Each Friday, I look at what the presidential contenders are saying about foreign policy. This Week: Who Kamala Harris chooses as her running mate could tip the outcome of the presidential race.
OK. That is a clickbait headline.
I have no idea who Vice President Kamala Haris will select as her running mate. Like anyone who has been following the news or scrolling twitter, I know her pick is likely to come from a pool of six men: Governor Andy Beshear of Kentucky, Secretary of Transportation Pete Buttigieg, Senator Mark Kelly of Arizona, Governor J.B. Pritzker of Illinois, Governor Josh Shapiro of Pennsylvania, and Governor Tim Walz of Minnesota.
Governor Shapiro looks to be the favorite. Harris starts a tour of the battleground states next Tuesday in Philadelphia. That is an ideal launching point if your running mate is a native Pennsylvanian. But that scheduling may just be a coincidence, a reflection of the fact that the Harris (née Biden) campaign is based in neighboring Delaware or that Pennsylvania has the most Electoral College votes of any battleground state.
The Water's EdgeWhatever the reasoning for the Philadelphia launch, we will know Harris’s pick soon enough. So the more interesting question is, how much of a difference will it make? The answer lies somewhere between not much and everything.
Former President Donald Trump made the case for the “not much” answer at his heavily (and rightly criticized) appearance this week before the National Association of Black Journalists. When asked to vouch for his running mate J.D. Vance, he responded:
I will say this—and I think this is well-documented—historically, the vice president, in terms of the election, does not have any impact—I mean, virtually no impact. You have two or three days where there’s a lot of commotion as to who—like you’re having it on the Democrat side, who it’s going to be. And then that dies down, and it’s all about the presidential pick. Virtually never has it mattered.
That answer probably didn’t help Senator Vance’s self-esteem, but it accurately captures what the political science literature tells us. Vice presidential picks generally don’t determine the outcome of presidential races. Voters focus on the top of the ticket and not the bottom of it.
That said, the words “generally” and “not much” carry a lot of weight in that summary of what we know. Vice presidential picks can clearly damage a campaign. George McGovern’s 1972 campaign never recovered after he named fellow Senator Thomas Eagleton of Missouri as his running mate. Once news reports broke that Eagleton had been treated for depression with electroshock therapy, he was off the ticket. John McCain’s selection of Sarah Palin is often held up as another example of a vice-presidential pick that hurt more than it helped. Some Trump supporters are already worrying that the choice of Vance could go down as another vice-presidential misfire.
Harris certainly hopes her pick for running mate will have Democrats cheering rather than complaining. But even if the choice of running mate only moves the needle slightly, that could make all the difference in a nation as deeply divided as the United States is today. John Kennedy’s decision in 1960 to ask Lyndon Johnson to join his ticket is likely why Kennedy took the oath of office on January 20, 1961, instead of Richard Nixon. The same could be true today. Just four years ago, a shift of just 43,000 popular votes in the right three states would have given the election to Trump, even though he received four million fewer popular votes than Joe Biden. A running mate who helps Harris pick up votes in swing states could be the difference between victory and defeat.
So a lot is riding on the choice Harris makes.
Campaign Update
The Trump campaign this week launched its first ad attacking Harris. Not surprisingly, it is unsparing in its depiction of a vice president it calls: “Failed. Weak. Dangerously liberal.”
Harris was out this week with her own ad, “Fearless.” It’s a partly biographical video that stresses that she is fighting for her fellow Americans. She decries Trump for wanting to “take our country backward” and vows that “we are not going back.”
Artificial intelligence (AI) has so far been the dog that hasn’t barked in 2024 campaign. It’s the first one since AI burst into the national consciousness. Experts have worried that the ease of making deepfake audios and videos will derail democratic politics. But other than spoofed phone messages in the New Hampshire primary using Joe Biden’s voice, AI hasn’t made much appearance on the campaign trail. That may be changing. Elon Musk earlier this week shared a video on X that used AI to mimic Harris saying things she never said.
The individual who created the video labeled it a parody, which gives it broad First Amendment protections. It’s unknown, however, how many people who watched the video understood it was a parody, if that is what it really was.
Paul Dans, the head of Project 2025 at the Heritage Foundation stepped down this week in the wake of Trump’s repeated criticisms of the project. Project 2025 has been billed as a blueprint for a next Republican administration. Democrats have been quick to attack the project’s report, which contains numerous proposals that poll poorly with the American public. Despite endorsing the project two years ago, Trump now says that “many of the points [in the project report] are absolutely ridiculous” and that he has “nothing to do with” the project.
What the Candidates Are Saying
Trump spent much of the week attacking Harris in personal terms. In an interview with Laura Ingram released on Tuesday night, Trump said that Harris would be “a play-toy” for other world leaders who would “walk all over her.”
He declined to say why he thought Harris couldn’t hold her own on the world stage. Instead, he turned to the camera and said: “I don’t want to say as to why. But a lot of people understand it.” That seems to be the definition of a political dog whistle.
Trump also kept up his attacks on Harris for being anti-Israel. He told a radio interviewer on Wednesday that Harris “dislikes Jewish people and Israel more than Biden did.” Trump went on to agree with the interviewer that Harris’s spouse, Doug Emhoff, who is Jewish, is “a crappy Jew, a horrible Jew.”
