Here we go.
Donald Trump has established himself as the presumptive Republican nominee, and the Stop Trump movements seem to have (at least mostly) subsided. Hillary Clinton has established herself as the presumptive nominee, and most of Bernie Sanders followers (including Bernie himself) have already come over to her side. With the (latest, and hopefully final) Benghazi committee wrapped up and the FBI choosing not to recommend charges in the use of the private email server, the final hurdles have been lifted and the general election has begun for real. (The distant screaming from the Tinfoil Hat Conspiracy Crowd in the back of the room probably won’t ever let it go completely, but, like a Nickelback concert that you’re running away from as fast as you can, they’ll get quieter over time.) To fill some news space post-Independence Day, there will be a few more news cycles populated with some people whining over the leftover detritus of the inconsequential email server nonsense for Clinton and unemployed GOP election veterans kvetching over the lack of traditional infrastructure in the Trump campaign, but that chapter is mostly past us.
So … time for the conventions! This year, they promise to be like Wrestlemania held on atop mountain of crystal meth or the Super Bowl staged in a field filled with zombies and land mines. I can’t wait. There is, this year, a realistic potential of two supremely enjoyable shit shows of epic proportions.
But first, the vice presidential picks …
Ugh …
Probably the most inconsequential part of the election process, the choosing of a running mate for each candidate is given a massively oversized amount of coverage and analysis. The reason it is not important is simple: Voters choose a candidate, not a running mate. In addition, the veep is given no real power, responsibility, or authority. Now that rampant misuse of the filibuster has effectively taken virtually all constitutional power from the VP (as President of the Senate, there’s no chance to break ties if no ties are ever allowed to happen), the only purpose of the VP is to wait, with thumb firmly inserted up in one’s rectum, for the president to die. It’s a worthless position with zero power and too much exposure.
But, choosing the right running mate might matter … for two reasons.
First, in some very limited circumstances the right choice for a running mate could, maybe, lend some support for the candidate. This is in the case of a popular VP candidate from a swing state bringing over some undecided voters to help win a tight race in an important state. The incestuous cousin of this theory is the “shoring up the base” pick, where the candidate picks someone even more to the “purist” end of the party than they are. Personally, I think these theories hold no water. Did Ferraro, Quayle, Kemp, Gore, Palin, or Ryan help their ticket in any meaningful way? No, most likely they did not.
On the other hand, picking their possible successors is the only truly presidential decision that candidates will make before being sworn in. Let’s repeat that: The only presidential decision. Really. Everything else is theater. Thus, the only real value in picking a running mate is to show the American public what direction you think the country should go in, in the (hopefully purely theoretical) case that you are no longer there to lead it. It also works as a signal to the American public how you might govern in office, and who you will reach out to (or, if you prefer, to “bow” to) once in power. Picking a running mate to the purist wing of your party signals, consciously or subconsciously, that you favor divisiveness and polarity; picking a running mate more to the center of the political divide shows a willingness to compromise and work with the other party.
So, has picking a running mate made any real difference?
Pre-1980
The idea that a candidate picks their own running mate, pre-convention, in the normal flow of the election cycle to a whole buttload of media fanfare is a very new phenomenon. It’s only a few decades old.
When the American Republic began, the electors selected the president and vice president (runner up) on the same ballot. This process broke down very quickly, as the population very quickly polarized into two parties that hated each other, intensely. Then they passed and ratified the 12th Amendment, which broke up the vote into two for the two positions, easing the problems had before. This worked till the mid-19th century, when the parties started nominating and running joint tickets.
And that’s where we’ve been ever since. Until very recently, however, the parties matchmaker-ed the shit out of the tickets, deciding who would get the presidential nomination and the number two at the convention, brokering various constituencies to build a convention majority over (usually) many, many ballots and backroom deals. This process stayed mostly in place until Ronald Reagan challenged Jimmy Carter in 1980.
Sometimes, these yenta-ed pairings worked like a charm (think JFK + LBJ or Ike + Nixon), each person bringing a different constituency of voters to the polls on election day for the win. Sometimes a fractured party couldn’t adapt quickly enough to satisfy a fragile coalition of disparate voters (think Teddy Roosevelt running against his successor Taft). Sometimes the party probably meddled too much (think FDR having a different VP on three of four elections).
