There is Kamala Harris supposedly narrow His list of potential running mates is down to three: Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, Arizona Sen. Mark Kelly and Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro.
All these competitors have their upside. Walz is a Midwestern veteran who plays well no nonsense, Folk father On TV and has repeatedly won a Republican-leaning, rural congressional district before becoming governor. Kelly Hall A border hawk whose climb up the Democratic ticket could theoretically be mitigated by Harris Weaknesses on immigration. Plus, he is went to space
Even so, a glance at the Electoral College map would lead one to believe that Shapiro is the obvious choice.
Right now, Harris is voting a little worse in Pennsylvania compared to other important Rust Belt battlegrounds. The presumptive Democratic nominee trailed Trump there by 1.9 points, though only lost 1 point to Michigan And 0.7 points in Wisconsin, according to RealClearPolitics’ polling average. Close the gap in Pennsylvania and Harris would be within striking distance of sweeping three Midwestern swing states, which could be enough to win him the White House.
What’s more, Pennsylvania has four more Electoral Colleges than Michigan and nine more than Wisconsin. As long as the Democrats win Pennsylvania, they can lose both of those states and still have a more plausible path to victory. With Pennsylvania in his corner, Harris could lose Nevada, Michigan and Wisconsin and still only get 270 Electoral College votes with Georgia and Arizona.
Given this math, picking a governor might seem like a no-brainer 60 percent Approval rating in the single most valuable battlefield state.
But there’s a flaw in this argument: There’s virtually no evidence that picking a vice presidential candidate from a particular state actually increases a party’s support in that state.
Shapiro may still be Harris’ best option. And it’s conceivable that he could slightly improve his support in Pennsylvania. But if he did, he would be the exception to the rule. Harris would be well advised to give more weight to other considerations in making his selections.
The weak, complicated case for believing that running mates help provide their home state
Some studies have shown that vice presidential candidates enjoy a “home-state advantage.” But this analysis usually rests on faulty premises.
Over the years, most studies have suggested that presidential candidates do not enjoy an advantage in their running mate’s home state. In 2016, political scientists Boris Hiersink and Brenton Peterson published one paper That challenges this consensus.
Traditionally, political scientists measured a running mate’s home-state advantage by considering 1) the national vote in a given election and 2) how a vice-presidential candidate’s home state voted on average in the previous five elections.
With these two data points, they estimated how that state should have voted in a given election, taking into account its historical trends and the national climate that year, and then compared those estimates to how it actually voted. If a presidential candidate exceeds their expected vote share in their running mate’s home state, one might conclude that they enjoyed an advantage there.
Hiersink and Peterson argue that there is a major problem with this argument: political parties tend to choose vice-presidential candidates from places where they have already lost ground due to structural political change.
They cite the example of John F. Kennedy’s election of Lyndon Johnson in 1960.
In the previous five elections, Democratic Party support in LBJ’s home state of Texas had declined sharply, as Republicans steadily ate away at the New Deal coalition. In 1940, Franklin Delano Roosevelt won 81 percent of the state’s vote; Four years later, he took 71 percent. With these two landslides above the Democratic Party’s historic average support in Texas, Kennedy was assured of a worse-than-expected performance in the Lone Star State, no matter who he chose as his running mate.
Traditional formulas for calculating home-state advantage miss this fact. Instead, it suggested that electing LBJ actually reduced Kennedy’s support in Texas by 15 points.
Hiersink and Peterson found this impossible. They assert that a vice-presidential candidate’s home state is more likely to be alienated from that candidate’s party than the nation as a whole. Therefore, to capture the true home-state advantage of a running mate, you need to compare the voting behavior of another vice presidential nominee from somewhere else with the same exact state in their home state.
Lacking the budget for interdimensional travel, researchers settled for the next best thing. By combining bits and pieces from other US states, they created a “synthetic” Texas: a group of geographic areas that collectively voted the same as Texas in 1952 and 1956. Comparing the results of the 1960 election in this Frankensteinian pseudo-Texas to real Texas, they found that LBJ’s election likely increased Kennedy’s margin in the Lone Star State.
Applying this method to all US elections between 1844 and 2012, they found that vice presidential candidates increased their ticket support in their home states by an average of 2.67 percent—enough to potentially change the outcome of an election.
Why picking Josh Shapiro might not help Harris much in Pennsylvania
If Hirsink and Peterson’s findings are correct, a ton of Democratic and Republican consultants need to be fired.
