One week ago, Vice President Kamala Harris selected Minnesota Governor Tim Walz to be her running mate. “Veepstakes”—the vice presidential selection process—is chock-full of undertheorized arguments about how a vice presidential nominee affects the ticket. Because she avoided a traditional primary, little is known about the policy positions Harris will campaign on and how she will choose to govern—making her running-mate selection feel even more consequential.
While the Harris campaign has a message around why it picked the midwestern veteran and former teacher, I wanted to take a step back and question whether the assumptions about what a running mate could add to a ticket actually make any sense.
The evidence that vice presidential nominees actually deliver votes in their home state is weak. The evidence that female candidates face an electoral penalty when they run for office is even weaker. And the assumptions that voters are demanding a racially-balanced or gender-balanced ticket is the type of argument that can seem obvious until you question the premises.
Today’s episode of Good on Paper is a conversation with Matt Yglesias. He’s a prominent political commentator and writer at Slow Boring. He was also a co-founder of Vox. (Note: We recorded this episode on Friday, August 9)
“It’s a fascinating moment because Harris came to the top of the ticket in such a sudden and unusual way,” Yglesias said. “So we’re all curious. What does she stand for? What does she think about the issues? How will she approach governance? This is the first big decision she makes, so it’s worth looking at, but we’re all looking at it to try to understand the broader implications.”
Listen to the conversation here:
The following is a transcript of the episode:
Jerusalem Demsas: Last week, Kamala Harris picked Minnesota Governor Tim Walz to be her running mate. He was picked, in part, because of his background winning elections in a midwestern state and because Harris was looking to balance the ticket with her vice-presidential pick, like many candidates before her.
There are a lot of undertheorized narratives floating around during the vice-presidential selection process: There’s the idea that the vice president should help deliver votes in their home state. There’s also the idea that voters want a gender-balanced or racially balanced ticket. And there’s the idea that women face a significant electoral penalty for their gender.
For how much these ideas have become conventional wisdom, they’re remarkably thin on evidence. Of course, no one on the outside can definitively say why Walz was selected to be the nominee. But his selection has come among a flurry of assumptions around the type of partner Harris needs in order to bolster her electability this fall. There’s this idea that his previous performance in rural Minnesota will help her campaign attract rural voters, and also this sense that his—for lack of a better word—vibe will help reassure voters that Democrats are not just the ticket for coastal-elite liberals.
[Music]
This is Good on Paper, a policy show that questions what we really know about popular narratives. I’m your host, Jerusalem Demsas, and I’m a staff writer here at The Atlantic. When we’re talking about electoral politics, I like to mention that before I was a journalist I worked on Democratic campaigns, including one for Kamala Harris.
And today I’m joined by my friend Matt Yglesias. He’s a longtime journalist and political commentator who runs the newsletter Slow Boring. We briefly co-hosted a podcast when we worked together, so this is a little bit of a reunion of sorts.
Podcasts about live elections should probably all come with a warning label. After all, just a few months ago, no one was publicly predicting the series of events that unfolded following President Joe Biden’s disastrous debate performance. It’s a reminder that trying to find a signal in the noisy mess of politics is a difficult game, and one that should be played with a lot of intellectual humility.
But the purpose of this show is to find the places where we can put a marker down and say, This is what the evidence tells us and how much confidence you should have in it. And with that, let’s begin.
[Music]
Demsas: So we’re here because Kamala Harris has selected a vice-presidential nominee. And there’s a lot of discourse about this, but I think there’s this idea that’s seeded through a lot of the VP-selection process, which is that there’s a serious electoral benefit that is there to be gained by a vice-presidential selection. And I don’t know what you think about this, but what is your sense about how much it matters who the VP is for the president to be or not be?
Matt Yglesias: I would say, as is often the case, these things are hotly disputed. And what I think is most important for a generalist to understand is that the contours of the dispute are pretty narrow. Some people crunch the numbers, and they feel that VP selections have significant home-state effects. For example, Republicans did terribly in the 2008 election, but they did pretty good in Alaska, right? So maybe Sarah Palin provided McCain with a big boost there. Democrats seem to have done very well in Virginia in 2016, but we might attribute that to broader structural changes rather than to Tim Kaine.
So some people think there’s a big home-state effect. Other people think there isn’t or that it’s diminished. But what nobody who’s looked at it quantitatively can really detect is the broader benefits of ticket balancing or enthusiasm that I think political parties are usually looking for, right? The hope—whether it’s J. D. Vance or Tim Walz or Sarah Palin or Joe Biden in 2008 or Kamala Harris in 2020—is that you’re going to make up for some of the nominee’s deficits, you’re going to enthuse some big group of people. And it’s really hard to find evidence of that happening.
People don’t know that much about politics and government, but I think they know that the vice presidency is kind of a fake job. Who cares who the vice president is?
Demsas: Well, we do now. (Laughs.)