These were pairings of rich, wealthy men, made by other rich, wealthy men. The idea of popular voting being the basis for these decisions (or any national decisions, really) is a very, very new phenomenon in American politics. In the past, local popular elections led to more restricted regional elections, which led to even more restricted statewide elections, which led to much more restricted nationwide elections, which created an elite group of “electors” who decided the real government was the law of the land. Trickle up politics at its best. Hey, voters getting a choice in who gets to be their senator is even a relatively new phenomenon.
Since 1980
The theater of picking a running mate as an election prop, as I mentioned before, probably goes back to about 1980. Not 1980 itself, because that year the Republican Party assembled the ticket of George H.W. Bush for Reagan, at convention. It was a brilliant move, and quite possibly the most significant choice of a running mate in the last 100 years. (Or at least since the choice of LBJ to run with Jack Kennedy.)
You see, even 11 months before the 1980 election, the majority of Americans were afraid of Ronald Reagan. Not “didn’t like” or “didn’t agree with” Reagan, but shit-in-your-pants afraid of this lunatic. If you lived through the 1960s and 1970s, you’d understand why. There has been a lot of revisionist history written since, but before he became president, Reagan was known best as a red-baiting, Commie-hunting, bad B-movie actor who wanted to throw hippies in concentration camps when he was governor of California. Seriously. That’s what people thought of him, and there was good reason to believe that.
Also, he held crazy theories of plutocratic economics, America First-ist fear mongering nationalist ideas, and a desire to ramp up militarily against the Soviets … all stuff that was very much NOT mainstream GOP policies at the time. There was enough of the Eisenhower Republican ideals left for a sizable portion of the GOP (much less the general electorate) to be revolted at the very thought of Ronald Reagan.
But then two things happened. First, Ted Kennedy took down Jimmy Carter in a way that the Republicans probably never could have. Second, Reagan (or rather, the Republican establishment) picked Bush as his number two. As the mainstream GOP candidate who ran second to Reagan in the primaries, he added a sense of mainstream validity to the ticket, pulling in GOP voters who were still reluctant to vote for Reagan as well as any Democrats and independents on the fence who didn’t want to vote for Carter. (The addendum to the 1980 election is John Anderson, who probably played an equally important part in beating Carter.)
1984
Four years later, former Carter vice president Walter Mondale picked rising Democratic star Geraldine Ferraro to run with him. Ferraro was the first female chosen as a VP candidate for a major party and the first running mate ever announced before convention. On the other side, Reagan stuck with Bush, making the choice a non-factor in the election. (I don’t see how the incumbent VP has any real influence over the election. The nation has lived with the incumbent president for more than three years by then, so there’s nothing really to learn about his or her decision making ability by then.)
In Ferraro, the very liberal Democratic Minnesota Mondale picked a very liberal Democratic New Yorker. Except for Sarah Palin, I can’t think of a more conscious decision to “unify the base” of the party than this choice. Mondale and the party gambled on two things: that women would come out in droves to vote for another woman across party lines and that the party would be yearning for a more traditionally liberal Democratic administration after four years of Reaganism. They lost those bets. Badly.
Since 1980, a few things had transpired. First was that Reagan hadn’t burnt the nation to the ground in a nuclear war with the Ruskies. (I’m pretty sure you can’t understate how scared people were of Reagan before his first election.) Second, Reagan benefited massively from when Paul Volcker fixed the economy. (Sorry Reaganites, it was Volcker who tamed inflation and fixed the economy.) Finally, Reagan lowered taxes. Americans love lower taxes. We do. And since the effects of these plutocratic tax cuts wouldn’t be felt for another couple of decades, it seemed like a good idea to a lot of people at the time.
1988
In 1988, there was no incumbent, so we had an open shot at the presidency. Massachusetts liberal Democrat Michael Dukakis picked longtime Texas senator and rep Lloyd Bentsen (announced about a week before the convention), balancing the ticket among liberal and more moderate constituencies. Incumbent VP George H.W. Bush picked Dan Quayle (announced at the convention), rising Republican star from Indiana, who didn’t really balance the ticket so much as give Bush someone that he thought he could control. He was wrong on that, as Quayle was a walking gaff machine, but it didn’t matter.
