I wish people would stop thinking of a VP like a silent symbol of extension for their office. Walz is rhetorically unmatched out of the potential nominees and he has a clean record with the base. I personally hate the idea that she’s considering someone with vastly different views who can provide milquetoast apologia at the podium like she did for Biden. Being from a state clearly isn’t an automatic win, just look at the couchcrawler.
How about Tim Gunn, the cohost of “Project Runway?” He could make it work.
I like this as an SNL skit.
Well, now we know who it won’t be.
We’ll find out by Tuesday. I’m comfortable being foolishly hopeful for a few days.
On one hand, I agree he’d be good at it. On the other hand, I’m selfish and want him in MN
Harris’ll probably go with the choice that is likely to tip Pennsylvania in the Dems’ favor, I suspect.
Shapiro might legitimately cost her MI and WI, and even MN. His response to the student protests over Gaza was extreme and brutish. 20% of MI voted undecided on Biden almost exclusively because of his position on Gaza. You need to signal to the voters you are going in a different direction and put those points back on the board.
Shapiro looks like more of the same ME policy as before. I’d say if you go Shapiro you bring PA to 50/50 odds but you now lose MI and maybe even WI, and MN even comes into play. If you don’t lock up MN/ WI/ MI, just go home because you’ve lost at that point.
You think Shapiro is disliked enough relative to Trump to move the needle much?
Yeah again, and this is what bnmw and blue maga never seemed to get.
This isn’t about Trump. It never was.
That’s not how you get Democratic voters out to vote, even if you wish it was.
Trump is a known quantity; fully defined. Biden tried to make this a referendum on Trump and it was fucking disasterous, and damn near handed Trump the election. You have to actually give voters a fucking reason to show up for you.
And there in lies the problem and opportunity for Democrats. Political wisdom says shoot for the center of mass. Shapiro meets that in rhetoric only. We’re buttering at the edges, but Shapiro doesn’t get you a specific cohort of voter in a specific state. He has been strong against Israel in rhetoric only. He doesn’t represent a true separation of policy from Biden
Democrats would be under performing about 10% across the board if Biden was still the nominee. It’s hard to put into words how monumentally stupid and idiotic it was to stick with Biden as long as we did. Anyone who promoted Biden as anything other than a fucking disaster for the previous nine months should be considered a paraiah and dutifully ignored for the damage they did, basically indefinitely. If it wasn’t for the damage caused by Blue Maga, the choice would be obvious. These states shouldn’t be on the table and yet here we are.
Right now PA is more of a long shot and if you don’t step towards a principaled stance on Israel Gaza, you don’t win back the upper Midwest, or at a minimum, you leave them still in play. PA is more of a wild card and it’s not clear to me that Shapiro gets you that state. If you go Walz, you lock up those three states and give your self breathing room as a campaign to actually campaign in states like PA, GA, NC. You pick Shapiro and now you’ve got three more states that are up for grabs.
Polymarket has him pretty low. And Shapiro doesn’t seem like an objectively bad pick, but his response to Gaza protests and student protests don’t seem to me like they are going to move the needle in the demographics Harris needs for the WI/ MI/ MN trifecta. Its also not clear to me that “not-picking” Shapiro loses her PA.
That being said, I think he’s an Walz does more for the ticket. So if you go Walz, you have to lock in MI and WI, and MN. This seems very doable. If its Shapiro, he has to lock up PA. Like if she goes Shapiro and doesn’t lock up PA, thats the ball game, because you are basically sacrificing either MI or WI and you’ve lost because really need both of those.
GA and NC are both 100% on Kamala, obv, and I’m writing AZ off and assuming VA is fine.
That all being said, I think Kamala’s early moves and numbers have been extremely convincing and yet again I find myself without a weekend to dig into the Florida data. It might be that this is all hand wringing over nothing, because the grass-roots energy is real, and thats something that Biden never had and was never going to have. Biden has no base and didn’t think he needed one; Kamala recognizes the importance and is doing, frankly, a better than Obama job at building one. Obama had a whole campaign season and super-human charisma, with deener and doufas as opponents. Kamala has had a few weeks and a couple coconut trees, with an actual christian fascist movement opposing her. In-spite of that, she’s already at the scale of doing more with less, so in some sense I want to let her cook.
I think that Walz is the smarter pick and you might just have to do so to lock up the undecided vote and not leave that on the table. Otherwise you may have left too much hanging out there convincing yourself you can lock up PA when thats still a real gamble, even with a Shapiro pickup.
Edit: If she goes Walz, I’m pulling out a heloc and betting on her in polymarket. I think she lights this shit off and takes a commanding lead by signalling to the progressives that she’s willing to play ball.
Polymarket has him pretty low. And Shapiro doesn’t seem like an objectively bad pick, but his response to Gaza protests and student protests don’t seem to me like they are going to move the needle in the demographics Harris needs for the WI/ MI/ MN trifecta.
I’d say that makes him an objectively bad pick. It’s confirming to people who are finally cautiously optimistic that they won’t have to vote for someone whose support for genocide was a given that their optimism was completely unfounded.
You might be right.
Shapiro was also the first and strongest voice calling out Bibi as a terrible leader as early as November 23 because of his handling of this specific issue
Depends.
I’ve got a friend that is pretty deep in their Palestine support, to the extent they are part of a social media bubble, and their entire bubble is full of articles and opinions painting Shapiro as an anti-Palestine, extreme Zionist, who is former IDF.
That’s the information they lead off with when characterizing him - no mentions of his criticisms of Netanyahu.
Michigan’s large Muslim population wrote off Biden, and the pivot to Harris showed a pretty big jump in support for her vs him. I think that Shapiro would absolutely cost her the race in MI.
Of course, the opposite could be true - Jewish voters (as well as the incredibly powerful AIPAC) may lean in to Trump if Kamala appears to be too critical of Israel. Shapiro could temper those sentiments.
Harris better absolutely be thinking about these things in making the decision.
Pretty thoughtful for a tropical ding dong.
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