Yglesias: (Laughs.) Sure. It’s what we have to talk about. It’s a fascinating moment because Harris came to the top of the ticket in such a sudden and unusual way. So we’re all curious, What does she stand for? What does she think about the issues? How will she approach governance? This is the first big decision she makes, so it’s worth looking at, but we’re all looking at it to try to understand the broader implications.
It’s not Josh Shapiro versus Tim Walz versus Gretchen Whitmer. I mean, it’s the vice president. And also, you’re talking about governors. So you could even say, when Obama picked Biden: Well, his deep relationships on Capitol Hill will help him in legislative negotiations. Was that true? I don’t know, but it was a theory.
Demsas: I don’t know. To ground it, because I know you just tagged this for us, I think a lot of people expect—or there’s, at least, a lot of argumentation around the idea that when you pick someone like a Josh Shapiro, that should help you in Pennsylvania. Even the argument around Tim Walz is, in many ways, based on how he can help the ticket in areas that he has theoretically won on.
We’re recording this Friday morning after he’s been selected, and there was a memo sent out to reporters this morning where they’re characterizing him, and they say, Walz has championed working families his entire life. He’s a historically popular leader who consistently outperformed national Democrats in his House district, including in rural areas and counties that have supported Trump, which would be important in the Southwest and across the country.
So there’s a sense that this really, really matters. Eric Levitz wrote a really good article about this for Vox, going over the research. But there’s one paper that indicates that a VP might help you in their home state. This is Boris Heersink and Brenton Peterson, and they basically find that, looking from 1884 to 2012, vice-presidential candidates increased their ticket’s performance in their home states by 2.67 percentage points.
Now, there’s another study that comes out in 2019 which rebuts this and that seems, actually, persuasive in their rebuttal of it. But I don’t know. My sense of this is it’s really hard to measure this stuff. There’s a bunch of assumptions and choices you have to make when doing your research design, which I can be convinced of basically in either direction. But my prior is: I find it a bit odd if someone with a name ID that was high in their own state and was popular as a good governor or a good senator would have no effect on the ticket.
Yglesias: Sure. I think you should have some kind of prior that adding a popular, well-known figure from Minnesota should help you to some extent in Minnesota. But then, do you need help in Minnesota? I think there’s a different question, right? Which is—in the memo—they talk about how Walz, when he was a House member, ran ahead of national Democrats in his House seat, which is absolutely true.
As governor, he hasn’t really run ahead of national Democrats in the seat that he used to represent. My interpretation of that would be—he will tell you—I used to get A ratings from the NRA. Now I get F ratings. He switched from representing a rural House district to representing a left-of-center state. I think it was after the Parkland shooting. So he favored gun control, which is not what rural voters agree with. And he became less popular there.
Epistemologically, Kamala Harris is a politician from San Francisco. She does not have a lot of practical experience trying to secure the votes of rural white people. Tim Walz does have that experience, and he could provide information to the campaign about his experience with that. But I think what he would tell you—if he’s, at least, being honest and analytically correct—is that he appealed to those voters by having views that he himself has disavowed and that aren’t in line with the Biden-Harris administration.
Demsas: There’s a theoretical dispute here that you’re drawing out. Because there’s the sense of: Is the reason why people are popular in certain districts largely because of the policy views that they hold? Or is it because of a sort of affect that they have?
Yglesias: Yes.
Demsas: And also just a sense of whether they—you know, the Harris campaign is now selling these hats that are camo hats, and it’s supposed to be this vibe of, He’s very folksy. He’s from this background.
Yglesias: I feel very torn about this because I don’t want to be too negative on Walz or on the Walz selection. He seems fine. He seems like a fine choice. But I really think that this vibes-based interpretation of him is mistaken and that Democrats are making a serious error if they believe that a guy from small-town Minnesota being on the ticket will magically give them rural votes.
And that’s because, if you want to find evidence of Walz overperforming in rural areas, you have to go back to when he was a House member. Since he’s been governor, he has not overperformed in those areas. I attribute that to him changing his positions to be more in line with what people in Minneapolis think and less in line with what people in rural areas think.
Lots of friends—most Democrats as far as I can tell—disagree with me. They think it’s a huge coincidence that when you change your policy views, rural people have different opinions about you. Every urban liberal who I know thinks that, to them, the policy positions people take on assault weapons are really important and really change how they think about people. And so it’s really good for Tim Walz to have changed his mind about this. And they would be really upset if Kamala Harris adopted his old pro-gun view.
But they say that rural people don’t actually care about guns, that for them it’s all vibes.
Demsas: Well, I actually—
Yglesias: —and I find it, on its face, implausible that city dwellers who don’t have assault weapons and are not impacted in any way by this policy care more about the issue than people who own guns and think liberals are insane.
Demsas: All right. Well, I think there’s a synthesis here that makes a lot of sense, which is the question about—well, first of all, I think there’s reasons why people in cities would care about assault-weapons bans outside of whether or not they’re around people directly owning assault weapons.