Did either running mate help the ticket? No.
Bentsen was clearly more presidential (possibly more so than Dukakis), and more respected than Quayle, but it didn’t matter. Neither running mate helped win their home state. (Dukakis lost Texas by more than 12 percent; Bush won Indiana by more than 20 percent. So neither running mate helped in a tight contest.)
After the disasters of 1980 and 1984, the Democrats were obviously searching for a formula that won in the past and settled on the marriage of JFK and LBJ, a Massachusetts liberal and a Texas moderate. The big problem was that Michael Dukakis was not John Fitzgerald Kennedy, never mind whatever the fuck Dan Quayle was.
1992
Enter Bill Clinton and Al Gore. Did Gore help Clinton get elected? In the sense that it might have added an element of hope and youth to the campaign and rallied young voters to come out and vote for them … maybe. But I doubt it helped in any true strategic way.
Clinton won his own state of Arkansas by nearly 20 percent. He won Gore’s neighboring Tennessee by about 4 percent. Now, you’d think that means Gore helped him win, and there could, maybe, just maybe, be a touch of truth to that. The problem with that theory is … Ross Perot. Perot was a major factor in the election, and polled about 10 percent all over, including in Tennessee. And let’s be honest with ourselves, people. Perot took voters from Bush, not Clinton.
In fact, that’s the main story line of the 1992 election. Yes, Clinton beat Bush, but Perot took so many votes from Bush that Clinton was able to win. Since he wasn’t able to take any states, Perot created an atmosphere that allowed Clinton to win a majority of electoral votes on a plurality of popular votes. If Perot hadn’t entered the election, it’s likely that George Herbert Walker Bush would have won re-election.
1996
To face Clinton-Gore, Bob Dole picked Jack Kemp, the main architect behind the sham that is supply side economics. Kemp was the first GOP vice presidential candidate chosen before convention, by a mere two days, sure, but enough to put him in the record books.
In Kemp, Dole picked a candidate that was more to the libertarian-conservative fringe, consolidating the base, and from New York, a state they didn’t have a shot in hell of winning. Basically, he broke both rules.
It didn’t matter. But the economy was doing better and Clinton’s constant moves to the middle politically (with the “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” rules for the military and signing the Defense of Marriage Act into law) left Dole and the Republicans no real political ground to stake for their own.
2000
The shit storm that was the 2000 election, where Al Gore won the popular vote but George W. Bush the presidency, is an outlier. We probably shouldn’t take too much from such a close and agonizing election, but I think we can all agree that as far as the campaign goes, the vice presidential choices were worthless to the campaign itself.
Gore picked moderate Joe Liberman from Connecticut and Wyoming’s moderate Dick Cheney chose himself to be Bush’s running mate. Since you could throw a dart in the dark at their political views nailed to a wall and not be able to tell whose was whose, I doubt that the VPs’ ideas played any part in the election. Likewise, they both came from states that were easy wins for their political masters. Bush’s choice of an older, more experienced mentor who had worked in many administrations in the past might have helped some voters overcome a view of him that he was too inexperienced, but I doubt it had much, if any, real effect.
2004
Frankenstein’s monster … oops, John Kerry … picked liberal Democrat John Edwards from South Carolina. Picking a southerner helped Kerry win none of the south. (He lost everything south of Illinois and Maryland, as well as just about everything in between.) In the end, though, Kerry only lost by about 30 electoral votes, but it’s hard to see how Edwards helped him win any of the 251 electoral votes that he did win.
But hey, at least Edwards waited until 2008 to fully meltdown politically with his extramarital affair and campaign violations to cover up said affair that nearly landed him in jail. If that had happened earlier, then he really could have sunk Mr. Heinz.
2008
Illinois liberal Democrat Barack Obama picked more moderate and more experienced Joe Biden from Delaware, and Arizona conservative (please don’t make me say “maverick”) John McCain picked proto-Tea-Party Alaska governor Sarah Palin. This is one of the best contrast in styles for picking a vice presidential candidate that we have in recent memory.
