Matt Yglesias on what the choice of Tim Walz really tells us about the Harris campaign
One week ago, Vice President Kamala Harris selected Minnesota Governor Tim Walz to be her running mate. “Veepstakes”—the vice presidential selection process—is chock-full of undertheorized arguments about how a vice presidential nominee affects the ticket. Because she avoided a traditional primary, little is known about the policy positions Harris will campaign on and how she will choose to govern—making her running mate selection feel even more consequential.
While the Harris campaign has a message around why it picked the midwestern veteran and former teacher, I wanted to take a step back and question whether the assumptions about what a running-mate could add to a ticket actually make any sense.
The evidence that vice presidential nominees actually deliver votes in their home state is weak. The evidence that female candidates face an electoral penalty when they run for office is even weaker. And the assumptions that voters are demanding a racially-balanced or gender-balanced ticket is the type of argument that can seem obvious until you question the premises.
“It’s a fascinating moment because Harris came to the top of the ticket in such a sudden and unusual way,” Yglesias said. “So we’re all curious. What does she stand for? What does she think about the issues? How will she approach governance? This is the first big decision she makes, so it’s worth looking at, but we’re all looking at it to try to understand the broader implications.”
Listen to the conversation here:
The following is a transcript of the episode:
Jerusalem Demsas: Last week, Kamala Harris picked Minnesota Governor Tim Walz to be her running mate. He was picked, in part, because of his background winning elections in a midwestern state and because Harris was looking to balance the ticket with her vice-presidential pick, like many candidates before her.
There are a lot of undertheorized narratives floating around during the vice-presidential selection process: There’s the idea that the vice president should help deliver votes in their home state. There’s also the idea that voters want a gender-balanced or racially balanced ticket. And there’s the idea that women face a significant electoral penalty for their gender.
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Podcasts about live elections should probably all come with a warning label. After all, just a few months ago, no one was publicly predicting the series of events that unfolded following President Joe Biden’s disastrous debate performance. It’s a reminder that trying to find a signal in the noisy mess of politics is a difficult game, and one that should be played with a lot of intellectual humility.
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Demsas: So we’re here because Kamala Harris has selected a vice-presidential nominee. And there’s a lot of discourse about this, but I think there’s this idea that’s seeded through a lot of the VP-selection process, which is that there’s a serious electoral benefit that is there to be gained by a vice-presidential selection. And I don’t know what you think about this, but what is your sense about how much it matters who the VP is for the president to be or not be?
Matt Yglesias: I would say, as is often the case, these things are hotly disputed. And what I think is most important for a generalist to understand is that the contours of the dispute are pretty narrow. Some people crunch the numbers, and they feel that VP selections have significant home-state effects. For example, Republicans did terribly in the 2008 election, but they did pretty good in Alaska, right? So maybe Sarah Palin provided McCain with a big boost there. Democrats seem to have done very well in Virginia in 2016, but we might attribute that to broader structural changes rather than to Tim Kaine.
So some people think there’s a big home-state effect. Other people think there isn’t or that it’s diminished. But what nobody who’s looked at it quantitatively can really detect is the broader benefits of ticket balancing or enthusiasm that I think political parties are usually looking for, right? The hope—whether it’s J. D. Vance or Tim Walz or Sarah Palin or Joe Biden in 2008 or Kamala Harris in 2020—is that you’re going to make up for some of the nominee’s deficits, you’re going to enthuse some big group of people. And it’s really hard to find evidence of that happening.
People don’t know that much about politics and government, but I think they know that the vice presidency is kind of a fake job. Who cares who the vice president is?
Demsas: I don’t know. To ground it, because I know you just tagged this for us, I think a lot of people expect—or there’s, at least, a lot of argumentation around the idea that when you pick someone like a Josh Shapiro, that should help you in Pennsylvania. Even the argument around Tim Walz is, in many ways, based on how he can help the ticket in areas that he has theoretically won on.