But beyond that, there’s this question here about whether a messenger’s credibility and their affect affects whether someone believes your policy views, right? There’s a reason why you can’t just get up every day and just say, I believe something else, something different, and have everyone believe that that’s real about you.
You have to have some level of credibility that that’s a real switch you’re making. And right now, the Harris campaign is clearly abandoning a lot of the older views that they had on more progressive issues, like on banning fracking, for instance, and, of course, doubling down on their immigration ideas. And so to me, it’s very clear that what they’re also looking for is someone who can credibly say, Yeah, this switch is happening. It’s a real switch. And it’s also coming from messengers that you may actually believe.
We know this from the political-science literature that often voters will assume women are more liberal because women tend to be more liberal. And so they look at female candidates and they say, You’re probably more liberal than average, or, You’re more likely to be a liberal than a male candidate. And so to counteract that, you have to say a bunch of stuff, but you have to be credible, you know?
Yglesias: No. I agree. There’s a reason why—I mean, right before I got in the studio with you, the Harris campaign released a new ad, and it’s about immigration. And the positions she’s taking are not different from Joe Biden’s positions on immigration. But in affect terms, it is a much more hard-edged ad than anything I ever saw from Biden. And that’s because people stereotype women as being more liberal in general, and specifically being more liberal on these kind of law-and-order issues.
And that stereotype is grounded in reality, right? On average, women do have more liberal views on those questions. So Harris is trying to convey, I’m tougher than you might think, right, and remind us that she was a line prosecutor before she was district attorney, that she’s not a politician. I mean, she is a politician, but she’s not just a politician. And Walz is supposed to reinforce that frame, that brand identity.
But, again, these things are mostly interesting for what they tell us about the larger decision making rather than, you know, that the guy himself transforms our understanding of the whole situation.
Demsas: All right, time for a quick break. More with Matt when we get back.
[Break]
Demsas: I think another broad narrative that’s been really playing a lot that I know that you have taken serious issue with is this idea that it got down to the point where it was Shapiro versus Walz as the two options—that it was either the governor of Pennsylvania, Josh Shapiro, or Walz who ended up being the vice-presidential nominee.
And so I think it’s worth spending time here because—to be transparent—it was very clear they were doing, like, DEI for white men on the campaign. And so with the final selection, the final few candidates that were seriously taken under consideration were all white men. And it was clear from years past, there’s a sense in the party that you need to be balancing your ticket.
Of course, Joe Biden thought about balancing his ticket with a younger Black woman, and then with Barack Obama, he wanted an older white man. And now, again, Kamala Harris is thinking about, Let’s replay the Obama playbook. How do you think about this balancing idea?
Yglesias: I don’t love the presumption that two women on a ticket would be somehow toxic or that adding a white man addresses—because it’s not to say that there’s no misogyny or racism in the world. But I don’t think that putting a man on the ticket addresses the misogyny that may exist in the world, if you know what I mean.
And to the extent that some voters don’t like the identity-politics mentality in Democratic Party circles, just doing it in reverse, in some ways, just further emphasizes that Democrats—or at least a certain segment of Democrats—are really, really, really interested in people’s personal identities in this particular kind of balancing way.
It’s not just that she only seems to have seriously considered white men in the final round, but it at least looks like Pete Buttigieg being gay, Josh Shapiro being Jewish were somewhat counted as strikes against them, right? That we ultimately gravitated toward this very classic WASP, small-town coach deliberately to counterpoise a biracial woman from California.
That is the history of America. FDR put John Nance Garner on the ticket. JFK put Lyndon Johnson on the ticket, trying to get regional balance. But those were in days of much less ideologically sorted political parties. I don’t think there’s any real doubt that Walz and Harris are just ideologically quite similar.
The Obama-Biden balance was interesting because I always thought—I mean, I cannot prove this; I’m just speculating on a podcast, but you know—Biden was notable during that 2008 primary for a number of gaffes that people criticized as racist. He said something about how a lot of South Asian people own convenience stores, but he put it in a less delicate way than that. He described Obama as clean and articulate in a way that—
Demsas: Who can forget?
Yglesias: —people found odd. And so I thought that part of that was not just balancing the ticket with a white person, but specifically with an older white person who said things that other people said were racist, that Obama was trying to show that he was cool with it. You know, not just that he had a white friend but that he had a white friend who maybe said some shit he shouldn’t have said but that he wasn’t going to give you a hard time about it.
Demsas: It seems like there’s ways in which you think balancing a ticket makes sense, right? But the question of whether or not the identity comes in is like, Is that actually helpful? Because are you actually shoring anything up in that case?
The question then becomes, again, about the debate between affect versus actual policy and cultural competency, maybe. Because there is a level here, right, where people might say, Well, you just said that Tim Walz isn’t going to help that much, even though he talks like this, you know, midwestern guy. But Biden does help because he talks like semi-old-school white guys.
