Every four years, public speculation about the identity of the vice presidential nominees tends to focus on governors or senators from competitive states that may hold a pivotal position in the electoral college. But almost every time, presidential candidates wind up choosing running mates who don’t come from electoral battlegrounds. This should be a clue that presidential candidates don’t place as much emphasis on the potential ability to deliver a home state as conventional wisdom assumes. But that raises the question of what they do value in a VP, and why.
The 2024 Democratic veepstakes threw this puzzle into especially sharp relief. An unusual number of the party’s supposed current rising stars represent presidential swing states, including Pennsylvania governor Josh Shapiro, Arizona senator Mark Kelly, and Michigan governor Gretchen Whitmer. With an extremely narrow margin in the national polls and a uniquely truncated timeline for settling on a running mate, it seemed natural to many in Washington that Kamala Harris would turn to one of these prominent figures to enhance her chances of building an electoral vote majority. But she opted instead for Minnesota governor Tim Walz, who was not nationally well-known before his selection and who comes from a state that Democrats were already favored to win. Once again, a presidential candidate passed over the battleground states when selecting a VP.
There are four main reasons why this pattern tends to happen.
1. Running mates can’t be counted on to deliver their home states. It’s unclear from the evidence exactly how much of an electoral bonus a party can expect to receive from selecting a home-state VP, but it’s likely to be no more than a couple of percentage points under the most favorable circumstances. The idea that a swing state can be “locked up” by putting its governor or senator on the ticket is simply a myth. Some advocates of Shapiro’s selection argued that there is a non-minimal probability that this year’s election could come down to a few thousand ballots in Pennsylvania, and that even a modest “friends and neighbors” vote for him might therefore decide the entire election. There’s logic to this argument, but it’s still hard for campaigns to game out the probabilities; if running mates could guarantee a 5-point bounce in their home states, presidential candidates’ calculations would undoubtedly be different. According to CNN reporting, the Harris campaign decided from its own polling that putting Shapiro on the ticket would not provide enough of an advantage to justify his selection.
2. Presidential candidates think in terms of voting groups, not individual states. Presidential candidates need to win multiple swing states, not just one. This encourages them to focus on the potential ability of a running mate to attract specific subgroups of voters located across the entire electoral battleground. Donald Trump selected the pious Mike Pence not to win over people from Indiana (he was already assured of carrying the state) but instead to motivate conservative evangelicals whether they lived in Florida or Pennsylvania or Iowa; Barack Obama picked the experienced Joe Biden to reassure persuadable voters across every geographic region that he would be well-equipped to govern if elected. This year, the Harris campaign clearly hopes that Walz’s plain-spoken, regular-guy persona will help them limit the desertion of working-class whites that has endangered the Democratic Party’s competitiveness in exurbs and small towns from coast to coast over the past two decades.
3. The party has its say too. The last thing that presidential nominees want in the heat of an electoral campaign is an internal fight within their party. To this end, they aim to select a running mate that will inspire unity and enthusiasm across all major party factions. In addition, they seek insider intelligence about various potential choices that will help them avoid choosing someone who turns out to have a major political or personal fault. Extensive consultation with other key party actors helps them achieve these goals. As I argued in my piece four years ago about Biden’s selection of Harris, Biden’s lifelong instinct to act as a loyal creature of the Democratic Party mainstream made him very sensitive to pressure from other Democrats to add a woman of color to his ticket—and convinced him that Harris in particular was the best choice. This year, it seems clear that Walz had an active chorus of internal proponents, especially among House Democrats who knew him well from his six terms of congressional service between 2007 and 2018, that Shapiro couldn’t match. Like Biden, Harris appears to solicit and value input from peers in pursuit of a unified party, and it’s likely that these voices in her ear helped convince her to settle on Walz.
4. Presidential candidates want governing partners, not just campaigning partners. Our perpetually election-obsessed political world may only be thinking about the VP selection in terms of its potential effect on the outcome in November, but presidential candidates are also envisioning what life might look like after they win. It’s only natural that a nominee with vice presidential experience of her own will have especially strong preferences about what kind of vice president she would like to have. And personal chemistry is a legitimate consideration; tension between the president and vice president is in nobody’s interest. Multiple news reportssuggest that Walz won out over Shapiro and Kelly in part because he clicked better with Harris and her staff, and because he struck her as someone who would be a more loyal member of her administration (Walz apparently said that he held no ambitions of his own to become president).
So what picture of Kamala Harris emerges from the VP selection process? In general, she acted like a typical presidential nominee—who cared more about appealing to an electoral subgroup than trying to target a particular battleground state, who was responsive to feedback from other members of her party, and who prized personal compatibility as well as electoral strategy. But that doesn’t mean that she made the right choice. The historical record of success in vice presidential selection is rather mixed, and she was denied the usual benefit of having several months after locking up the nomination to gather information and weigh alternatives. But even well-chosen running mates are valuable less for the modest number of voters they might attract than for their ability to share the heavy burden of governing if victory is achieved.