Harris ‘wanted a pale and male VP to counter Trump’
In the end the Minnesota governor Tim Walz’s ‘regular Joe’ credentials won the day over ‘showboater’ Josh Shapiro.
It was Friday afternoon and a small team of Kamala Harris’s aides was “murder-boarding” her potential running-mates.
Cedric Richmond, a former adviser to the Biden administration, the former labour secretary Marty Walsh and Tony West, Harris’s brother-in-law, were grilling six finalists for the 2024 Democratic presidential ticket, presenting them with doomsday scenarios to test their readiness for the highest political office in America.
They were quizzed on any dirty laundry - college antics, previous relationships and past political opinions.
The gruelling process of picking a vice-presidential nominee is usually a months-long affair, involving extensive interviews, background checks and some fairly rigorous research. Harris’s team had just weeks to whittle down a list after President Biden stepped aside.
While the candidates had little time to prepare, three clearly stood out. Any could win the race, they told her, leaving the vice-president with the freedom to choose her favourite. She took the weekend to mull it over, before making her decision on Monday.
The countdown began a week earlier when her aides approached the New York law firm Covington & Burling to draft a shortlist, one almost exclusively male and pale by design.
As Harris is the first female vice-president, and the first of African and Asian descent, her team did not think voters would go for two women.
“There’s a lot of sexist, racist white dudes out there in America who don’t like Trump but just need a little extra validation,” someone familiar with the Harris campaign told NBC News. They needed “someone who gives moderate Republican voters a place to go”.
Behind the scenes, senior Democrats were bidding for different candidates.
Biden, a son of Pennsylvania, liked the state’s governor, Josh Shapiro, who had become close with former president Barack Obama. Shapiro, 51, enjoyed considerable bipartisan support at home and could deliver the most important swing state on the map.
Nancy Pelosi, the party doyenne and former House Speaker, pushed the team in the direction of Tim Walz, the unassuming governor of reliably blue Minnesota. She was even overheard telling caucus members not to “sleep on” him. Bernie Sanders, the liberal senator for Vermont, also fancied Walz for his strong relationship with the unions and his track record on fighting for blue-collar jobs.
Walz had one of the lowest public profiles of any hopeful; videos of him meeting voters at a state fair while chewing a pork chop on a stick had caught the Harris team’s eye. There was a sense that he looked and sounded like a regular Joe and could speak to rural and working-class voters who might not otherwise be open to Harris.
A former attorney-general from California, Harris is criticised by Republicans as being part of a “west coast elite”; Walz, meanwhile, is the affable Midwestern former football coach, soldier, high school teacher and Democratic congressman from a red district.
In an interview now seen as a public audition for the role, Walz appeared on MSNBC’s Morning Joe and made a seemingly off-hand comment about Donald Trump and JD Vance, Trump’s pick for vice-president. “These guys are just weird,” Walz said.
Something about the message and its delivery set the internet alight. Suddenly Walz was a viral meme, on the lips of voters everywhere. It got under Trump’s skin, too. To the Harris team, it showed Walz’s ability to take on Trump with a lighter touch, while thundering on about existential threats was turning off undecided voters. According to insiders, it pushed Walz to the top of the pile, alongside Shapiro, a centrist whose star was rising in the Democratic Party, and the Arizona senator Mark Kelly, a former astronaut and Navy pilot.
While Walz’s political stock was growing, Shapiro, who is Jewish, was attracting critical media coverage for comments he made in a resurfaced college newspaper essay about the Israeli-Palestinian peace process.
Shapiro quickly became a lightning rod for progressive Democrat anger. A group of leftwingers under the label VPUnity warned in a letter to Harris that choosing an avowedly pro-Israel candidate at such a critical juncture in the Middle East would “ruin Democratic unity” and be a “catastrophic gift to Donald Trump”. And while Harris aides felt that Kelly had a stellar CV, there was concern that he was an uninspiring public speaker. Harris allies also felt that he had been insufficiently loyal to Biden in the weeks after the president’s poor debate performance.
Late last week, her team began to look at the candidates’ legal, financial, political, personal, family and employment backgrounds. Walz had a drink-driving arrest in 1995, which did not overly trouble them.
Harris then met the top three, Walz, Shapiro and Kelly, at her official residence in the Naval Observatory for several hours on Sunday.
In the end, it came down to chemistry. “You also have to ask yourself at some point, is this someone you would want to have lunch with every week for four years?” a White House official involved in the process told NBC.
Shapiro reportedly relayed concerns to the vice-president’s team that he was struggling with the prospect of leaving his job as governor if he was chosen.
According to sources, Harris’s team also thought Shapiro, who has become known for his powerful oratory style, came off as a bit of a “showboater”, someone who would take the spotlight off the vice-president.
He was clearly highly ambitious and Harris, a relatively young nominee at the age of 59, feared Shapiro would not be content remaining at the bottom of the ticket in 2028.
In contrast, Walz showed a deference to Harris and was not driven by ego. He had a “Midwestern dad” folksy charm that reminded the vice-president of Biden. “He’s just so open, I really like him,” Harris reportedly said of Walz after their 90-minute meeting.
The Minnesota governor made a pitch to Harris in that meeting that would ultimately seal the deal. “I’m at the end of my career,” he told his prospective boss. “This is not about me.”
Walz missed Harris’s 10am phone call delivering the news on Tuesday as he does not like to answer the phone when there is no caller ID. “Let’s do this,” he replied, once she finally got through.
The Times