Yglesias: Well, I don’t know. But I mean, again, I think to the extent that that made sense, right, it’s not that Biden helped. It’s that Obama was trying to make a point about himself. Right? Obama in the 2008 cycle, in particular, I think his campaign was clearly concerned that people would not want to vote for a Black candidate. It hadn’t been run before. There’s been a lot of racism in American history; it’s a major fact in politics. And so he did a lot of things for the first time.
Demsas: You’re hearing it here for the first time.
Yglesias: Yeah, it’s a big news. But, I mean, his famous race speech in Philadelphia and, I think, the Biden selection—all those things were designed to try to convey to people that he was quote-unquote “one of the good ones,” right, in some sense. And he was he was doing respectability politics on his own behalf. I mean, I don’t know.
But the whole Harris campaign doesn’t seem to me to be really operating on that wavelength. We’ve already had an African American president. She’s already been vice president. This is sort of normalized. People have polarized along these lines. Trump has been known for being very racially inflammatory on a number of dimensions. And, you know, whatever she’s going for is just different because it’s 16 years later.
But it shows us the question is like, What doubts do people have about Harris, and what can she do to assuage those doubts? It seems like people think that she is more left-wing than Biden, or at least they did before she took over. And she has been trying to move to counter that, I think, mostly with her ads and stuff that’s been in her speeches. She has leaned in a lot to patriotism, you know, which is not something that Biden never did, but I think that she has owned more distinctly and in a different register. She’s a different person, and that’s been an interesting choice. It’s not position taking. It is affect. But it does seem different from how she ran in 2019.
Demsas: This is a take people had about Obama, too, where it is easier, in the current context of liberalism, for a Black candidate to make claims about patriotism without seeming like you are buying into sort of, you know, conservative American mythology. So Obama was very patriotic in his speeches and was able to do that very effectively and get people really happy about America.
And I don’t know—people feel this way a lot, I think, about Kamala Harris too. And of course, Wes Moore was one of the people who came out and praised her about this, who’s the governor of Maryland, and he’s also Black. And so, I think that’s not a coincidence, but I think for listeners who maybe are not as steeped into the literature here, it’s worth weighing into the series of events that happened that led us to fully believe that women could not be on a ticket together.
There’s a reason why Gretchen Whitmer was not seriously considered and Amy Klobuchar was not seriously considered, even though these are midwestern overperformers in their own right. But Hillary Clinton lost in 2016, and then she and many of her staffers spent a lot of time in the last years—even as recently as this year—seeding the idea that she lost because she was a woman. It’s not the only reason that they pointed to, but it’s a repeated theme that they bring up for years. And they will say this on news shows. They’ll write it in books. And it’s just a constant idea that she couldn’t win because the electorate was just too sexist.
And, of course, this isn’t coming from nowhere. Women did historically face an electoral penalty. There are studies in the ’60s and ’70s that show that men tended to outpoll women in a number of Western democracies, but I’m not sure people are aware that this has basically disappeared.
Yglesias: Yeah. I’ve been very frustrated with this for years, that a lot of people have put out this idea that there was an insurmountable misogynistic penalty—or not insurmountable but very, very large. The published research just does not show that.
Now, what’s true is that if you want to have a dataset that has a meaningful number of points in it, you have to look at a lot of House races, governor’s races. To get more data, you have to go further down ballot. And you could say, Well, it’s different in a presidential election. But Jennifer Victor and others who’ve looked at this just do not find that women face an electoral penalty; what they find is that women are less likely to run for office, which has a range of different causes related to family dynamics and social pressures.
Demsas: But also just the fact that incumbency favors the existing pool of elected officials, who are disproportionately male.
Yglesias: Yeah. If you think about first runs for office, veterans are more likely to be recruited by their state party to take a run for office. And most of the people who serve in the military are men. There’s a lot of things happening in the pipeline, but we don’t see strong evidence that women face a systematic penalty.
The majority of voters are women, which is notable. And that’s different from the kind of penalties than a member of a racial or ethnic minority, right? So Obama received the greatest vote performance from African American voters of any candidate ever. They’re just badly outnumbered by white voters. So even a small racial bias is very harmful to a Black candidate. Since most voters are women, it can both be true that you face a gross penalty from some sexist men out there, but as long as there are some women who are unusually excited about a woman candidate, you can offset it. You saw that with—
Demsas: But to be even clearer about the literature itself, I talked to Alexander Coppock, who is the co-author of this paper alongside a Princeton University political scientist who’s named Suzanne Schwarz. And I think people have a sense that if you see sexism happening to a candidate, that means that the candidate is being negatively electorally affected by that sexism.
And, of course, we witnessed sexism happening to Hillary Clinton. People wore shirts at rallies that said, Trump that bitch. No one’s saying that that’s not true. But the question that they’re trying to solve then—and they did this meta-analysis of 67 different experiments across the world in which they’re asking survey respondents to choose between hypothetical candidates with very demographic profiles. So that lets them control for the impact of gender because obviously there’s a lot of things that are different between Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump that are not just the fact that she’s a woman and he’s a man.