Now, there’s another study that comes out in 2019 which rebuts this and that seems, actually, persuasive in their rebuttal of it. But I don’t know. My sense of this is it’s really hard to measure this stuff. There’s a bunch of assumptions and choices you have to make when doing your research design, which I can be convinced of basically in either direction. But my prior is: I find it a bit odd if someone with a name ID that was high in their own state and was popular as a good governor or a good senator would have no effect on the ticket.
Yglesias: Sure. I think you should have some kind of prior that adding a popular, well-known figure from Minnesota should help you to some extent in Minnesota. But then, do you need help in Minnesota? I think there’s a different question, right? Which is—in the memo—they talk about how Walz, when he was a House member, ran ahead of national Democrats in his House seat, which is absolutely true.
Epistemologically, Kamala Harris is a politician from San Francisco. She does not have a lot of practical experience trying to secure the votes of rural white people. Tim Walz does have that experience, and he could provide information to the campaign about his experience with that. But I think what he would tell you—if he’s, at least, being honest and analytically correct—is that he appealed to those voters by having views that he himself has disavowed and that aren’t in line with the Biden-Harris administration.
Demsas: There’s a theoretical dispute here that you’re drawing out. Because there’s the sense of: Is the reason why people are popular in certain districts largely because of the policy views that they hold? Or is it because of a sort of affect that they have?
Yglesias: Yes.
Yglesias: I feel very torn about this because I don’t want to be too negative on Walz or on the Walz selection. He seems fine. He seems like a fine choice. But I really think that this vibes-based interpretation of him is mistaken and that Democrats are making a serious error if they believe that a guy from small-town Minnesota being on the ticket will magically give them rural votes.
And that’s because, if you want to find evidence of Walz overperforming in rural areas, you have to go back to when he was a House member. Since he’s been governor, he has not overperformed in those areas. I attribute that to him changing his positions to be more in line with what people in Minneapolis think and less in line with what people in rural areas think.
Lots of friends—most Democrats as far as I can tell—disagree with me. They think it’s a huge coincidence that when you change your policy views, rural people have different opinions about you. Every urban liberal who I know thinks that, to them, the policy positions people take on assault weapons are really important and really change how they think about people. And so it’s really good for Tim Walz to have changed his mind about this. And they would be really upset if Kamala Harris adopted his old pro-gun view.
But they say that rural people don’t actually care about guns, that for them it’s all vibes.
Demsas: Well, I actually—
Yglesias: —and I find it, on its face, implausible that city dwellers who don’t have assault weapons and are not impacted in any way by this policy care more about the issue than people who own guns and think liberals are insane.
Demsas: All right. Well, I think there’s a synthesis here that makes a lot of sense, which is the question about—well, first of all, I think there’s reasons why people in cities would care about assault-weapons bans outside of whether or not they’re around people directly owning assault weapons.
Yglesias: No. I agree. There’s a reason why—I mean, right before I got in the studio with you, the Harris campaign released a new ad, and it’s about immigration. And the positions she’s taking are not different from Joe Biden’s positions on immigration. But in affect terms, it is a much more hard-edged ad than anything I ever saw from Biden. And that’s because people stereotype women as being more liberal in general, and specifically being more liberal on these kind of law-and-order issues.
But, again, these things are mostly interesting for what they tell us about the larger decision making rather than, you know, that the guy himself transforms our understanding of the whole situation.
Demsas: All right, time for a quick break. More with Matt when we get back.
[Break]
Demsas: I think another broad narrative that’s been really playing a lot that I know that you have taken serious issue with is this idea that it got down to the point where it was Shapiro versus Walz as the two options—that it was either the governor of Pennsylvania, Josh Shapiro, or Walz who ended up being the vice-presidential nominee.
And so I think it’s worth spending time here because—to be transparent—it was very clear they were doing, like, DEI for white men on the campaign. And so with the final selection, the final few candidates that were seriously taken under consideration were all white men. And it was clear from years past, there’s a sense in the party that you need to be balancing your ticket.
Yglesias: I don’t love the presumption that two women on a ticket would be somehow toxic or that adding a white man addresses—because it’s not to say that there’s no misogyny or racism in the world.
