Vance vs. Walz and the complicated business of vetting vice presidential candidates

Now that both presidential candidates have chosen their running mates it is hard to pick up a paper or turn on cable TV without someone speculating whether the choice of running mate will help or hurt the ticket. That’s because, in spite of the exhaustive and intrusive vetting of potential running mates that goes on before a presidential candidate makes a choice, things don’t always work out as planned and some vice presidential picks have gone wrong.

The latest pick that seems to have gone wrong is Donald Trump’s choice of Ohio Senator J.D. Vance as his running mate. In contrast, Vice President Kamala Harris’s pick of Minnesota Governor Tim Walz seems to have hit a home run.

What happened? A little background:

Ever since 1972, the “vetting process” for a running mate has developed into an exhaustive and highly intrusive look into a potential candidate’s past. Vetters (usually lawyers and accountants) review the candidate’s tax returns, record in office, writings, social media, their love lives past and present, and anything else that could cause a distraction and hurt the presidential candidate. Nonetheless, mistakes get made.

The biggest one, judging by the fact that the vice presidential candidate was pushed off the ticket, occurred in 1972 as a result of a last minute selection process. Senator George McGovern, the Democratic nominee for president, wasted time before choosing a running mate in hopes that Senator Ted Kennedy (D-Mass.) would add much needed luster to his campaign. When Kennedy finally said no, the convention was set to begin, and McGovern turned to Senator Tom Eagleton (D-Mo.). There was no time and no vetting; in fact, in those days the kind of extensive vetting vice presidential candidates endure now was nonexistent. Within days of the announcement, however, the rumors started to fly. And it turned out that Eagleton had been hospitalized for depression and given electro-shock treatments three times. This election was held in the middle of the Cold War when fear of nuclear war was real. Within three weeks, Eagleton resigned from the ticket—after many had concluded that it was too dangerous for someone who had a history of mental illness to have his finger on the (nuclear) button. He was replaced by Sargent Shriver, a Kennedy in-law and director of the Peace Corps, and the ticket went down to a big defeat.

Nowadays, vetters are not likely to miss a history of health problems or tax problems. But they still make mistakes. Consider the case of former Alaska Governor Sarah Palin who was chosen to be Senator John McCain’s (R-Ariz.) running mate in 2008. At first, she was a breath of fresh air—young, attractive, and with great populist lines such as “They say the difference between a hockey mom and a pitbull—lipstick.”

Her 2008 speech at the Republican Convention was electric and helped give the McCain-Palin ticket a convention “boost.” But as the fall campaign began, Palin gave one disastrous interview after another during which she showed an appalling ignorance of the issues around the presidency. The vetters had done a good job of discovering personal issues such as her daughter’s out-of-wedlock pregnancy, but they missed how poorly educated she was on the issues of the day. Political scientists from Stanford University and Duke Unviersity estimate that she cost McCain two percent of the vote and that the effect of the running mate on the ticket can change during the course of the campaign.

How did McCain’s staff miss Palin’s weaknesses as a candidate? For one, Palin was, like Eagleton, a late pick.  McCain’s first choice was former-Democrat-turned-Independent Senator Joe Lieberman (I-Conn.), but he faced huge resistance from Republican delegates who thought he was much too much of a Democrat. So, he ended up with Palin without knowing much about her.

And so, we come to today’s picks. A recent ABC/IPSOS poll showed that 42% had an unfavorable view of Vance compared to only 30% who had an unfavorable view of Walz.

Dislike of Vance has gotten so intense that some Republicans actually called for him to be replaced on the ticket—something that hasn’t happened since 1972 .

While I’m sure that Vance’s taxes got a thorough look, his past statements didn’t. Take for instance the now famous “cat ladies” statement from July of 2021.

“We’re effectively run in this country—via the Democrats, via our corporate oligarchs—by a bunch of childless cat ladies who are miserable at their own lives and the choices that they’ve made, and so they want to make the rest of the country miserable too.  You look at Kamala Harris, Pete Buttigieg, AOC, the entire future of the Democrats is controlled by people without children. And how does it make any sense that we’ve turned our country over to people who don’t really have a direct stake in it.”

When the statement was unearthed, a backlash occurred from all corners of the country, including even conservative women. It was especially damaging because in a recent Senate vote, Vance voted against a bill that would have guaranteed IVF treatment for women. Against the backdrop of that vote, Vance’s stance managed to infuriate not only the women who chose not to become mothers but the women who couldn’t conceive and had taken the costly and sometimes heartbreaking route of IVF.

It’s hard to say why Trump passed over other finalists for Vance. For instance, Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) had a great deal more national experience than Vance and came from a critical state. It’s also possible that they missed Vance’s statements but probably more likely that they were operating inside the MAGA opinion bubble and could not foresee the backlash. And it is also possible that they only cared about revving up the MAGA base.

Nonetheless, the cat ladies controversy opened up a window on a segment of the far right that Vance associated with—including ideas such as giving people with children more votes than people without.

As the controversy was raging, Kamala Harris was looking at candidates for her running mate.  On July 23, Walz went on MSNBC where, with one word, he seemed to have won the vice presidency: weird. As so often happens these days, his comments went viral. Here they are:

“These are weird people on the other side,” Walz said in an interview on MSNBC. “They want to take books away, they want to be in your exam room. That’s what it comes down to, and don’t get sugarcoating this: These are weird ideas.”

Walz’s ability to speak plainly was immediately applauded by the public as was his Midwestern dad, football coach background.

So there you have it—a vice presidential pick gone badly and a vice presidential pick that, so far at least, seems to have gone well. In a 2020 book by political scientists Christopher J. Devine and Kyle C. Kopko, they show that the vice-presidential pick has few direct effects on voters’ choices but that there are indirect effects, ones that affect the voters’ perceptions of the presidential candidate.¹ This may be one reason why a recent New Yorker magazine cover  shows the four candidates on a roller coaster with Trump and Vance headed down and Harris and Walz headed up. But as John McCain and Sarah Palin found out, things can change quickly—it has already been a roller coaster kind of a year.