And they find that not only is the average effect of being a woman not a loss, but it’s actually a gain of approximately two percentage points. And that’s repeated a ton in literature. And there’s even a paper—I know some people have problems with the hypothetical-candidate thing because, you know, Well, okay. I’d vote for this fake woman I found on this piece of paper but not a real one. But Sarah Anzia and Rachel Bernhard did a 2022 paper where they look at tons of local elected races, and they similarly find that there is not an electoral penalty to female candidates. The advantage declines for women in mayoral races, it seems, so there’s some people who have made the argument that it’s a problem for them in—
Yglesias: Executive office.
Demsas: Executive office, exactly. And it’s hard to do that, of course, with presidential [races] because we’ve had a sample size of one with Hillary Clinton. But yeah, I just think that there’s a sense here that there’s obviously going to be attacks on every candidate that runs for office. And then, if you’re a woman, you are exposing yourself to gendered attacks that are different than if you were a man.
But men aren’t attacked less than women; it’s that they’re attacked differently. And then the question becomes: Are sexist attacks actually effective on the margins? And, particularly, I think when the candidates are so different between Kamala and Trump, you’re not going to have a situation where there’s a Democratic voter out there that’s like, Man, I really don’t want to vote for a woman. I guess I’ll vote for Donald Trump, who opposes all of my other policy preferences.
Yglesias: That’s what I actually like about the hypothetical-candidate example because it neutralizes that kind of strategic decision making. And it’s just like, Is it true that people have a gut-level presumption that women shouldn’t be in politics? They say no. Also, if you look at the general social survey, they ask, Do you think women are suitable for political leadership? And if you go back decades, a lot of people said no. And that number has been going down, I think, because people’s minds have changed.
American society is quite different from how it was when my dad was a kid, to say nothing of people older than him—the cohorts that never saw women in professional roles, that would rarely see a woman doctor, that never saw women mayors, things like that. Those people are dead. And I think it’s a little strange that it became the somewhat orthodox, feminist position post-Hillary that nominating women for office was a bad idea.
I feel really bad for Amy Klobuchar, in particular. In 2020, Democratic Party primary voters were clearly looking for an electability candidate. She had—of the people in that field—by far the strongest track record of electoral overperformance. But she seemed to really have a hard time getting people to hear that message beyond the presumption that a white man, like Joe Biden, was just, per se, a more electable option.
And now, again, if you want a statewide elected official in Minnesota who overperforms the national Democratic Party ticket in rural areas, the person who has those characteristics is Amy Klobuchar, not Tim Walz. Now, there may be other reasons to like Walz better than her. He’s a little bit younger. He has military experience. He’s not an attorney. It’s kind of nice to see—this is the first non-lawyer on a Democratic ticket in, like, a billion years, so that’s all cool.
But still, the fact is that I don’t know what it is actually about Senator Klobuchar, but she is dramatically better at getting people to vote for her than almost anyone else—particularly anyone else with a pretty banal voting record—but I think never got credit for that because people were like, Oh, voters don’t like women. But they like women fine.
Demsas: Yeah, it’s funny. There’s actually a study done about the Democratic primary in 2020, and they looked at voters who said that their top choice—if they could push a button, basically who the top choice would be. And ones who did say things like, Oh, Kamala Harris and Elizabeth Warren, then they would ask them again, for voter intent, Who do you intend to vote for? And you saw this drop-off happen in primaries where they would say they would vote for a male candidate, at least in part because of electability concerns due to their gender.
And it was wild because during the 2020 presidential campaign, you actually had a lot of stories out there about whether Hillary’s loss was hanging over these women, and you had quotes from prominent women from the campaign saying things that these women were potentially disadvantaged on the fact of their own gender, despite all of the reasons why someone may not have voted for Hillary Clinton outside of that. And I do think it’s pretty remarkable that one of the only ways that there still might be a significant gender bias is now happening in these diverse primaries because of a liberal argument that the electorate is sexist.
Yglesias: And if you think about it logically, right, I mean, way back in 2002, Congress voted on use-of-force authorization in Iraq. Most Democrats in Congress voted no, but a minority of them voted yes. Hillary Clinton was one of the ones who voted yes. She had her reasons, I’m sure, but by 2008, that was a crippling disadvantage for her in a Democratic Party primary, right?
If she had voted no on the war, I don’t even understand what Obama’s campaign against her would have looked like. And she would have won that primary, and she would have won the election. And then we’d all be like, Well, of course, popular former president Bill Clinton’s wife, herself a well-regarded and accomplished professional known for her mastery of public—you know, why not? Right? You know, but she made specific decisions that were hurtful to her and that if she had decided differently would have been in better shape. I mean, I’m relitigating the 2008 primaries.
Demsas: Going all the way back!
Yglesias: Because 2016 is old hat. But it has bugged me that nobody likes to admit to error. I don’t, either, so I sympathize in that regard. But it salted the earth, I think, for a lot of other women in politics that her operation didn’t want to just say that, like all politicians, they made decisions, and not all of those decisions were correct. And if they had made better decisions, they would have been in better shape. And she happens to have twice, in the 2016 general and the 2008 primary, lost by very, very, very narrow margins, which must be incredibly frustrating.
