Over-simplistic Swing State Silliness

Striking at the heart of the MAGA myth rather than electoral map engineering should guide the Democrats’ search for Kamala Harris’ VP

Joe Biden has finally heeded calls to bow out from the 2024 Presidential Race (Thanks Joe!).  Within seconds of Biden’s letter hitting the internet on July 21st, speculation began on the ideal vice president pick for presumptive presidential nominee Kamala Harris.  Political strategists and journalists have flooded our inboxes and news feeds with curated lists and graded rankings of Democrats whose VP candidacy might steal momentum away from Donald Trump (whose brush with death now seems like a hazy memory) and his MAGA acolyte J.D. Vance.

While the Democrats will need a VP candidate capable of countering the compelling life narrative of this Millennial MAGA star, expert opinion has trended toward the over-simplistic strategy of picking a swing state governor who might secure the electoral votes Harris needs to defeat Trump.  Tapping Josh Shapiro to carry Pennsylvania or Gretchen Whitmer to carry Michigan is tempting.  But Democrats will follow this conventional wisdom of picking a swing state governor to their peril.  The problem with following the conventional wisdom of picking a swing state running mate is that it is more conventional than it is wise.  There is little evidence to prove this strategy is remotely effective.  In 2016, the queen of conventional electoral map thinking, Hillary Clinton, tapped Tim Kaine to help her win the swing state of Virginia only to see the Midwest Blue Wall crumble, allowing Donald Trump to sweep Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania.  In 2004, John Edwards could not even help John Kerry win North Carolina.  Looking at winning presidential tickets, there is scant evidence that a swing state VP has helped push a Presidential candidate to victory in recent memory. Joe Biden didn’t need Kamala Harris to deliver California.  Trump didn’t need Pence to secure Indiana. Obama didn’t need Biden to win Delaware.  George W. Bush didn’t need Cheney to lock down Wyoming.  On and on it goes for 64 years until we get John F. Kennedy’s razor-thin victory over Richard Nixon in 1960 when we can justifiably argue that LBJ’s help in Texas was crucial in securing the Democratic win.  

To their credit, the Republicans seem to be aware of the foolishness of following a swing state VP strategy that has failed more often than not in living memory.  The Republicans do not need J.D. Vance to carry Ohio, a state that has gone from purple, to pink, to deep red on projected Electoral College maps.  The power of Vance is grounded in the power of personal narrative.  Vance’s Hillybilly Elegy, a bootstrap tale of overcoming a childhood of poverty and abuse to reach Yale Law School intertwines with a broader story of the decline of the American heartland, specifically Appalachia and the critical Rust Belt communities of Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin.  There is no shortage of hypocrisies and inconsistencies in the story of J.D. Vance.  To defeat Donald Trump, the Democratic VP candidate needs to be capable of humbling or even humiliating Vance, a man who could very well ascend to the presidency in the next four years and transform MAGA from a one-man cult of personality into an entrenched intergenerational movement.  Unfortunately, none of the top names on the Dems’ swing state shortlist seem up to this challenge.  

Swing State Sweethearts

Josh Shapiro

Let’s start with my governor from the great Keystone State of Pennsylvania, Josh Shapiro.  Anytime I see Shapiro at the top of any Veep shortlist I realize how little political experts understand the cultural geography of Pennsylvania, not to mention the swing voters and disengaged young Democrats Kamala will need to win our 19 electoral votes.  Josh is a young, energetic governor of a crucial swing state who won in 2022 by a landslide, what’s not to like?  We all know the well-worn adage that Pennsylvania is Philadelphia in the east, Pittsburgh in the west, and Kentucky/Alabama/(insert deplorable red state) in between.  As a local elected official from the Democratic Party in a purple community in Western Pennsylvania, I assure you it doesn’t take a long drive out of Pittsburgh to get into Appalachia.  Vance’s story will resonate here.  More Pennsylvania residents will understand J.D.’s rough and tumble roots in Middleton, Ohio than they will Josh’s upbringing as the son of a doctor in the Philadelphia suburbs.  

