On Saturday, August 10, Kamala Harris is scheduled to be in Las Vegas with her running mate, the last stop in a Harris-Whoever battleground state tour the campaign has planned for next week.
We’ll know who Whoever is no later than Tuesday, when the seven-state trip starts in Philadelphia. Sandwiched between Philly and Vegas are stops in Wisconsin, Michigan, North Carolina, Georgia and Arizona.
You’re all familiar with the usual suspects on Harris’s VP list – an assortment of straight white males, and Pete Buttigieg.
Meanwhile, when the Nevada Current staff was idly playing the VP nominee speculation game a few days ago, April Corbin Girnus, deputy editor, joked that Harris should pick … Brian Sandoval.
LOL.
For those of you who are new to Nevada (oh hi Sam Brown), Sandoval was elected Nevada governor in 2010 and reelected in 2014. Back in the day, his name actually was floated as a potential Republican VP pick on occasion.
True, unlike the preponderance of people on Harris’s list, Sandoval isn’t just another mostly inoffensive white guy.
He’s a mostly inoffensive Latino guy.
But did you note the “Republican” part? The Harris campaign is obviously trying to soothe, let’s say, a certain segment of the electorate, via a reassuring VP pick.
If there’s one thing that would soothe and reassure those particular voters, perhaps it would be a Republican – not one of today’s weird ones, of course, but a more or less plain vanilla, chamber of commerce-loving, culture war-avoiding Republican of the sort that roamed free-range before Trump turned all the party’s elected officials into cult functionaries.
And just like the two white guys most frequently mentioned as at the top of Harris’s list – Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro and Arizona Sen. Mark Kelly – Sandoval is from a battleground state.
Sandoval can also boast a tangible Democratic-friendly achievement that might be more splashy than anything those other guys can claim: first (and for quite a while, only) Republican governor in the nation to expand Medicaid under Obamacare.
Yes (like April) I’m joking. The prospect is unthinkable and absurd.
And even if it wasn’t, all evidence indicates even the transnational conglomerates that mine Nevada’s gold don’t have enough extraction equipment to separate Sandoval from his current job as president of the University of Nevada, Reno.
Besides, picking a vice presidential candidate because they are from a battleground state is daft (especially if the battleground state only has a measly six electoral college votes, like Nevada).
The last time a vice presidential candidate actually helped a presidential ticket win their own state was when Lyndon Johnson delivered Texas for John F. Kennedy in 1960. Since then, the only instance that comes to mind of a presidential nominee even making a semi-serious stab at using a VP selection to pick up a specific state was when another Massachusetts guy, Michael Dukakis, named another Texan, Sen. Lloyd Bentson, his running mate in 1988.
Dukakis lost Texas, because of course he did.
Presidential nominees rarely even bother to look for the swing state VP anymore. Instead, they tend to pick a running mate who brings something the person at the top of the ticket doesn’t have – some ideological tempering (Ronald Reagan picking the more moderate George H.W. Bush in 1980); some excitement (Walter Mondale selecting Geradine Ferraro as the first woman vice presidential candidate in 1984).
Or as in Harris’s case this year, a Y chromosome.
Playing it safe. But fast.
The Harris campaign’s calculation could be flawed. Seemingly committed to the golden rule of picking a vice president – “first, do no harm” – they may be passing up an opportunity to attract more interest from a swath of the electorate that has been, and may still be, decidedly, even aggressively uninterested in the 2024 presidential campaign.
Shapiro, Kelly, Kentucky Gov. Andy Beshear, Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, and Illinois Gov. J.B. Pritzker all appear to be more or less safe candidates with adequate political skills.
Not only an astronaut but the husband of Gabby Giffords, Kelly’s bio is more intriguing than that of any of the governors.
But not much if anything about any of them suggests they will light up casual and disaffected voters.
Meanwhile, whatever value you assign to career experience as a hotly marketed memoirist, a venture capitalist, and/or a professional media celebrity, even the most lightly regarded vice presidential candidates in modern memory, Dan Quayle and Sarah Palin, were more fit to be vice president when they were named to a national ticket than JD Vance is now. Trump didn’t set a low bar. He set a subterranean one.
Presumably the Harris campaign is reading Trump’s blunder as a cautionary tale.
Among the multiple mistakes Trump made when he selected Vance (doubling down on his base instead of reaching beyond it, impulsively following his feelies, looking for his mini-me), Trump’s campaign did a shoddy job of vetting Vance. Instead of a hero of the working class they thought they were buying, they got “childless cat ladies” guy.
The Harris campaign has been under an unprecedentedly tight schedule to select – and vet – a VP candidate.
That seems like an argument to consider somebody who has already been vetted by the national press, somebody who has already withstood relentless attacks from national Republicans and national right-wing influencers, and somebody who has consistently demonstrated an unparalleled proclivity for dismantling right-wing nonsense clearly and with a smile. Often on Fox, no less.
Maybe Harris should bring Buttigieg to Las Vegas next Saturday.
Fortunately for Harris, and the nation, each of the potential running mates on her known list has a reputation for being solid and solidly mainstream, and definitely not, to use a word Walz so effectively tied to the Republican ticket, “weird.”
The electorate might not be any more electrified by Harris’s running mate than they would be by, well, Brian Sandoval.
But whichever person on her list she selects to join her on the ticket, when Harris and that person come to Las Vegas next weekend, Harris’s decision, when contrasted with Trump’s, will yet again remind Nevada voters of Trump’s unfitness to be president.