So I sympathize on a human level, but one of the things I most hope will come out of a 2024 campaign is clearing the air around this. Because especially for Democrats, there are not that many white men in the Democratic Party.
Demsas: Are there?
Yglesias: No, no, no. I mean, sorry—let me put it another way: A relatively small share of the people who vote for Democrats are white men. So when you have most of the Democratic Party elected officials being white men, you’re pulling a lot of fish out of a relatively small pond, right? You should just expect the majority of the political talent in the Democratic Party to be women, African Americans, Latinos—because that’s the majority of the people.
So if you put a thumb on the scale against them in primaries, you’re going to end up denying yourself the strongest talents. And I think you see—actually, pretty palpably with Moore, with Cory Booker—a kind of Jackie Robinson effect with prominent Black Democrats, that they’re better public speakers because there’s a presumption earlier against them, right?
Demsas: But there’s also—we find this too in the literature around women and electability—that they tend to be way more qualified when you look at things like years in office, positions held, whatever. So there’s a level here where, to even get to this stage, they end up overperforming, in part, because I think of selection effects. But I think both of us agree, hopefully, whatever happens this November, it’ll just be because Harris ran a good or bad campaign versus the question of her gender.
I do want to move on a bit because there’s something that you brought up earlier that I want to get to, which is this question about why everyone cares so much about this VP selection. I mean, VP stakes are always kind of fun. People always do it. They get into it.
But in a normal election, there are many avenues with which candidates have to make large decisions or large public pronouncements about what they believe and the types of priorities they have, especially in settings where there’s a discrete set of options that they have to make. And Kamala Harris—by the fact of both her very short time in national politics before becoming vice president, and then now she began running for president literally just a few short weeks ago. And of course that happened in dramatic fashion. I don’t have to recount for anyone on this podcast.
Yglesias: What happened?
Demsas: (Laughs.) Yeah. I think that there’s a level here where, you know, you kind of hinted this earlier: Her selection of Tim Walz is kind of the first big decision she’s made that may indicate to us her views. And so a lot of people before and after were sort of forecasting, wish casting, kind of trying to read the tea leaves on who she is and what this would mean for her as a candidate and a president.
Yglesias: Right. I mean, it’s interesting because she is the vice president of the United States, right? And so she has this somewhat ambiguous relationship to the Biden administration.
So for example, if Joe Biden had just died two weeks ago and she had become president, I don’t think you would see people say—I read a Jay Caspian Kang New Yorker article, and he was saying, like, We don’t know anything about what Harris stands for. And I think, again, if Biden had literally passed away, and she had just become president, I don’t think you would be writing articles like that. You would be saying, She has taken over, as what used to be the Biden-Harris administration is now the Harris administration, but it’s the same administration, right, with the exact same budget proposal to Congress, the exact same legislative agenda, the exact same set of executive orders in the pipeline, and they’re now hers.
I know, of course, when Lyndon Johnson took over from John Kennedy, some things changed, but mostly what happened was he advanced the same legislative priorities that JFK had been advancing, and he seems to have advanced them more effectively because he knew more about the Senate. And whatever differences there were between them, you know, emerged over the course of many years of small-scale decision making piling up.
Because Biden is still the president, it feels more different. Right?
Demsas: Well, it’s also different because if she was president, she would be making decisions.
Yglesias: Right. She would be governing the country.
Demsas: Yeah.
Yglesias: And so Gene Sperling resigned from the Biden White House to go work on the Harris campaign because those are different entities. And she has taken over the Biden campaign apparatus. Jen O’Malley Dillon—it’s preposterous, but her office is in Delaware because it’s Joe Biden’s campaign. But because that was the campaign of an incumbent president, they didn’t really have a policy team the way a Democratic Party presidential campaign normally would because the policy team was running the government, whereas now they’re trying to build that.
And we’re waiting, you know? On the first day of the campaign, nobody’s like, Where’s her 12-point agenda? you know. Then you got the second week, then it’s like, Well, we’re waiting for the VP. Now we’re waiting for the convention. I think you can tell the national press corps is now annoyed that she hasn’t done press conferences.
Demsas: Yeah, you’re seeing reports of this where they’re just like, Why is she not answering questions?
Yglesias: Right.
Demsas: And again, it led her to answer questions. She just said recently that she was going to do an interview by the end of the month. Of course, it’s the first week of August when she said this so, you know, it’s like, That’s a long time not to do an interview as a major presidential candidate.
Yglesias: I don’t actually have a strong opinion on this, but it is true that every day that goes by without more clarity, including even just a statement about how, like—should we just assume that everything the Biden administration has proposed she agrees with? Right? That’s something you could say, right?