In recent elections, neither party’s presidential nominee chose a running mate from the most hotly contested swing state. They tend to pick politicians from completely uncontested states: George W. Bush picked Dick Cheney from deep red Wyoming, Obama tapped Biden from safe blue Delaware, Trump picked Mike Pence from solidly Republican (Except in the immediate aftermath of the financial crash) Indiana, and Biden chose Harris from Coastal Gomorrah, California.
If all these nominees could get themselves a significant boost in a key swing state simply by choosing a different running mate, their top advisers should never work in politics again.
The thing is, Hiersink and Peterson’s paper is almost certainly wrong.
In 2019, political scientist Christopher J. Devine and Kyle Kopko A study published Which reaffirmed the original conventional wisdom: Running mates don’t meaningfully boost ticket support in their home states.
Devine and Copco’s research directly refutes Hiersink and Peterson’s, noting two major flaws: First, its premise — that parties tend to pick vice-presidential candidates from states they’re losing — isn’t true and has a technical flaw. The research was based on
In 1948, a group of Southern Democrats split with the National Party to protest President Harry Truman’s adoption of civil rights. These Dixiecrats put forward their own, alternative Democratic nominee, South Carolina Governor Strom Thurmond. Alabama decided to drop Truman from the state ballot and listed Thurmond as the Democratic presidential nominee instead.
As a result, the Democratic Party’s actual nominee received no votes in Alabama that year.
Hairsink and Peterson coded this as a 100-point Republican victory in Alabama, since they did not recognize Thurmond as the Democratic nominee. And this questionable decision is important to the rest of their paper, since in 1952, the Democrats’ vice presidential candidate was from Alabama. In fact, parties usually pick VP nominees from places where they lose ground based entirely on the alleged fact that 1952 Democratic standard-bearer Adlai Stevenson picked a running mate from a state where her party lost 100 point four. Take that result from Heersink and Peterson’s average years ago and the trend disappears entirely.
A second problem with their paper is that its findings are based on the voting behavior of geographic areas rather than the population as a whole. Data on changes in a region’s overall political leanings have their uses, but information about individuals’ voting preferences is generally better for measuring the impact of any given factor on election outcomes.
This is partly because the population of an area can change between election cycles. For example, a state may gradually lose college-educated voters if other areas offer better job opportunities for young professionals. Thus, if you compare a state’s voting behavior in one election with its behavior in the next, you may mistake the effect of demographic changes for the effect of a particular campaign decision, such as electing a running mate from that state.
Using large-scale survey data on individuals in all 50 states, Devine and Copco are able to measure the impact of ongoing partisan decisions on voters. They find that, after controlling for all other relevant variables (eg, partisanship, race, age, gender, income, etc.), voters in the same state are no more likely to support one party’s vice-presidential nominee than voters in the other. States
Shapiro might be the right choice, but Harris shouldn’t be picked for the wrong reasons
None of this necessarily means Harris should pick Shapiro.
The governor of Pennsylvania has some responsibilities. his unusually harsh Criticism of pro-Palestinian protesters has earned him the enmity of some progressives, while he has uncanny similarities Speech style and Barack Obama’s May be off-putting for some voters.
Still, by picking Shapiro, Harris can admirably address the widespread perception thatHe is very leftist, which may cause concern for some swing voters. And the qualities that enabled the Pennsylvania governor to achieve a 60 percent approval rating in his home state could help him win the trust of a national electorate.
It’s also conceivable that Shapiro could give Harris some help in Pennsylvania. Empirical evidence may strongly suggest that a moving partner’s home status does not matter, but there are no precise measurement tools in the social sciences. Survey data can be biased and relevant variables cannot be identified and controlled. More critically, as noted above, it’s been decades since either party’s nominee tried to put a popular incumbent governor on the ticket in a hotly contested swing state. Historical data may therefore not be a reliable guide to the effect of Shapiro selection.
There are also reasons why Harris’s VP pick is the most important: in some Recent polls, Harris’ favorability has jumped dramatically in recent weeks, a development that suggests voters’ impressions of him are unusually volatile. Since his choice of running mate will be the first major decision he makes as the presumptive Democratic nominee, it could solidify many voters’ opinions of his candidacy. Shapiro’s election may reassure some Pennsylvania voters that Harris is the type of Democrat they can trust.
Still, Harris shouldn’t be relied upon. While it is possible that Shapiro could help him win Pennsylvania, the historical record indicates that it is far from a sure thing.
For that reason, if Harris believes Walz or Kelly will play better to a national audience, he shouldn’t choose Shapiro simply because he comes from a more valuable state.
