| Posted: 06 August 2024 at 6:44pm | IP Logged | 4
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If Harris is going to have a chance to win, she needs to reign in all those "uncommitted" Democratic primary voters who are unhappy about Gaza (particularly those in Michigan). As Dave noted, a Shapiro pick would have put the war front and center as an issue and potentially alienated those voters. And as JB noted, if you have a non-WASP at the top of the ticket, you pretty much need a WASP (or at least a WASC) on the bottom.
Would Shapiro have helped in Pennsylvania? Possibly, but it's unclear how much influence a VP pick actually has on the outcome. I'm trying to think of the last time either party selected a VP from a swing state and then actually won that state. I guess it was 1992 with Al Gore. But Clinton was a Southerner himself and likely would have carried Tennessee without Gore anyway.
With one exception, every Democratic VP pick since then has been from a solidly Democratic state. The exception was John Edwards in 2004, but North Carolina was not a swing state at the time (it was solidly Republican) and Edwards wasn't able to move the needle enough to help win it.
On the Republican side, I guess Wisconsin was sort of a swing state in 2012, and Romney chose Paul Ryan from there. But that didn't work out for him.
You really have to go all the way back to 1980 (when Mondale helped make Minnesota one of only six states carried by Carter) to find an example of a VP pick seeming to have a notable effect on the winner in their home state.
Edited by Jason Czeskleba on 06 August 2024 at 8:56pm
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