In choosing Mr. Walz, Ms. Harris seeks to capitalize on his connections with voters in the swing states of the Midwest, such as Pennsylvania, Wisconsin and Michigan, where she will hold rallies with Mr. Walz later this week.Elizabeth Frantz/Reuters
Debra Thompson is a contributing columnist for The Globe and Mail.
After much speculation, Democratic presidential nominee Kamala Harris announced on Tuesday morning that her running mate would be Tim Walz, the Governor of Minnesota.
The slate of potential candidates was whittled down over the past few days, with Mr. Walz, along with Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro, and Senator Mark Kelly of Arizona, reportedly the last men standing.
The finalists were all immensely qualified potential running mates. And, noticeably, all were white dudes.
Look, I’m not saying that Mr. Walz didn’t earn his nomination. Nor would I dream of suggesting that Mr. Kelly, Mr. Shapiro, or Mr. Walz only made the short-list of contenders because of diversity, equity and/or inclusion (DEI).
But it is notable that, after President Joe Biden explicitly stated that he would choose a woman as his running mate in the 2020 presidential election, and as pressure mounted for him to choose a woman of colour, Ms. Harris’s calculation that a white man was required to balance the Democratic ticket went without saying. The key difference between then and now is that when a top contender is a woman, or a person of colour, or – God forbid – a woman of colour, the presumption is that the candidate isn’t qualified based on their skills or abilities, but it is their identity, and identity alone, that deemed them worthy of consideration.
This logic is insane. It doesn’t work in Mr. Walz’s selection, and it didn’t work for Ms. Harris, who was evaluated and vetted by Mr. Biden’s selection committee months before the 2020 election according to core criteria such as her ability to help Democrats take the White House, her debate skills, and her qualifications for governing.
It also obscures two critical truths about the types of political calculations needed to win presidential elections in the United States.
First, the point of a vice-presidential pick is to broaden the appeal of the presidential ticket, with the goal of bringing more potential voters into the fold. Depending on political circumstances, that appeal might be deemed to be most crucial in battleground states. Sometimes the choice is more about ideology, with the hopes of healing visible fractures among various wings of the party. And sometimes, it’s about race and gender.
Electoral campaigns are all about sending signals to would-be voters. And, like it or not, signals help the electorate see themselves and their identities represented by those who hold the highest political office in the country. These signals matter.
Representation isn’t everything, but can be consequential in electoral outcomes. And, importantly, taking race and gender into consideration is a legitimate way to appeal to would-be voters and reach out to the kind of coalition that the party deems necessary to win.
Democrats have very quickly rallied around Ms. Harris’s nomination over the past two weeks, making this a very different scenario than I wrote of last month. But time is of the essence, and the challenge for a Harris-Walz ticket is to keep the enthusiasm of this summer going through the fall. In choosing Mr. Walz, Ms. Harris seeks to capitalize on his connections with voters in the swing states of the Midwest, such as Pennsylvania, Wisconsin and Michigan, where she will hold rallies with Mr. Walz later this week. Mr. Walz may also bring in more progressive voters, given his track record of championing policies such as free school meals and expanded paid worker leave in Minnesota. And Mr. Walz can appeal to rural, white voters.
And this is the second critical truth about the role of race and gender in American electoral calculations: There is an underlying fear that white people will not vote for Ms. Harris. There. I said it. Decades ago, this was called the Bradley effect, where minority candidates lead in public opinion polls, but lose their elections because white voters say they will vote for minority candidates and then don’t.
Yes, millions of white voters supported president Barack Obama in 2008 and again in 2012. But 2008 was a million years ago, and Mr. Obama was not only a particularly skilled politician, but he was able to harness the unbridled enthusiasm that went alongside bearing witness to the election of the first Black president of the United States.
And yes, Ms. Harris is the first woman of colour to run for president, but as neither the first Black/multiracial person nor the first woman to be on the presidential ticket, the impact of her historic candidacy just hits differently. And after the white working-class grievance politics that were widely (and inaccurately) blamed for bringing Mr. Trump to the White House instead of Hillary Clinton in 2016, and the white (women) voters who actually formed a significant portion of Mr. Trump’s vote share in both 2016 and 2020, the appeal of celebrating historic firsts before they have come to pass has made us, understandably, wary.
Ms. Harris needs white votes. Here’s hoping Mr. Walz can help her get them.