Just Pick Who You Want, Kamala

Why Vice President Harris Should Ignore All the Voices Claiming a Veep Selection Can Win an Election

1. The Story of Dan Quayle

In 1988, Vice President George H.W. Bush, running to succeed Ronald Reagan as President, chose Sen. Dan Quayle of Indiana as his running mate. It turned out to be a public relations disaster. Quayle was not up to the job. He flubbed basic political events, like the time he misspelled “potato” at event involving schoolchildren. He showed no depth of understanding difficult foreign policy challenges (which looked particularly bad considering he would be serving under a President running on his foreign policy expertise). He bumbled and stumbled his way through the campaign. His worse moment came at the Vice Presidential debate, when the young Senator compared his experience level to John F. Kennedy’s level of experience when he ran for President in 1960. Quayle’s opponent, the avuncular Sen. Lloyd Bentsen, responded with the ultimate putdown: “Senator, I served with Jack Kennedy. I knew Jack Kennedy. Jack Kennedy was a friend of mine. Senator, you’re no Jack Kennedy.”

Quayle’s candidacy was so bad that Saturday Night Live ran a Weekend Update joke that the parties had requested that this is how the ballots would read:

BUSH/quayle

dukakis/BENTSEN

Bush, of course, won that election. And the country was put at risk— during a very eventful time in human history (fall of the Berlin Wall, end of the Cold War, release of Mandela, Tiananmen Square, the first Gulf War, and a big recession), Dan Quayle was, for four years, a heartbeat away from the presidency. Thankfully nothing happened to Bush.

In 1992, Bill Clinton ran to replace George Bush. Notably, Clinton almost never mentioned Quayle during the campaign, despite Quayle in theory being a massive weakness to Bush, instead sticking to his three part message that strategist James Carville came up with— change vs. more of the same, the economy stupid, and don’t forget health care. Clinton won, and Quayle basically exited politics (he had one short-lived run for President) until his cameo role telling Mike Pence to do the right thing in 2021.

I learned a lot from watching the Dan Quayle thing transpire. Mostly, I learned that vice presidential selections don’t actually mean anything. Back then, as now, pundits swore that a Veep selection could deliver votes. In Bush’s case, it was a way for an old man presidential candidate (imagine, back then we considered 64 years old to be an old candidate!) to connect with youth with the young, handsome, Baby Boomer Veep candidate (the first Boomer on any presidential ticket). There’s no evidence the kids voted for Bush because of Quayle, of course.

Quayle’s pick exemplifies everything wrong with the discourse about Vice Presidential candidates— the mystical belief that voters vote on the bottom half of the ticket, the magical thinking about “ticket balancing”, and the complete lack of concern for the actual damage a bad vice presidential selection can do. It had it all. And sadly, a lot of political nerds never learned the lesson.

2. Winning Candidates Don’t Choose Swing State Vice Presidents

Starting with Carter in 1976, take a look at who the winner of each Presidential election chose as their running mate:

Carter— Walter Mondale, from Minnesota, not a swing state

Reagan— George H.W. Bush, from Texas, not a swing state (alternatively, from Maine, a tiny state that makes little difference in the presidential election)

Bush— Quayle, from Indiana, not a swing state

Clinton— Al Gore, from Tennessee, not a swing state

George W. Bush— Dick Cheney, from Wyoming, not a swing state (alternatively, from Texas, not a swing state and a state the ticket already had covered with Bush)

Obama— Joe Biden, from Delaware, not a swing state

Trump— Mike Pence, from Indiana, not a swing state

Biden— Kamala Harris, from California, not a swing state

The last winning first term presidential candidate to pick a Veep from a swing state was Nixon in 1968, who picked Spiro Agnew from the then-swing state of Maryland. The last time a Veep selection may have actually mattered was 1960 when Kennedy picked Johnson, and even then there’s a lot of dispute about whether it actually did.

In other words, for all the talk of how you have to choose someone from a swing state and “pick up a state”, winning campaigns seem to completely ignore that talk and do just fine. Indeed, where you find swing state veep candidates is in losing campaigns, at least in recent years. Hillary Clinton (Kaine- Virginia), Mitt Romney (Ryan- Wisconsin), and John Kerry (Edwards- North Carolina) all picked swing state candidates.

Indeed, Kerry’s selection of Edwards is particularly instructive here. Kerry got slaughtered in North Carolina by about 13 points. Just four years later, Obama and Biden won North Carolina. That kind of indicates that the state might have been winnable four years earlier, doesn’t it? And yet, selecting a North Carolina running mate resulted in Kerry being trounced in the state.

Advocates of choosing someone from a particular state have a response. They say if you look closely and squint, a candidate’s numbers improve in the state where the Veep was from. This is, to me, a classic example of the misuse of statistics. Basically in most of these elections, as you saw above, the Veep doesn’t come from a swing state. And if the Veep doesn’t come from a swing state, and the election is fait accompli in that state anyway, sure, why not vote for a Veep candidate? That doesn’t mean that voters are going to vote for the Veep when the election is on the line. The public cares a lot about who is going to be President and almost not at all about who will be Vice President.