I mean, I don’t even necessarily expect her to say it but, you know, you and I have both been on briefing calls at various times with politicians or their staffs, right? There are ways of communicating to journalists how you’re supposed to understand what’s happening that include having the principal do interviews and press conferences, but they go well beyond that. I mean, President Biden did not do a ton of press. His team still communicated with the press about what was going on.
Demsas: I don’t know. My big fear about all this, though, is that we’re getting to a point here where, in many ways, it is rational for her to play very close to the chest her large-body views about various different things that may or may not be divisive to her own coalition. And the way in which most people are forced to reveal those views is either a primary or because they feel pressured in order to get their message out to speak to the media. And you’ve seen this critique happen in entertainment media, actually, significantly in the last few years, where instead of entertainment journalists you see influencers doing the interviews in public spaces.
You know, I don’t care, whatever. Like, Brad Pitt, I don’t have to hear what he has to say about everything. But, you know, I do think there’s a problem if we get to a place where politicians realize that they can get their message out without the intermediary, kind of a neutralish slash at least hostile or investigatory journalistic apparatus that exists, and instead can just bypass that entirely.
And what that means, I mean, is just there are actually much fewer ways to get politicians to have to reveal things about themselves, and that actually undermines, I think, a lot of democratic principles around, like, Voters are making decisions based on information that they have that is credible about candidates.
So, I don’t know. Again, this specific case—I understand why it hasn’t happened yet. I don’t want to make too big of a case. She’s been, you know, the nominee for just a couple of weeks here. But I do think there’s a lot of people who are saying, both on background to reporters and in articles that have been reported, like, Why would she even do this?
Yglesias: I want to make the case to politicians that they actually should engage with the press. You know, I ran a piece that my researcher wrote recently, just looking at the literature on the efficacy of campaign ads.
And, you know, they do work, but they don’t work that well. It is riskier to put yourself out there in an interview because you might screw up, or you might go off message; you might get a question you don’t want. But you can also help yourself. There’s way more upside because it’s much more credible, and people actually care what happens there.
I don’t want to, you know, attribute everything to this, but there was this period of time when different people were auditioning, in effect, to be Harris’s vice-presidential nominee. And Andy Beshear went on CNN, did a number of things. And I think people felt like he just didn’t do a great job—that he, to use your name, on paper was an incredibly strong candidate, but in the national political glare, he didn’t seem that good. Walz went on Ezra Klein’s podcast, which, you know, is not as good as yours but is a good show, and it’s well regarded, and Ezra is well regarded. And I think he helped himself a lot by doing that, you know.
Because a doubt that national-politics people always have about governors—you ask anyone national politics, What about Governor X? He’s so popular. And they’ll all be like, You know what? That state, local media is a joke, you know. They’re not gonna be able to hack it. Ezra is a big-time guy who asks questions that are of interest to national opinion leaders and national audiences.
You can’t just tell him about, like, I did a ribbon cutting at a gym somewhere, you know, and I got on local television. And if you do that well, it helps you. Like, why do we know who the former mayor of South Bend, Indiana is? And it’s because he did a lot of press, and he seemed like he answered people’s questions well.
And so, you know, beyond the specifics of like, Who is Harris gonna do interviews with? When is there gonna be a press conference? if you get out of the mindset that, like, This is all downside, or, Reporters are being jerks, there’s a lot of upside. And if you’re concerned about reporters who are jerks, find a reporter who you don’t think is a jerk, and do an interview with them because still the best way to actually convince somebody, you know, is to put yourself in a context where questions that skeptics might have will be raised. And of course, you know, you should be strategic about it. You should think about, Which kind of skeptical audience am I trying to reach, and who can reach that audience? Who will ask the questions that I want to show I can address?
But every Democratic Party staffer who I know is so thrilled that Harris is throwing big rallies with good energy, because the Biden-era Democratic Party has been a bummer to work for. And they’re like, This is amazing. This is great. The fact that she can make hardcore partisan Democrats feel good about themselves is good. That’s better than the opposite. But that’s not a grave doubt that persuadable voters have about her. She has to find a way to talk to them. This is what Donald Trump is so bad at, right?
Demsas: Yeah. But let me connect your thoughts about the upside of doing media to your previous concerns about the Walz selection that you made, right?
So Ezra made this point on his podcast after Walz was selected, and Ezra has talked a lot about his theory of media attention, and he basically argued that Walz was the candidate that was “most likely to help you win the day-to-day fight for attention and message and enthusiasm.” And so whereas, as you said, Beshear, maybe it was seen as not having done so well on some of those TV hits, Walz, of course, he went on TV. He made the criticism of his opponents that, you know, they were weird, and that really took off. It drove a media cycle; a lot of people started using it. It seemed effective in that it was able to drive a news cycle that was negative for the Republicans. What do you think about that theory and Walz’s ability to use that?
Yglesias: I mean, you know, he does seem to be a very good politician. I mean—
Demsas: And speaker. He’s a great public speaker.