Trump made even bigger news in his appearance at the National Association of Black Journalists national convention in Chicago later on Wednesday. There he falsely insisted that Harris had not always identified as Black:
She was always of Indian heritage, and she was only promoting Indian heritage. I didn’t know she was Black until a number of years ago when she happened to turn Black and now, she wants to be known as Black. So I don’t know, is she Indian or is she Black?
It’s unclear why Trump doesn’t grasp that Harris might identify as being both Black and being of Indian descent. Roughly 10 percent of the U.S. population is multiracial. That number will continue to grow in the future.
All these personal attacks on Harris overshadowed what in any other week would have been Trump’s most noteworthy remarks, namely, his pitch to a conservative Christian group that they “won’t have to vote anymore” if they helped elect him in November. Some democrats jumped on the remark as further evidence that Trump poses an existential threat to American democracy. Others argued that he was simply acknowledging that he wouldn’t be on the 2028 ticket and didn’t care how people voted then. People in the former group weren’t reassured by Trump’s subsequent interview with Ingraham. She gave him several chances to address the fear that he intended to do away with elections. He declined to give her the reassurance she was searching for.
Trump continues to waffle on whether he will debate Harris. He said on Monday that he would "probably" debate Harris, but "can also make a case for not doing it." Harris has been quick to accuse him of being afraid to debate her. She threw down the gauntlet at a rally in Atlanta, telling Trump that if he had “something to say, say it to my face.”
Yes, you can already buy “Say It to My Face” t-shirts online.
What the Pundits Are Saying
Trying to predict what a candidate will do once in office is a bit of mug’s game. They can go from calling Chinese leaders the “butchers of Beijing” on the campaign trail to lobbying Congress to provide China with favorable trade terms. But scoping out a candidate’s likely foreign policy choices is catnip for experts and journalists nonetheless, as Foreign Policy’s recent deep dive into Harris’s record attests. As FP’s editors note, “pinpointing the distinctions between U.S. President Joe Biden’s foreign-policy views and Harris’s is no easy task, given that the two have sought to present themselves as being in total lockstep on foreign-policy and national security issues for nearly four years.”
A team of writers at NBC News weighed in with their assessment of Harris’s approach to foreign policy. They concluded that “Harris’ lack of a clear record on foreign policy issues—and no definitive doctrine—is a marked difference” from both Biden and Trump, “and potentially opens a front in the battle over voters’ national security concerns in the 2024 campaign.” Then again, with foreign policy ranking low on the list of voters’ priorities, questions about how Harris will lead the United States abroad may not change any votes.
The Washington Post’s Michael Birnbaum and Missy Ryan also wrote about Harris’s foreign policy vision. They report that “aides say the core of her foreign policy would not likely swerve from Biden’s robust support for Ukraine, which remains at war with Russia, and his hard line on China as it seeks to displace the United States as the world’s leading superpower. On Gaza—the most divisive global issue among Democrats—Harris has carved out a distinct rhetorical lane, voicing sharp criticism of Palestinian suffering even while continuing to back strong military support for Israel.”
Another popular line of stories every presidential election year is who will follow the winning candidate into the administration. Axios’ Mike Allen and Jim VandeHei this week explored who might join Trump’s national security team should he return to the White House. They have Governor Doug Burgum of North Dakota, Senator Tom Cotton of Arkansas, Senator Bill Hagerty of Tennessee, and Senator Marco Rubio as leading contenders for secretary of state.
What the Polls Show
Recent polls have confirmed what seemed apparent in the wake of Biden’s decision to abandon his presidential bid: the 2024 race is once again a dead heat. A Bloomberg News/Morning Consult poll out this week shows that the lead Trump had built in battleground states has evaporated among registered voters. The poll has Harris leading Trump in Arizona, Michigan, Nevada, and Wisconsin, while Trump is leading in North Carolina and Pennsylvania, and the two are tied in Georgia. The results are all within the poll’s margin of error, and polling of registered voters doesn’t necessarily align with polling of likely voters.
A separate poll conducted by the Republican polling outfit Public Opinion Strategies found similarly tight races in the five battleground states it surveyed, though its specific findings differed from the Bloomberg News/Morning Consult poll. Public Opinion Strategies had Harris leading Trump in Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin, with Trump leading in Arizona and Nevada, and the two tied in Michigan. The results for Arizona and Pennsylvania were outside the poll’s margin of error. Lots of factors can explain why polls asking the same question generate different results, with one being that Public Opinion Strategies polled likely voters. The differences between the two polls are a reminder that it’s best to look both at lots of polls and trends over time.
The Campaign Schedule
The Democratic National Convention opens in Chicago in seventeen days (August 19, 2024).
The second presidential debate is in thirty-nine days (September 10, 2024)
Donald Trump’s sentencing hearing on his New York felony convictions is in forty-seven days (September 18, 2024).
The first in-person absentee voting in the nation begins in Minnesota and South Dakota in forty-nine days (September 20, 2024).
Election Day is ninety-five days away.
Inauguration Day is 171 days away.
Shelby Sires assisted in the preparation of this post.