The other problem with the data scientists here is the sample size is so tiny. A handful of presidential elections is a very small, heterogeneous data set. It isn’t like analyzing a batter in a baseball game who has had 600 plate appearances. You can conclude very little about Presidential elections by just looking at, say, 10 of them and extracting some data point from them, especially when much of the time the Veep selection wasn’t even from a swing state anyway. (FYI, before Kerry chose Edwards you actually have to go back to 1972 to find a ticket where either party chose a swing state Veep candidate. So the sample size of swing state Veep candidates in modern elections is exactly three. Not exactly a large sample.)

It’s worth noting that even the data science here is pretty contested among experts. For instance, Nate Silver recently ran his calculations and found the effect of choosing a swing state Veep is, maybe, 1 percent. He didn’t mean you gained an actual percentage point in the polls. No, you gained much less than that. He meant when you run all the different possible election scenarios through his computer model, only 1 in 100 times does the Veep selection ever matter.

3. The Dangers- The Andrew Johnson and Joe Lieberman Problems

If this was just some argument about political strategy, that would be one thing. A lot of things are done in politics that are meaningless but not harmful. For instance, less and less people watch the political conventions as they have become boring infomercials for the candidates. But the campaigns put a lot of money into the conventions even if they don’t have much of an effect. We lawyers know all about this effect— for instance, we put tons of effort and time into delivering good appellate oral arguments even though, as former Chief Justice Rehnquist said, oral arguments only affect the results of less than 5% of the cases. Most cases are won on the facts, the law, and the briefs. Yet lawyers work very hard on oral argument because it is the last thing we have any control over. Once oral argument happens there is almost nothing we can do to influence the process. So we throw everything at oral argument. Why not, the argument goes, throw everything at the few things you can control.

But there are two big arguments against this when it comes to the Vice Presidency. The first is the Andrew Johnson problem. We all learned Abraham Lincoln was a great man. And he truly was. But what if I told you that a single decision he made may have been the direct cause of over 80 years of suffering for Black Americans. That’s right, he listened to the strategists of his day and replaced his original Vice President, Hannibal Hamlin (who somehow advanced in 19th Century politics with a name that sounded like a horror movie villain), with Andrew Johnson, from the “border state” (i.e., 1864’s version of a swing state), Tennessee.

Johnson’s role in the Civil War was one of personal courage. He was a Democrat and sympathetic to slavery, but stood up to the secessionists and insisted that his home state should stay in the union. Lincoln and his people wanted to reward that and to appeal to “war Democrats”, people with pretty bad attitudes about race and slavery but who nonetheless did the right thing and supported the Union. So Lincoln put Johnson on the ticket. Big mistake! Lincoln was shot and killed, and Johnson came in and basically created the federal government’s permission slip to the South to impose Jim Crow. He pardoned rebels, he vetoed reconstruction bills, and he did as little as he could get away with for the freedmen.

The point is, the fact that the Veep succeeds the President is far more important, in terms of the selection of a candidate, than these discussions about picking up states and balancing tickets. Lincoln needed to choose someone who could credibly succeed him as President, and he failed at this basic task. It would have been far better, in retrospect, to pay Johnson off with a cabinet slot or find some other way to honor him for what was actually honorable about Johnson- that he supported the Union and the war despite his personal feelings about the underlying issues that caused it. Instead, Lincoln very nearly undid most of the good he did through emancipation.

Now, you might respond that none of the people Harris is considering are Andrew Johnson. True enough. But that’s not the only way the Vice President is important. What I call the Joe Lieberman problem is this— Lieberman, Gore’s running mate, was an awful politician and an awful human being. He supported US military adventurism everywhere including Iraq. He killed the public option in Obamacare. He was a sanctimonious moral scold who was constantly lecturing us about the culture we choose to consume. But Gore named him as his Veep candidate and then almost won the 2000 election.

Now, think what would have happened if Gore had won. Gore might have stood a decent chance of reelection in 2004, and then Lieberman would become the candidate in 2008, because Vice Presidents often become the nominee later on. Harris, Biden, Gore, and HW Bush were all former Vice Presidents nominated for President by their party.

So instead of Barack Obama, an amazing politician, an excellent President, and a historic figure, we might have had the awful, small, petty, sanctimonious, murderous Joe Lieberman as our nominee. All because Gore chose him 8 years before.,

Now obviously Lieberman is stacking the deck in a couple of ways— he was both by far the worst human being the Democrats have nominated for Veep in my lifetime, and wasn’t even nominated to secure a state or constituency. But consider Tim Kaine. Remember him? He was the boring, mediocre, not particularly talented, privileged white guy from Virginia that the supposedly brilliant Hillary Clinton campaign nominated for Veep to “balance” her ticket and “pick up Virginia”. She almost won the election, but had she won and gotten reelected, rather than potentially electing the first Black woman President, we might be voting for a total zero of a white bread presidential candidate on the Democratic line this year.

The point is, if Harris just chooses a swing state white dude, she probably won’t help herself any in the election but she will lock in a swing state white dude as potentially the party’s next presidential nominee. Is that what we want? We can’t do any better than that?

4. Just Choose Who You Want

I have a better idea for Kamala Harris. She should choose the person she wants to be Vice President. The person she thinks will be a good President. The person she can work with (Gore was an excellent choice because Clinton worked well with him). The person she might like to see run for President on the Democratic line in the future.

This person doesn’t have to be a white male. They don’t need to come from a swing state. They don’t need to make the data scientists and political nerds happy. This person should make Kamala Harris happy.

Because it turns out the vice presidency is unimportant to electoral results but sometimes crucial for the country.