Vice President Kamala Harris has rapidly emerged as the front-runner for the Democratic presidential nomination. Now, the party is consumed with the next big question: Who should be her running mate?
The prevailing wisdom in these debates, as articulated by countless pundits and political junkies, is that a presidential candidate must snag a VP who can “balance out the ticket” and ideally help secure a battleground state. In countless columns and social media posts, candidates are chiefly assessed — often through reference to brief cable news clips — on how they could help Harris edge out former President Donald Trump and Sen. JD Vance on Election Day.
What matters most in the long term is recognizing how likely it is that a vice president could become a presidential candidate or president one day.
I hope that the Harris camp does not succumb to such shallow and shortsighted thinking. Data gathered by political scientists indicates that VP picks have a very limited impact on the appeal of a presidential ticket. What matters most in the long term is recognizing how likely it is that a vice president could become a presidential candidate or president one day — and what this person might do with that power.
The veepstakes is perhaps the ultimate catnip for pundits and political junkies in every presidential cycle, spurring innumerable takes on how a specific VP’s home state, rhetorical style, race, gender and vibe might complement the presidential candidate and help win over key constituencies.
But political scientists have found that VP picks don't make much of a difference when it comes to elections. Take the claim that selecting a vice president can help a president secure the state they hail from in the election, which is central to the argument that a VP should come from a battleground state. The political scientists Kyle Kopko and Christopher Devine, who specialize in the electoral impact of vice presidential picks, studied over a century of election and voter data and found “a vice presidential candidate’s state of residence generally has no effect on how a presidential candidate performs in that state. The vice presidential home state advantage is, essentially, zero.” The one exception they found was that a VP pick from a state with a small population and who has established an exceptional reputation as “an institution in state politics” could confer some home-state advantage to the presidential ticket. But a small state is, by definition, rarely going to be a game changer in the Electoral College. (Moreover, most battleground states today are not small.)
Kopko and Devine have also pointed out that there is little evidence that vice presidents deliver specific demographic groups. “We didn’t find evidence, for example, that Geraldine Ferraro or Sarah Palin attracted more women voters to their party’s ticket,” Kopko recently told The New Republic. “Nor did Mike Pence attract more evangelical voters.” They have found one exception to that trend: Harris, as Biden’s running mate, did have a measurable impact on the vote choice of Black, women and Black women voters. But that being said, the effect was very small, and may have been amplified by a perception of Biden as unusually old and/or a potential one-term president meant to take down then-President Trump.
While data suggests that people’s vote choice or likelihood is rarely affected by a VP pick, Kopko and Devine have found that the nature of the choice does, to some extent, affect voter perception of the presidential candidate. So while Palin did not win women for Republican presidential candidate John McCain in 2008, she did dampen voter perception of his age and judgment.
To be fair, there is an argument to be made that Harris’ VP pick matters more in this cycle than most because of the exceptional nature of her candidacy. Assuming she secures the nomination, she will have a strikingly short period of time to introduce herself as a presidential candidate, and perhaps her running mate will play a larger role in defining her campaign as a result.
But while we cannot rule out the electoral significance of a VP pick at the margins in a tight race, those considerations must be weighed against something we know matters: A vice president is unusually likely to become a viable presidential candidate or president in the future.
Close to one-third of U.S. presidents have served as vice presidents before. That's not including the vice presidents who have become a nominee and failed. The last and current election cycles alone are a reminder of how much vice presidents matter as potential future leaders. In the 2020 Democratic primaries, Biden’s name recognition and background as Barack Obama’s vice president were indispensable to his performance in national polls and securing key endorsements, which is why he became the establishment candidate that moderates consolidated behind and he won the nomination. And Harris is now the front-runner to win the nomination because she is effectively fulfilling her vice presidential duty as a backup president, and because she represents the simplest route to party unity. This is why Harris should take the long view in her selection.
Asking “What kind of potential presidential candidate or president would this person be?” helps train the eye on qualities such as a running mate’s demonstrable competence and their ideological positions. Does a governor or lawmaker have a track record of getting things done legislatively or changing the way people think about policy? Do they know how to lead and generate a mandate? Do they have dexterity with coalition-building? Do their values and their attitudes toward American politics and economics match the direction of the party and the country? Do they have an instinct and a vision for how to push the country forward? Their charisma matters, but it should not be viewed purely through the prism of their serving as a perfect “attack dog” VP. This person could one day be an attack dog for the entire party.
I prefer vice presidential picks who understand the Democratic Party is becoming more progressive and exhibit ambition toward that end. Politicians who can think not just technocratically but also about systems, and recognize we live in a populist moment where many people are craving sweeping change.
It is all the more imperative as the next generation of MAGA politicians takes up somewhat more left-leaning economic positions which sporadically show openness to regulation and quasi-labor-friendly policy. Democrats should elevate leaders who can vigorously identify capitalist exploitation, elucidate the meaning of social democracy and can call out the ruse of right-wing populism.
Incidentally, these kinds of politicians are often the kinds of people who give off good vibes on television — because they have their finger on the pulse of the country. A serious party would seek to elevate them.
