As Hillary Clinton considers running mate options over the next week or so, I have some unconventional advice for her: Don’t make any electoral considerations.
Pick someone you want to work with for four to eight years. Someone you don’t mind having by your side in important moments. Make it someone you won’t mind taking the reins of power should you resign, retire or otherwise have to step down. After all, research shows vice presidential nominees don’t really help the electoral chances of the ticket.
“The vice presidential home state advantage is, essentially, zero,” political science professors Kyle Kopko and Chistopher Devine wrote in Politico in April. They found a few exceptions where vice presidential nominees who served their states for decades were able to help slightly, but only if the state was small, like Deleware, where Joe Biden served as a U.S. senator for 36 years.
(Interestingly, their research found that if Al Gore had picked Jeanne Shaheen of New Hampshire in 2000 instead of Joe Lieberman, he probably would have won New Hampshire by a narrow margin, which would have won Gore the election. But that’s the only case where they saw any possibility of a possible vice presidential nominee having a decisive effect.)
So, Mrs. Clinton: Picking Sen. Tim Kaine isn’t going to help you in Virginia, and picking Sen. Sherrod Brown won’t help you in Ohio. Picking Bernie Sanders would help you in Vermont, but you probably already have those three electoral votes in the bag.
What about demographics? Walter Mondale picked Geraldine Ferraro in 1984, and then lost the female vote by 16 points. John McCain and Sarah Palin lost women by 13 points.
So, Mrs. Clinton: Picking Sen. Cory Booker probably won’t help you win over more men or African Americans, and picking Secretary Julian Castro probably won’t help you win more men or Hispanics. Besides, you’re running against Donald Trump. Do you really need any help with minorities?
You’re probably going to win the election anyway. Both betting odds and the FiveThirtyEight election forecast give you nearly a 75 percent chance of winning the election. The RealClearPolitics polling average gives you a 4.3 percentage point lead nationally. You’re winning or within the margin of error in six battleground states, like Colorado, Florida and Pennsylvania.
Besides, what if your vice president actually becomes president one day? Would you really want to know you helped that person into office because of how it (supposedly) served your own electoral self-interest, or because he or she was the most qualified person for the job? (On second thought, don’t answer that.)
“It would be a shame if one of the primary considerations used to select a running mate in the United States continued to be a politician’s address, up there with executive experience or policy expertise,” Kopko and Devine write, “especially now that the evidence is in that, in nearly every case, the ‘home-state’ strategy doesn’t even work.”
Jason Russell is a commentary writer for the Washington Examiner.
