The Democrats Will Unite Behind Any VP Choice
Even if your niche corner of the internet will not.
Tim here, sitting in today—JVL has the week off, so we’ll be taking turns subbing for him.
1. The Internet Is Not Real Life, Part Eleventy Bajillion
For days there has been chatter on the progressive interwebs about how Josh Shapiro would “divide” the party. Extremely online politicos upset about his views on Israel or school vouchers or his Kosher Obama speaking style have asserted this dispositively. Deep inside the politics internet there has been a spate of retrospective complaints about how bad a “blitz primary” would have been as evinced by the aggressive and deranged online discourse that has supposedly tainted the purity of the “veepstakes.”
If you are involved in these online meme wars, I grant that it might feel as if things are very contentious. You might see yourself as being on one side of a battle that must be won, and that your activism is the tip of the spear that represents a broader coalition behind you out in the world. For example, if you are involved in progressive or anti-Zionist online activism it might seem as if everyone hates Josh and game theory requires him to be passed over. If you fancy yourself a political polling and data nerd, you might have come to the conclusion that anyone except for Josh would be idiocy. If you are a regular resistance activist your feed is exploding with Hot Walz content.
Even the unifying, thoughtful Bulwark Redditors have exploded in a #war between the Walz-pilled and the Shapiro-stans.
Here’s the problem with all of this.
This “war” that is purportedly happening within the party over the VP selection is all an illusion. It is taking place in a hermetically sealed bubble among political hobbyists who have extremely strong feelings about the ideological trajectory of the Democratic party . . . and nobody else. They are a fraction of a fraction of the party.
Rank-and-file Democrats are unburdened by the veepstakes discourse. They only have surface-level knowledge about the main contenders, according to polls. And the Democrats who live in each contender’s respective states overwhelmingly love their hometown boys.
The one supposedly “divisive” name being discussed, Shapiro, is viewed favorably by 90 percent of Pennsylvania Democrats. I guess the Keystone State progressives didn’t get the internet’s memo.
The reality is: Concerns about whether one of these DEI whites will salt the vibes are based on Twitter-brain alone.
2. The Real Vibes Doctors
You know who has been driving the Coconutmentum both online and out in the real world? A bunch of people who have zero fucks to give about Mark Kelly vs. J.B. Pritzker.
Let’s start with the big names who have engaged in the past month.
Beyoncé donated $4 milly to Kamala over the weekend and let her use “Freedom” as the campaign theme song. Charli XCX declared it Brat Summer. Megan Thee Stallion performed at the campaign rally Georgia.
Do you think any of them is jumping off the bandwagon because of a VP contender’s college essay? Do you think Charli has strong feelings about Andy Beshear Fall?
I do not.
My TikTok feed is littered with random people getting hundreds of thousands of likes for their coconut dance. Do you think any of them are going to limit their future engagement because of the VP pick’s views on the PACT Act?
I do not.
How about the hundreds of thousands of new donors and volunteers who have flocked to the campaign? Do you think more than 3 percent of them will revert to apathy based on the selection?
Hard to imagine.
And if you want some evidence that the choice of a more centrist, white male with a dodgy track record won’t be a wet blanket on the buzzy presidential candidate, let’s head back to 2008, when this exact scenario played out.
Did any of the Obama mojo dissipate because Joe Biden made an offensive joke about 7-Eleven clerks? Did anybody boycott the 2008 convention because of Biden’s past views on abortion or criminal justice or any of his other more conservative views from decades past? No! Because normal people—people who are not reading newsletters such as this—just don’t concern themselves about the VP selection.
This is not to say that it doesn’t matter at all. A VP candidate can give a boost with a certain demographic (Pence) or do serious harm to a ticket by showing a lack of preparedness (Palin). But the latter doesn’t seem to be a concern in this case. All of the medium-bodied whites in this veepstakes read the newspaper and know the basics of American foreign policy.
The online acrimony over the VP choice reflects the same misunderstanding of the Democratic electorate that some influencers and pundits had during the Biden age discourse. Even before the fateful June 27 debate, the vast majority of Democrats and Democratic-leaning independents were saying two things to anyone who would listen: (A) that they wanted a candidate who could beat Trump, and (B) that they thought Biden was too old to do the job.
Despite this very clear message being sent in every quantitative and qualitative survey, a bunch of smartypants on cable news panels and election Twitter who all agreed with part A shouted at each other over how to deal with part B. That shouting read to some in the political world as “disarray.”
But then something weird happened. Biden stepped aside. The vast majority of Democrats got what they wanted . . . and overnight, voila, unity! Things were in array!
That’s all it took.
This unity was available the whole time. All the Democrats had to do was provide voters with a ticket that was responsive to their fundamental desires. The anti-Trump coalition may disagree about a LOT, but for everyone who is a part of it, the thing they agree on most is that they want to be rid of his fat orange ass once and for all.
So when Kamala Harris makes her selection, as long as that person passes the bar for “presidential believability” and demonstrates the ability to do the #1 job that Democratic voters are looking for (taking on Trump), then come Chicago, the vibes will be immaculate.
Yeah, there will be pockets of disappointment if Harris goes in an ideological direction that some of us would prefer she avoid. Some of those people will complain online about it. The most obnoxious subset of that group will ostentatiously project dissatisfaction or division in order to gain status/attract engagement from other political obsessives in their cohort.
And a small but loud subset of the especially obnoxious might even try to sabotage the campaign over it. But it ain’t gonna work.
When the lights go down in the United Center in August and the Alan Parsons Project or Kim Petras blares over the loudspeakers and the Harris/Chardonnay pairing appear on the big screen, the people who exist in the real Democratic party are going to scream out with such purpose that those little social media squabbles won’t even be audible.
3. Marty Kemp’s Revenge
Over the weekend in Atlanta, Trump lost his mind on the state’s popular GOP Governor Brian Kemp and his wife, Marty. As A.B. Stoddard writes on the homepage today, the speech amounted to political self-sabotage on Trump’s part. I made a video breaking it all down:
This is basically what I was getting at the other day which drew a rather rude reply. The Democrats have a slate of options for VP who would all be basically fine. There's some room for optimization, some room for theory, but they're all going to be essentially interchangeably fine for the ticket in November. There is no JD Vance in the offing for Harris, there is no real "unforced error" to be had despite what the other newsletter says. They'd all be fine.
There are upsides to Shapiro, there are also downsides. The left does have a point that he has some baggage as regards Israel/Palestine that could move some needles. There's a racist op-ed from his college days calling the Palestinians too "battle-minded" to ever form a nation that he insists he's evolved from, but it'll still get dragged up (though, crucially, it can't really be effective ammunition for the right which just literally thinks this). There's some shadow around his administration regarding a sexual harassment case involving a top adviser. He of course also has upsides, which you and others have covered quite well.
I'm a Pennsylvanian. I'm also a leftist, which means I'm gonna be some degree of unhappy no matter who gets chosen. That said, I'm also going to vote for Harris in November no matter who gets chosen, because unlike some of my compatriots I do not believe America has to pass through the ravages of fascism to embrace a more equitable vision of society. If I were living in New York or Massachusetts or California, yeah, maybe a Shapiro choice would convince me to stay home or leave that category blank to exert some infinitesimal unit of pressure. Whoop-dee-doo. That would be a luxury, one I know I don't have. Ultimately I think that's where the relevant left lands on this issue. We may gripe and we may groan but at the end of the day there are very few outright accelerationists among us.
"Because normal people—people who are not reading newsletters such as this..."
Tim.... are you calling us "weird"?