06 Nov Election Thoughts, Part I
I know that most of you have already read a million post-election analyses and will almost certainly see a million more. Given that, I will be brief today and will focus on aspects of the election that are not likely to get much coverage elsewhere. I’ll have more to say later – much more, I’m sure. But for now, consider the following.
First, conventional wisdom notwithstanding, running mates do matter, or at least they matter sometimes.
Think back to 2000 for a moment. George W. Bush, the young, brash, and largely untested son of the former president, picked his running mate carefully – and extremely well. It’s hard to remember, now that Dick Cheney has been both evil-personified and the father of Kamala’s savior, but 24 years ago, he was the guy who brought “gravitas” to the Bush ticket. Without Cheney and his intellectual and foreign-policy heft, Bush likely wouldn’t have been able to seal the deal with the electorate. Cheney mattered.
This year, both running mates mattered. Trump needed someone who could evince calm, wisdom, and intelligence. JD Vance turned out to be the perfect choice.
Harris needed someone like Dick Cheney, someone who would give her heft and seriousness. What she got instead was a clown. It is, frankly, impossible to imagine a worse choice than Tim Walz. He was a disaster. He didn’t appeal to men. He didn’t appeal to Midwesterners and “regular people.” He didn’t appeal to gun owners, hunters, and farmers. Everything the Democrats initially said about him turned out to be false – and so, for that matter, did half of the things he said about himself. He was inarguably a drag on the ticket – which, given the top of the ticket – is really saying something. The campaign said that Harris picked Walz because she “went with her gut.” If this is true, then her gut is stupid.
Second, regardless of what the campaign says, I don’t think Harris necessarily picked Walz because she went with her gut. I think she picked him because he was the only one who answered the phone when she called. I put this way in my American Greatness column almost exactly three months ago:
During the early 1980’s, a political science professor at the University of California San Diego, Gary Jacobson, developed a theory about Congressional elections that was both revolutionary at the time and seemingly blindingly obvious in retrospect. In brief, Jacobson’s “strategic politicians hypothesis” posits that smart and talented politicians are most likely to run for office when their chances of winning are the greatest. In Congressional elections, this means that good candidates are more likely to get into a race when a national “wave” election appears to be building or when the incumbent in their district is not running for reelection or when they have a unique opportunity to raise campaign funds or…whatever. Good candidates don’t want to take any chance that they might be defeated, and so they will generally avoid contests in which the odds are stacked against them.
There is much more to Jacobson’s theory than just that, and the data he collected and analyzed were specific to U.S. House races. Nevertheless, the basic premise of his model makes logical sense in any election: candidates want to win, not lose, and they will pick their opportunities based on that calculation.
It is quite possible, in other words, that Kamala Harris chose the manifestly flawed Tim Walz as her running mate because Tim Walz was the only person she asked who said “yes.” Whitmer, Cooper, and Beshear all took themselves out of the running for the VP slot more than a week ago. It is hardly unreasonable to assume that they did so for fear of being part of a disastrous presidential ticket. Harris appears to have momentum at the moment, but there is no telling whether that momentum is real or, more to the point, if it will last beyond a few weeks. Harris has never won a Democratic primary vote, having dropped out of the 2020 race before any voters ever went to the polls. She was, until a couple of weeks ago, generally considered a political liability. She is not especially likable, and whether she wants to or not, she will have to defend the Biden record on domestic and foreign policy. Momentum notwithstanding, she will not win this race easily.
In retrospect, I think this was pretty close to what happened. There’s more to the story than just that, of course, and I’ll get to some of it later this week. But for now, it seems pretty clear that for all the hysteria about this being “the most important election ever” the Democratic powers that be understood from the start that they were playing a very weak hand. Knowing that they have a relatively short bench, they didn’t think it necessary to burn up a good candidate on a bad nominee. Walz was expendable – for reasons that are obvious now – and he has been duly expended.
More to come…