But what about Josh’s crushing win in the 2022 governor’s election, doesn’t that attest to widespread appeal across all cultural contours of Pennsylvania?  Not really.  Shapiro’s impressive win was less a product of his electrifying popularity and more a function of the bizarre retrograde worldview of his Republican challenger and January 6th participant Doug Mastriano.  Shapiro’s own campaign funded ads for Mastriano in the Republican Primary to prop up a candidate whose hardline stances on abortion and election denial would be rat poison in the first state election of the post-Dobbs era.  But if Shapiro already slayed one MAGA foe, why can’t he take down J.D.?  J.D. Vance charmed his way into Yale Law School, the top of the New York Times Bestseller List, and onto the big screen for a feature film portrayal of his life story.  Doug Mastriano’s film career consists of Facebook Live streams that could almost qualify as unintentional art cinema in their awkward intimacy.  With a consummate weirdo as an opponent, Shapiro sold himself as a centrist to independents and sane Republicans, pledging to support school vouchers.  So far Shapiro has yet to honor those school choice promises, and bolting for a VP spot less than halfway into his first term will likely cause a backlash in the swing voters Kamala Harris needs to win over.  To make matters worse, Shapiro’s full-throated support for Israel in the Gaza conflict could easily turn off the disaffected Pennsylvania progressives who have warmed up to a Kamala candidacy after writing Biden off as “Genocide Joe.”  Josh Shapiro has a bright future in politics.  If Kamala loses in 2024 and there even is an election in 2028, I would not be surprised to see Shapiro at the top of the Democratic ticket.  But plugging a still-green Governor Shapiro in as Kamala’s running mate this year would be a wasted opportunity to punch back at Vance and would not even guarantee that Pennsylvania will go blue when polls close on November 5th.

Gretchen Whitmer

Despite the other nugget of conventional opinion that Kamala needs a white guy to balance out her ground-breaking POC female status, Gretchen Whitmer is a stronger pick for VP than Shapiro, if we are limiting the search to swing state governors.  Unlike Shapiro, Whitmer is in her second term, having successfully won reelection by double digits in 2022.  Whitmer cannot seek reelection to the governorship and Michigan swing voters would not have the same misgivings that Pennsylvanians would have about Shapiro’s early exit placing career aspirations over service to the state.  Personality-wise, Whitmer is vivacious and a sharp debater, her spontaneous style contrasting favorably with Shapiro, whose voice can occasionally sound like an Obama AI Voice Generator.  But Whitmer, like Shapiro, also suffers from an inability to challenge J.D. Vance’s “Culture War as Class War” strategy.  She is the daughter of an insurance executive and assistant attorney general, having grown up in the comfortable Forest Hills community largely untouched by the post-industrial decline so central to Vance’s narrative of retribution and resentment.  Whitmer also came into national prominence when a far-right plot to kidnap her was halted by the FBI in 2020.  The fact that at least three FBI informants took part in the plot would only add fuel to the fire of Vance’s conspiratorial deep-state paranoia.  It’s not Whitmer’s gender, but her social class and entanglement in pandemic-era culture war politics that make her a less-than-ideal opponent to face Vance.  

MAGA Myth Busters

If our trusty swing state governors can’t save us is all hope lost?  Not at all.  The obsession with Shapiro and Whitmer arises from an overly simplistic notion that the only way to move the numbers in a swing state is to pick a politician based in that state. The GOP’s pick of Vance shows an understanding that cultural currents flow easily across state lines and that a Senator from Ohio can tap into the regional Rust Belt resentment needed to win Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin.  But J.D.’s autobiographical memoir and film is not entitled Rust Belt Elegy.  J.D.’s identity and legitimacy are not drawn from ties to the postindustrial north but to the rural mountain South, specifically the hill country of Eastern Kentucky.  To disrupt Vance’s narrative and derail his momentum, the Democrats need a candidate who can strike at the heart of the Hillbilly Elegy myth, exposing the fact that Vance has built his celebrity status and political power on associations to a place that he only occasionally visited for family reunions, funerals, and an occasional butt-kicking by the authentic Appalachian youth down in the holler swimming hole.  

