By Jeffrey Blehar
Friday, June 07, 2024
Political scientists will tell you that vice-presidential
picks don’t really matter that much in terms of electoral results, even at the
margins. Smart campaigns don’t pick one because they hope to swing a state into
their party’s column. It’s really about the top of the ticket for most voters,
and vice presidents are usually a reflection of perceived weaknesses at the
top, chosen to bridge otherwise difficult demographic divides in a symbolic
way. They are chosen to “round out the character” of the presidential nominee,
to sell a narrative to the public based on the person that nominee selected as
his emergency stand-in.
In an earlier, more regionalized era — before ideological
sorting turned the Democrats into the “progressive” party and Republicans into
the “conservative” one — California conservative Ronald Reagan chose well-bred
Northeastern moderate George H.W. Bush to balance out an ideological ticket.
Bill Clinton chose Al Gore of Tennessee to emphasize a willingness to play for
ancestral Southern Democratic votes. In more recent years, as our political
discourse has become wholly nationalized, vice-presidential nominees have been
chosen to balance out personal weaknesses. With a reputation as an intellectual
lightweight, George W. Bush sought out Dick Cheney to provide gravitas.
(Meanwhile Al Gore chose Joe Lieberman to distance himself from Clinton’s
sexual sleaze.) As the first black presidential nominee, Barack Obama felt
compelled to add “Lunchbucket Joe” Biden to reassure white middle- and
working-class voters he wasn’t Jesse Jackson. Donald Trump, with a history
of sordidness so tangled it recently resulted in 34 dubious felony
convictions, tabbed Mike Pence to signal to the world that at least one
upstanding adult was in the room. (Pence later proved it, much to Trump’s
dismay.)
But for once, owing to the unique circumstances of 2024’s
presidential race — may we never live through this again — vice-presidential
picks matter. When two old-codger retreads are running for a four-year term in
office as president, potential successors matter! Surely nobody needs reminding
of that less than Joe Biden, a mentally enfeebled octogenarian running for
reelection who — because the public clearly can see his accelerating slide —
wears Vice President Kamala Harris like a cement lifejacket around his concaved
shoulders. (To be fair, Biden, currently decaying before our eyes faster
than Walter Donovan, probably needs to be reminded on occasion of who his
Vice President is, for all we’ve seen of her in public in recent months.) And
Donald Trump — himself probably the only man in America unpopular enough to
make the 2024 presidential election a close race — finds himself with a unique
opportunity.
Believe me, it matters every bit as much for Trump to get
this right as it did for Biden not to blow it back in 2020. While Trump’s core
fanatics would happily band together to break the man out of prison, any
national victory scenario for a man whose flaws need no recounting will require
significant numbers of reluctant voters to sign on. And Trump’s core
fanatics may actually need to break this man out of prison, for all
we yet know. His pick as vice president is perhaps the best opportunity he will
have in this race to persuade grudging voters off the fence. So who will be his
new apprentice?
First, and in the spirit of the man’s famous Memorial Day greetings, we can cross all the haters and
losers off of our list. In the “haters” category comes most obviously Mike
Pence, who one might have thought uniquely qualified for the position of Donald
Trump’s vice president, having done it once already. But alas, issues of
principle intervened, as they tend to do with politicians who actually believe what they say. In the “losers” category, there’s
obviously Vivek Ramaswamy — always a pilot-fish, never a pilot — left holding
an empty bag in return for all of that obnoxious simping during the primary. A
passel of promising younger Republican women seemed positioned early on to have
a shot — Elise Stefanik, for example — but that buzz all seemingly came to an
end once leading candidate Kristi Noem, as if anticipating Team USA’s feat in Dallas yesterday, shocked the world of Cricket.
