Many commentators have said that VP Kamala Harris should have selected Josh Shapiro, Governor of Pennsylvania rather than Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz. The most repeated reason for selecting Shapiro was that he could have probably secured Pennsylvania’s 19 electoral votes. They assume that Harris cannot win the election without winning that state.
That logic is faulty when it comes to adding electoral votes. Those commentators ignore that Michigan and Wisconsin have a total of 25 electoral votes, six more than Pennsylvania. Harris and Walz must win them just as much, if not more, than Pennsylvania.
A critical battleground for electoral votes is the swing states that hug the Great Lakes region. The voters there have two key constituencies that the Democrats need. The first are white working-class men, and the second are rural residents.
Donald Trump and Kamala Harris have chosen VPs who could attract those groups. On paper, JD Vance seems to be a perfect candidate. His childhood personal story aligns with both of those groups.
When Vance was selected as Trump’s running mate, it was assumed that Biden would remain the Democratic nominee for president. That allowed Vance to run against Harris, whom the Republicans tagged as a liberal Californian—worse yet, she was from San Francisco.
Biden dropped out, and Harris replaced him, which sunk that strategy. Vance privately told donors, “All of us were hit with a little bit of a political sucker punch” when Vice President Harris replaced President Biden as the Democratic candidate.
Meanwhile, Walz is a better sell in Michigan and Wisconsin than Vance, upsetting Trump’s intention of using JD Vance as a VP candidate to win them and Minnesota. Shapiro may have won Penn for Harris, and he still may, but Walz can help carry those three Great Lake states much better than Shapiro.
As JD Vance said before, the Republicans were sucker-punched – but this time again with Walz on the ticket with Harris. Walz blocks Trump’s reliance on Vance, capturing these blue states from “Californian” Harris. Democrats have a genuine mid-westerner in Walz, who has a visible record of getting rural votes in this region. Shapiro, unlike Walz, didn’t have those advantages over Vance.
Harris needs Shapiro to take Pennsylvania for her. The poll shows that Trump’s support had only a 2% lead over the Democratic candidate rather than 4% before Biden withdrew. A recent poll shows that 61% of voters in the state approve of the job Shapiro is doing as governor. Consequently, believing he can move the dial more toward Harris than Vance could is not a stretch.
However, the contest between Trump and Harris in Michigan and Wisconsin must be revised. A poll by Redfield & Wilton Strategies, in partnership with The Telegraph, taken on August 6, showed that both were tied in Wisconsin with 43% for each. In Michigan Trump leads by 1%, but he dropped by two points since their last swing state voting intention poll when Biden was the Democratic presidential candidate. Harris leads by five points in Minnesota, and Walz will only strengthen that lead.
Despite Harris’s closing the gap between Biden and Trump in overall national support, the Redfield & Wilton poll found the race is a toss-up in the swing states. In a hypothetical match-up between Kamala Harris and Donald Trump, with Robert F. Kennedy Jr. included as an independent candidate, Trump leads Harris by between one point and six points in five of the ten swing states.
Assessing the value of a vice presidential candidate on their ability to carry their home state is never a certainty. Barbara Norrander, a professor in the School of Government and Public Policy at the University of Arizona, studies polls and concludes that it only matters a little who the vice presidential candidate is. People tend to focus on the top of the ticket.
However, the VP candidate can hurt the presidential candidate. It is often stated that Sarah Palin, then the incumbent Governor of Alaska, running in the 2008 presidential election as the VP to Republican Party presidential candidate John McCain, did hurt his image. Her image is blamed for his loss to Barack Obama and Joe Biden.
The question that Trump and Harris had to answer correctly was whether their VP pick would hurt their campaign. At this point, Walz looks like the safer bet not to hurt Harris more than Vance appears to be already doing to Trump.
The bottom line is that Walz has a better chance of acceptance among the swing voters in at least two key swing states than that displayed by the two other contenders for being Harris’s VP, Shapiro, or Arizona’s Senator Mark Kelly.
Now Walz and Harris only have to convince those voters that they are not “radical liberals.”
Is there any reason why a popular Governor Shapiro can’t swing as many votes over to Harris as could a VP-candidate Shapiro? Does a swing voter, who by definition these days is also a low information voter, make a VP candidate more persuasive?
I mean, if you’re a Pennsylvania swing voter and you LIKE and ADMIRE your Governor, is it really going to make that much difference if he’s the Governor or a VP candidate? I can’t see that it does and has any “expert” ever offered more than conventional assertion? I know it’s hard to pin down facts in the situation like this, but what’s the reasoning?
And I’m not doubting that endorsements count. I have voted for many candidates without knowing much about them but their endorsements convinced me…. So I’m not skeptical of that part of the discussion… Endorsements do indeed matter.
Are you implying that non-swing state voters are informed?
I’m saying that swing voters in this election in any state are probably low-information (that’s a great phrase!) voters.
Whatever point you’re trying to make, it’s moot now.