Yglesias: But my most critical thing I have to say about him—I mean, I did this bit before but was like, He won in a rural district. Then he ran statewide, changed his opinions, doesn’t get those rural votes anymore. But it’s not for no reason. I mean, he successfully courted a national, progressive thought-leader constituency and elevated himself to the vice presidency.
Demsas: But it’s also possible that those rural jurisdictions changed.
Yglesias: I’m just saying, to his credit, he seems like a very smart and effective politician, you know. I think two months ago, you know, if you were betting, What if Kamala Harris takes over? Who’s going to be vice president? I don’t think the governor of Minnesota was on people’s minds. And he really did it. What he didn’t do—but this wasn’t his job, right? He was trying to get on the ticket. So he did this weird thing, and liberals love it, right? It got a lot of attention. It drove a lot of conversation, etcetera, etcetera, etcetera.
What so far neither Harris nor Walz has really done is take questions from the right and answer them persuasively, right? All the polls show immigration is Trump’s best issue. Harris seems to know that. She’s leaning into a new immigration message. Crossings are down, this bipartisan bill, etcetera, etcetera. The obvious question is: What took you guys so long?
Demsas: I don’t know. I mean, when she started running for office, she just started doing it.
Yglesias: No, no, no. But I mean, the Biden administration, right? Like, why did this asylum crackdown come so late as it did? And, you know, there’s ways you can answer that question, but that’s what we haven’t seen her do. That’s what you would do in an interview. Somebody would be like, Was Mark Kelly right that you shouldn’t have pulled the Title 42? Or you would ask her a different question, you know?
But I just think it’s like, What are the doubts that people have about Harris or about the Biden-Harris administration, and how do you address them? Now, also, from a standpoint of public information, answering leftists’ questions about Gaza would be very informative. I think electorally, she could only hurt herself that way, but I would like to know, as a journalist and as someone who cares about democracy.
Demsas: But then you should be thrilled with the selection of Tim Walz because if you’re able to drive the conversation and choose which issues are on the agenda, and you’re good at doing that, that seems like good at putting the issues on the agenda that you want to be debating.
Yglesias: No, no, no. I mean, I agree. I’m just—I’m trying to make the case for why people should do press.
Demsas: Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Yglesias: It would be useful to try to address people’s doubts about you in a persuasive way. And again, I mean, Trump has won elections without doing this, so you don’t have to do it, but his signature weakness as a politician is that I just can’t think of any time when somebody came at him with a good-faith concern and he seemed like he really was trying to engage with that and be like, I understand why you might think I’m bad, but in fact, I’m good. And here’s my explanation of that. Right?
Even when he has kind of moved to the center on abortion or something, I’ve never seen him talk to a woman who’s worried about reproductive rights and try to seem like he understands where that worry comes from, and he’s reassuring you. He’s just not a reassuring person.
But effective politicians do that, right? There’s 330 million people in America. You can’t take positions that everyone agrees with on dozens and dozens of separate issues. And good politicians convey some kind of empathy, some kind of understanding, some sense that they have heard your doubts, that they’re not just giving you the brush-off. And, you know, you can do that in town halls. You can do that in interviews. You can do that in certain kinds of unscripted television. It’s hard to do that in an ad because somebody who is skeptical of you is going to be like, Well, that’s an ad.
Demsas: Yeah. Yeah. Well, it sounds like there’s an open call to any politician, including Kamala Harris, to come on either this podcast or speak to Matt at Slow Boring.
Yglesias: All the pods. Slow Boring pods. Many fine podcasts out there.
Demsas: Always our final question, Matt: What is something that you once thought was a great idea but ended up just being good on paper?
Yglesias: When I was involved in launching Vox.com, one of our big ideas there was that I and others—but myself—should be a manager of digital-media journalists, because I felt that I knew a lot about producing digital content, and I was good at it, so I could tell other people how to do it well and get in their business. And that was a terrible idea.
Demsas: What was hard about managing?
Yglesias: I do not have the mental fortitude for it. It provoked way too much anxiety in me to try to understand other people and their feelings or give advice that was constructive in any kind of way. It turns out that knowing how to do things and knowing how to teach other people how to do things are very different. I mean, there’s probably some relationship between them, but it is a bigger gap than I ever anticipated.
Demsas: Well, I’m very, very glad we got to have you here, Matt. This was a great conversation. Thanks for coming on the show.
Yglesias: Thank you.
[Music]
Demsas: Good on Paper is produced by Jinae West. It was edited by Dave Shaw and engineered by Erica Huang. Our theme music is composed by Rob Smierciak. Claudine Ebeid is the executive producer of Atlantic audio, and Andrea Valdez is our managing editor.
And hey, if you like what you’re hearing, please leave us a rating and review on Apple Podcasts.
I’m Jerusalem Demsas, and we’ll see you next week.
[Music]
Yglesias: Should I yell? All right, you know, I was surprised—normally if you walk into a podcast studio, people ask you what you ate for breakfast.
Demsas: (Laughs.) Nobody did that.
Yglesias: Yogurt!
Demsas: Okay. (Laughs.)
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