Andy Beshear

The ideal VP partner for Kamala Harris will be able to expose Hillbilly Elegy as a glorified college admissions essay, a cynical use of the struggles and shortcomings of an Appalachian culture to which Vance is only indirectly connected, a self-serving confabulation used to climb the social ladder into the Yale Law School, the New York Times Bestseller List and Peter Thiel’s Mithra Capital.  There is no better VP candidate to highlight Vance’s phoniness than Kentucky Governor Andy Beshear.  As a Democrat, Beshear has pulled off the impressive feat of winning the governor’s race twice in deep-red Kentucky based on his efforts to alleviate the suffering of the Appalachian hillfolk that Vance only uses as props in his narrative of bootstrapping success.  Beshear could relentlessly hammer Vance on how little direct experience J.D. has with the Kentucky folk whose culture he claims forms the foundation of his identity.  Of course, Vance will push on Beshear’s privileged upbringing as a Blue Grass Blue Blood and son of a governor.  But Beshear can counter with the line of argument that Vance used in glorifying Trump as a billionaire who chose a life of self-sacrifice by running for public office when he could have easily lived a life of careless luxury.  As a true son of Kentucky and a true public servant dedicated to uplifting the people of Appalachia, Andy Beshear is everything J.D. Vance and Donald Trump only pretend to be.  

Roy Cooper

In a close second to Beshear in the search for Kamala’s VP pick is North Carolina Governor Roy Cooper.  Like Beshear, Cooper represents a state with Appalachian residents.  He can speak to decades-long public service from Attorney General to Governor, working to address the social pathologies of the white underclass that Vance discusses with smug scorn in Hillbilly Elegy.  Cooper can highlight his efforts as Attorney General to lock up sex offenders and protect children while J.D. Vance merely flirts with QAnon adjacent conspiracies about international pedophile rings.  In restoring business relationships damaged by his Republican predecessors' disastrous anti-trans bathroom bill, Cooper can position himself as a social moderate who understands the negative impact caused by culture war games that have become the bread and butter of Senator Vance’s political career.  

Mark Kelly

Third place goes to Arizona Senator Mark Kelly, whose VP potential strikes an intriguing balance between the shaky swing state strategy and the stronger strategy of attacking the Vance mythos.  Arizona is undoubtedly a swing state, as Trump’s popularity in the Southwest has been bolstered by Biden’s border struggles.  Kelly might help keep Arizona and Nevada blue in 2024, but his pairing with Californian Kamala creates heavy West Coast bias on the ticket.  More compelling than Kelly’s swing state clout is his ability to push against the military service component of the J.D. Vance story.  Vance served six months in Iraq as a combat correspondent without facing any real fighting.  As a naval aviator, Kelly flew 39 combat missions during Operation Desert Storm and later joined the NASA Astronaut Corps as a Space Shuttle pilot spending 54 days in space.  Kelly’s far superior military experience completely neutralizes and reverses the foreign policy advantages Vance has over the governors we have already reviewed.  Kelly will also add much-needed seriousness to a gun control debate that Vance usually treats with flippant folksiness.  When Vance shares family folklore about the 19 loaded guns found at his MaMaw’s house, Kelly can counter with a little story about the time his wife was shot in the head during a community meeting in a Safeway parking lot.  By contrasting himself as a man of serious public service against a bearded boy with a bestseller and powerful best friends, Kelly provides multiple lines of attack against the MAGA myths propping up Vance’s candidacy.  

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J.D. Vance was a bold pick by Donald Trump and the GOP - high risk but high reward.  The GOP is betting on Vance’s ability to refashion the Republicans into the party of the working class, a rebrand allowing them to lockdown the Rust Belt vote in Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, and Michigan.   The Democrats cannot meet this challenge through poll-watching prognostication and electoral map engineering, relying on the unfounded conventional wisdom that a swing state candidate can help them eke out a victory on November 5th.  Instead, they must pick a strong VP candidate who can strike at the heart of the MAGA myth and expose J.D. as the type of character Rust Belt swing voters hate the most: a phony, an ass-kisser, and a social climber.  Kamala Harris’ team must recognize that at this moment they can do far more than just win the 2024 election, they can bury once and for all the MAGA myth that Donald Trump’s GOP is the party of America’s forgotten working class.