Who Should, And Who Will, Win The Veepstakes?

Think strategically.
The post Who Should, And Who Will, Win The Veepstakes? appeared first on Above the Law.

I really should be in charge of everything.

I’d make the world a much better place (if I do say so myself), and I share God’s sense of humor.

(I packed more sacrilege and ambiguity into the back half of that sentence than you’ve managed in a lifetime, no?)

Anyway, I wrote a few weeks back that if I were in charge, Joe Biden would drop out of the presidential race, and the Democratic slate would be Govs. Gretchen Whitmer of Michigan and Josh Shapiro of Pennsylvania. The Democrats have to win Michigan and Pennsylvania; the Whitmer/Shapiro ticket would do it. (I suggested offering Kamala Harris a position as attorney general, with a behind-the-scenes promise that she’d be the next Democratic appointment to the Supreme Court, to keep Harris on board. But that’s now all hypothetical water under a nonexistent bridge.)

Biden dropped out, and the Democratic nominee for president will be Harris. Who should she choose for vice president?

Think strategically: Trump’s base is working-class white men without a college degree. Biden attracted just enough of those men to win the electoral college in 2020. Harris is likely to attract more young people, more people of color, and perhaps others than Biden did, but she’s likely to be weaker than Biden among working-class whites. It doesn’t do Harris any good to win the electoral votes of California and New York by even larger majorities than Biden would have. Harris needs working-class white votes in the industrial Midwest. The analysis should start, and perhaps end, there.

Some folks don’t like identity politics, but the world often thinks in terms of identity. Thus, although a ticket with Harris and Sen. Cory Booker would be interesting, I’ll rule it out. Winning Booker’s state of New Jersey doesn’t help the ticket (Democrats will win New Jersey even without Booker) and having two African Americans on the slate would probably not be the best way to attract working-class whites. (Yeah, yeah: I’m not being politically correct. But I am being honest.)

For the same reason, I extend my condolences to Gov. Wes Moore. Maryland and New Jersey (and Black and Black) pose the same issue for you as they do for Booker. I’ll have to look elsewhere for my candidate.

Let’s consider Shapiro as Harris’s running mate. He’d help carry Pennsylvania, a critical swing state for the Democrats. He’s young; he’s moderate; he’d make a good candidate. But he’s Jewish.

Zay mir moykhl, Josh. A Black and a Jew is almost as bad as two Blacks on the Democratic ticket. We’re trying to win the folks Hillary Clinton called “deplorables” here, and this ticket just doesn’t work.

Pete Buttigieg? Oy gevalt! Norm-shattering? Yes. Electable? Not with the demographic the Democrats need. This is a Joe Bag-o-Donuts race; a Black/gay ticket ain’t worth a cruller.

How about two women? How’s Harris and Whitmer for a ticket? In some ways, the testosterone right versus the progesterone left would be a fascinating race, but I again think it’s too radical for much of America. I wouldn’t take the risk.

The same goes for Gina Raimondo, the secretary of commerce. I hear great things about her, but she’s got the wrong chromosomes to be the Democratic vice presidential nominee in 2024.

Gov. Andy Beshear of Kentucky? He’s a moderate white guy from the south, and he’s won the Kentucky governorship a couple of times, which is quite a feat for a Democrat. But he’s never going to carry Kentucky for the Democrats in a presidential race. Sorry, Andy, you’ll have to do something else for the next four years.

So, too, for Roy Cooper, the governor of North Carolina. Democrats stand a better chance of winning North Carolina than Kentucky, but it’s still too much of a stretch. I say no.

J.B. Pritzker has the opposite flaw. Harris will win Illinois with or without the help of the state’s governor, so Pritzker doesn’t add electoral votes to the ticket. He does add immense wealth, which helps with financing a campaign, and Harris might want to brag that her billionaire is richer than the Republicans’ billionaire.  But Trump would surely lie about that, too, claiming that he is richer than Pritzker and, in fact, richer than anyone — living, or dead, or imaginable.

Let’s move on to consider hugely unlikely candidates: Mitt Romney, Liz Cheney, or Adam Kinzinger. If the Democrats really believe that democracy is at risk in this election, and if the polls suggest that nominating a Republican for vice president is the only way to defeat Trump, then the Democrats should nominate a Republican. Nominating a Republican for vice president would give permission for sane Republicans to vote for Harris for president, and those votes might turn the election.

Stop all that squealing, Democrats. I hear you now: “Romney! Cheney! Kinzinger! We disagree with all of their policies! They’d turn off the Democratic base!”

You’re shouting only because you didn’t read carefully: Assume that democracy itself is on the line in this election. (You’ve been saying that often enough for the past year. Now I’m simply asking you to believe that it’s actually true.) And assume that the polls show that the only way to win the election is to have a Republican vice presidential nominee.