How’s that geography workin’ for ya? Well, McCain didn’t pick Palin to win Alaska, which he won by more than 20 percent and would have won by 20 percent regardless of the choice. And Obama didn’t pick Biden to win Delaware, which he would have won with any other candidate. The best reasoning on this score is that Biden helped Obama win over more working class whites, especially in the old Rust Belt from Pennsylvania through to Wisconsin, than he might have gotten out to vote for him otherwise. There could be some truth to this, but voting against the GOP after eight years of Bush-Cheney was possibly just as important for that demographic.
McCain was talked into picking Palin to shore up the party base. His first choice was Democrat Joe Liberman. (You remember, Gore’s vp candidate.) Now that would have been interesting. One candidate running on a platform of Hope and Change to be the first African-American president of the U.S.A., and the other candidate running the first true bipartisan ticket since Abraham Lincoln picked Andrew Johnson. That would have been a legitimate campaign of two differing visions of what “Hope and Change” actually mean. And it would have been fascinating.
Alas, he picked the lunatic reality show star and the campaign became Hope + Change verses anti-Hope and anti-Change. When the financial crisis metastasized at the end of the summer, and the country shit its pants and fell in love with the idea of true change, McCain was done for. Hope won.
2012
I have never understood the need for a liberal candidate to “shore up” the liberal base (like Mondale in 1984) or a conservative candidate to “shore up” the conservative base. But apparently, a wealthy white straight-laced Mormon isn’t conservative enough for Republican voters, so Mitt Romney’s campaign picked Ayn Rand acolyte and scourge of the poor and the Federal Reserve Paul Ryan to be his running mate. Then, surprise surprise, when the voters caught wind that the uber-rich Romney wasn’t very moderate after all, like Republican insiders were afraid of, there was nowhere for the ticket to turn. It became the ticket of Rich Romney and Rich-Apologizer Ryan, and the makeup of the ticket didn’t allow the party anywhere to turn to change that narrative.
With the economy on the mend, the furor over the Affordable Care Act winding down, and Obama’s relatively middle-of-the-road positions on most issues, Romney had very little political real estate of which to take advantage. Picking a running mate to the Right of him gave him even less room to maneuver.
So what about this year?
Well, I’ll get to what I think each candidate should do in my next couple of posts, but let’s see if there are any definite conclusions that we can draw.
First, the choice of geography is probably a red herring at best. For the Democrats, a choice based on region hasn’t really helped since 1960, and then because the party was so fractured in the face of the postwar era where realignment was occurring because of desegregation and the amplifying Cold War and the upcoming civil rights era. And that choice was probably driven more by demographics than geography.
Second, shoring up the base probably hurts a ticket more than helps. Ferraro, Kemp, Palin, and Ryan did not help their tickets. If anything, choosing them helped to turn moderate centrists off. Now, whether they really cost their tickets anything of significance is probably not possible to prove. Usually, parties choose this type of running mate when the party at large is in a bit of disarray, and the party is usually in disarray because it’s losing. So did the choice help to make the losing party lose, or was it an appropriate risk to take? I have no idea, but with the possible exception of Sarah Palin, I don’t think that any of these individuals had any real impact on the election or the impression that voters had of the candidate.
Third, picking toward the middle probably helps. The only running mate choice that probably had a significant impact on the general election in the modern (postmodern?) era of presidential politics is George H.W. Bush, who probably helped to bring a lot of moderates and centrists to the GOP in 1980. Without him, John Anderson might have been able to exploit a larger share of Republicans (in the end, Anderson’s votes most likely ended up coming almost entirely from the Democrats). And it’s possible that a statistically significant percentage of Democrats not happy with the Carter administration probably crossed the aisle and secretly voted for Reagan (and Bush) too. None of that would have happened without Bush on the ticket. None. Eight years later, the Democrats tried to duplicate that success, but even the help of Bentsen couldn’t help overcome the weakness of the primary person on the ticket.
Which brings me to the final point: No choice matters if the person atop the ticket isn’t strong enough to win. No selection of running mate can turn a loser into a winner. A good choice might make a winner win more, and a bad choice might make a loser lose more. But the person in the back of the car can’t really steer the vehicle out of a skid.