Are Democrats really this out of touch with the country, and with its own history?
There’s a reason nobody expected far-left Kamala Harris to pick a far-left governor from a deep blue state as her running mate. It’s never worked.
In the wake of Jimmy Carter’s crushing defeat in 1980 and repeated Democratic losses thereafter, the party decided that to win presidential elections they had to at least appear as moderates.
Bill Clinton won by labeling himself a “new Democrat” and picked Al Gore, then a fellow moderate Southerner. Gore in turn tapped Joe Lieberman as his running mate. Barack Obama tried to position himself to the right of John McCain and ran with Scranton Joe Biden. Hillary Clinton picked Virginia moderate Sen. Tim Kaine to balance the ideological scales. Biden ran as a sensible centrist with a talent for working both sides of the aisle (and picked Harris more as an insurance policy against impeachment than anything else).
Which is why pundits across the board expected Harris – in what amounts to the first important decision she has made as presidential candidate — to pick a more mainstream governor with cross-party appeal from a swing state like Arizona or Pennsylvania.