If you accept my two assumptions, then you nominate a Republican.

Of the three names I’ve suggested, I’d go with Mitt Romney. He was the Republican presidential nominee in 2012, so he’s a more important figure for traditional Republicans than Cheney or Kinzinger. I understand that he says he’s not running for reelection to the Senate because it’s time to pass the torch to a younger generation. But that’s nonsense, of course. He’s in fact not running for reelection because he can’t win reelection with his party dominated by Trump.

It’s easy enough for Romney to decide that he’s not so old, after all. He could surely give a speech saying that Trump is utterly unfit for office, and Romney has decided to postpone his retirement to run as Harris’s vice presidential candidate because America has to rally against Trump, and our democracy must be saved.

Romney would somehow have to modify his position on abortion, but I’m sure that smart political advisers could figure out a solution to that.

In the end, however, I doubt that polls would show that having a Republican on the ticket is the only sure-fire way for Democrats to win the election, and, unless that were the case, Democrats would never stand for Romney. Let’s rule him out.

I’m down to three final potential candidates — the two guys who comprise the pool from which I’d pick if I were in charge, and the candidate that I predict Harris will actually pick.

First, my guys:

Consider James Stavridis, the four-star admiral who now appears occasionally as a talking head on MSNBC. I’d never considered Stavridis as a possibility until Bret Stephens proposed him in a recent New York Times op-ed. Now, having thought about it, I like it.

I’ve also recently seen that another four-star admiral, William McRaven, may actually be on the list of potential nominees that Eric Holder is vetting for Harris.

Neither Stavridis nor McRaven have any known fundraising chops, but that may not matter to Harris; her fundraising thus far has been spectacular. Neither of the two admirals has a political base, because they’re not politicians. But this presidential race is going to be decided by the votes of testosterone-rich white males without college degrees in Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin. That was why Hulk Hogan spoke at the Republican convention; that’s why J.D. Vance is the Republican nominee for vice president. Working-class white males are the key to the election.

Trump acts tough, and he has great political instincts. Whether you love Trump or hate him, pumping his fist in the air after a would-be assassin took a shot at him is a spectacular political move. Trump projects tough. Vance, the hillbilly who served in the Marines for four years, reinforces the tough-guy image. The Republicans are tough, and working-class white guys apparently love that.

The truth about Trump and Vance is a little different from what they project. Trump, after all, dodged the draft, and Vance spent his four years as a military correspondent. Trump is not tough, and Vance’s military service, though admirable, was not in the role of a gun-toting badass.

So let’s pick a gun-toting badass to join Harris on the slate! Putting a four-star admiral on the Democratic ticket would take the wind out of the Republicans’ sails (to use a particularly apt metaphor). If that four-star admiral, like Stavridis, had also been the highest-ranking military officer in NATO, his nomination would suggest that Democrats stand for sane policies in Ukraine and NATO, rather than the crazy stuff Trump and Vance are advocating. Or, if the four-star admiral, like McRaven, had been a Navy Seal and later oversaw the raid that killed Osama bin Laden in 2011, that’d do the trick, too. Stavridis and McRaven project tough — really tough. Their decades-long military careers might give permission for some high school-educated white guys in the industrial heartland to vote Democratic and carry Harris to the presidency.

Go for a four-star admiral, Kamala, and beat the Republicans at their own game! Stavridis and McRaven both do the trick. If it were up to me, one of those two guys would be Harris’ choice for vice president.

But, as I said, the Democrats won’t go the military route. The Democrats will instead go with Sen. Mark Kelly of Arizona. Kelly was a navy pilot and an astronaut, which provides almost as much testosterone as Stavridis or McRaven.  Kelly is married to former member of Congress Gabby Giffords, who was a victim of gun violence. That helps a bit. And Kelly is from the swing state of Arizona, increasing the odds that Democrats would carry that state in November.

Kelly is the guy.  You read it here first.

But if I were in charge …

Hell, if I were in charge, I’d go right to having the Democrats win the general election, so I wouldn’t have to worry about a vice presidential nominee.

I don’t understand why any sane person wants as president a guy who stood silent for three hours watching a mob attack the Capitol Building. Put all the rest aside — the pussy-grabbing, the business fraud, the sexual assault, the 34 criminal convictions — and just look at those three hours. Trump’s not fit to be president.

Sadly, I’m not in charge. So Mark Kelly, it is.

Good luck to him.

Mark Herrmann spent 17 years as a partner at a leading international law firm and later oversaw litigation, compliance and employment matters at a large international company. He is the author of The Curmudgeon’s Guide to Practicing Law and Drug and Device Product Liability Litigation Strategy (affiliate links). You can reach him by email at [email protected].