedly shocked and pleased to hear Walz respond that he didn’t ever want to run for President on his own. He even went so far as to assert “I’m at the end of my career. This is not about me”.
Shapiro, on the other hand, apparently tried to negotiate what the role of her VP would be, asking “what decisions he would be included in making”. In fact, it went so poorly that he called the Harris campaign afterward to suggest that, upon giving it further thought, he was actually reluctant to leave the PA Governorship.
To put it simply, it’s clear that Harris didn’t want to worry about a potential Vice President Shapiro’s future political viability. Rather, she wanted a VP like Walz, who held no separate electoral ambitions. Should she come up just short in the key state of Pennsylvania – or if Walz noticeably stumbles on the trail or in a debate – then she’ll be excoriated for her choice.
Regardless, by taking this comprehensive view of the Vice Presidency and Harris’ relationship to it, we can see why she made this decision and gain some valuable insight into how a Harris-Walz Administration would function.