Ahead of Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden’s imminent announcement of his running mate, one leading candidate was urged by a top Democratic Party leader to reject the nomination over the weekend.
Sen. Kamala Harris, D-Calif., should not accept Biden’s offer, former San Francisco Mayor Willie Brown — a leading Democratic party voice in California — and instead insist on being named his Attorney General.
Attorney General has real power, Brown wrote. A Vice President Kamala Harris would be a largely ceremonial position.
“Being picked for the vice presidency is obviously a huge honor, and if Biden wins, Harris would make history by being the first woman to hold the job,” Brown wrote in an op-ed in The San Francisco Chronicle. “But the glory would be short-lived, and historically, the vice presidency has often ended up being a dead end. For every George H.W. Bush, who ascended from the job to the presidency, there’s an Al Gore, who never got there.”
The upcoming running mate announcement will shift the force of the campaign — at least temporarily — away from President Donald Trump’s presidency onto Biden himself. That’s not a place many Democrats are comfortable given Biden’s frequent gaffes and the persistent lack of excitement behind his candidacy.
More fundamentally, the choice offers Biden chance to unify a party still reeling from Trump’s 2016 win and solidify its future. He’s already committed to selecting a woman and is considering several Black women.
And since the 77-year-old Biden has not committed to seeking a second term, his running mate could be strongly positioned to become the Democratic Party’s presidential nominee in 2024 and shape national politics for the next decade.
Sen. Tim Kaine of Virginia, who served as Hillary Clinton’s vice presidential nominee in 2016, said Biden’s decision “may be the most closely held and personally driven vice presidential pick ever.”
While Biden has said a top priority is selecting someone who could step into the presidency on Day One, the politics of the moment have pushed the silver-haired white man to the brink of making history. While he promised months ago to pick a woman, the nation’s reckoning with the death of George Floyd has added pressure to pick a woman of color.
While Harris is widely considered the front runner and checks all those boxes, it’s not certain she’ll be the pick. Last weekend, Biden met privately with Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer, who’s white. Biden has said publicly she remains on his shortlist. Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren, who also is white, has also been a leading contender.
Biden’s campaign has refused to comment on his search, but his team has been in recent contact with a small group of finalists that includes at least four women of color: Harris, former national security adviser Susan Rice, California Rep. Karen Bass, and Illinois Sen. Tammy Duckworth.
Some were instructed late last week not to leave Washington, an indication that more in-person interviews, or an actual announcement, was imminent.
Within the party, there is growing tension about how soon before the Democratic National Convention Biden should unveil his decision. While finalists and their allies believe the process has already gone on too long, experienced Democratic operatives want Biden to wait as long as possible before the convention’s Aug. 17 start date to hide the vice presidential nominee’s from controversy expected no matter whom he picks.
Most of the women don’t have strong ties to a specific battleground state that might offer Democrats a geographic advantage this fall, which would represent a break from precedent to some extent. But Biden allies hope the historic nature of his pick might help energize two key Democratic constituencies: suburban white women and minority voters.
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Inside the campaign, some are privately skeptical that even a history-making pick would have a significant impact. There is a strong belief that after only a brief focus on Biden’s running mate, the election would quickly return to being a referendum on Trump’s presidency.
Yet Biden risks a real backlash from his base if he doesn’t pick a woman of color, according to some far-left activists.
“It would be a reckless choice to pick a white running mate with a party that’s as dependent on black and brown voters as it is,” said Aimee Allison of She the People, a political advocacy network. “A Black woman as VP is a healing link that our country needs right now to navigate this historic moment.”
Running mates are rarely a deciding factor in presidential elections.
Kaine may have given Clinton a modest 2 point bump in his home state four years ago, but he did not prevent voters from abandoning Democrats in droves elsewhere. Republican nominee Mitt Romney picked Wisconsin native Paul Ryan in 2012 but lost Ryan’s home state by nearly 7 percentage points. Trump, a New York native, won Wisconsin four years later running alongside Mike Pence, who was a governor in Indiana.
Some historians argue that adding Lyndon Johnson to the ticket helped John F. Kennedy win Texas in 1960 and capture the White House.
John McCain’s 2008 selection of Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin might be the most recent example of a running mate swaying an election. In that case, the mainstream media claims she had a negative impact. But those involved in the decision argue that larger forces were at work that year and that McCain’s loss wasn’t just because of Palin.
“There was a lot of fury and chaos inside the campaign that resulted from it, but all of the electoral studies of voting behavior demonstrated there was really no electoral impact with (Palin) on the ticket,” said former McCain campaign adviser Steve Schmidt, who attributed McCain’s loss to the collapse of the nation’s economy and voters’ desire for change after the George W. Bush presidency.
Former Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker, a Republican who was deeply involved in Ryan’s vice presidential preparations in 2012, said the main objective of picking a running mate is to find someone who may complement the presidential nominee. But above all, the person should do no harm.
The Trump campaign is eagerly awaiting Biden’s announcement and the attention it will almost certainly divert from the Republican president’s struggle to control the coronavirus pandemic, revive the economy and unify the nation.
Given Biden’s advanced age, Trump campaign spokesman Tim Murtaugh predicted that his pick would be far more significant than those of past nominees.
“Who he picks as VP could be seen as a sort of a living will for him politically,” Murtaugh said of Biden, who is three years older than Trump.
He declined to offer any specific criticism of the finalists when asked. “It doesn’t matter to us who he picks,” he said, “because whoever it is will provide opportunities for us.”
For a politically ambitious Democrat like Harris, being exposed on the national scale as a running mate could hurt her chances at a later run for the White House, Brown cautioned in his op-ed.
“Best of all, being attorney general would give Harris enough distance from the White House to still be a viable candidate for the top slot in 2024 or 2028, no matter what the state of the nation,” Brown wrote.
The Associated Press contributed to this article