The finalist’s circle has, at least as of now, apparently
been reduced to four potential picks: Senator Marco Rubio of Florida,
Senator J.D. Vance of Ohio, Senator Tim Scott of South Carolina, and Governor
Doug Burgum of North Dakota. Of those four, we can immediately dismiss Marco
Rubio as a contender, and it’s not just because some of us still remember that agonizing 2016 primary debate where smoke visibly
poured out of both of his ears as his malfunctioning proto-AI kept returning
the Manchurian Candidate–like activation phrase “Barack Obama knows
exactly what he is doing.” It’s because both he and Donald Trump are residents
of the state of Florida, which means that under the U.S. Constitution Florida’s electors — likely
Republican this year — can cast their votes in the Electoral College for Trump
but not for Rubio. Perhaps there are clever legal workarounds to this elemental
objection, but Donald Trump strikes me as a man already well stocked with
other, more important legal issues to address. (And anyway, admit it: The
tragicomic lunacy of a Trump/Harris administration would be something America
does not want or need but sincerely deserves.)
Next there is J.D. Vance, who presumably would be brought
in as a military veteran and tribune of the working class. Vance, however, is a
notable vacuum of charisma on the stump and in retail politicking — think about
how much retail work Trump’s vice-presidential pick might have to do, given
where Trump will be spending his time — while Trump himself has no real need to
further bolster his credibility among a demographic he’s already rapidly
siphoning away from the Democrats. I would be surprised if Trump chose either
one of them.
South Carolina’s Tim Scott and North Dakota’s Doug Burgum
remain. And if these are indeed Trump’s two remaining choices, he actually has
real potential to draw upon. Scott is the more well-known of the two, and his
advantages are straightforward: Most obviously, he is a well-regarded black
senator during a cycle when potentially game-changing numbers of minority
voters are positioned to turn away from the Democratic fold. But his
unfeignedly upbeat, effortlessly sunny charisma would also be a welcome (and stabilizing)
contrast to Trump’s paranoid and fulminatory style. The danger with Scott is
that he might come across as unprepared for the job — his presidential campaign
inspired no enthusiasm and felt almost perfunctory — and, as I have said, this
is an election where voters would appreciate a reliable backstop should
something befall the man at the top.
That leaves us with Governor Doug Burgum of North Dakota.
Like most of the rest of you, I did not know who Doug Burgum was prior to his
announcement that he would be running for president. (I’m not even quite sure I
knew North Dakota was a state. My teachers taught me to think of that part of
the country as unmarked wasteland where we stored nuclear missiles and barley.)
But he impressed during what was otherwise a completely unenlightening sequence
of primary debates, speaking as a governor with calm Midwestern composure and
rugged sobriety. Burgum focused mostly on energy issues when he spoke (quite
naturally given his state’s booming oil industry), but throughout every debate
refused all attempts to launch zingers, get involved in petty sniping, or engage
in any of the other intramural catfighting that made the rest of the candidates
seem pathetically small compared with Trump, who ignored them all. Apparently
he has drawn Trump’s attention as well, and he fits in much the same way that
Pence did in 2016. Back then, morality was issue. Now it’s sobriety. Trump is a
loose cannon, and people are reluctant to vote for a man they have every reason
to suspect will govern like the Red Caesar out for revenge should he win.
Burgum’s calm, respectable stolidity could prove to be an immensely important
counterweight to that.
I wouldn’t dare to guess who Donald Trump will pick as
his vice president. But I can look around at the most likely candidates and
clearly see that Trump would be doing himself the most favors with a vice
president like Doug Burgum. 2024 is a chaos-era election pitting two authentic
chaos agents — one in his decrepitude, the other in his erraticism — against
one another, with no particularly good answers for voters. So we look to the
second-in-command. Joe Biden is stuck with Kamala Harris and is paying an enormous
price for it even among those who might otherwise vote for him with the
understanding that he’d die in office and leave things to someone more
competent. Trump can at least hope to change his own narrative with a better
pick. He should remember what worked in 2016: A calm and sober voice, with
serious governing experience. It points to someone like Burgum.
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