Within the Margin

Campaigns do not rise and fall on VP selections. But if people are going to talk about it, please don’t talk about it nonsensically. One example? The obligatory “analysis” that “anyone Warren excites is already voting for Biden.” I have news for you: anyone “excited” by any VP pick in May, or July when the announcement is expected, or frankly September is already voting for Biden.  The argument for a VP pick who excites the progressive wing of the party is not to get them to show up to vote; it’s to get them to put in the work to get the guy (and his running mate) elected. That includes the door knocks (well, maybe less this year), the phonebanking, the texting, the small donations, the conversations with friends and family.  A lot of those folks will do the work regardless, but these things are won on the margins. That includes the margin between whether someone puts in zero volunteer shifts or one volunteer shift or twenty volunteer shifts. It includes the margin between whether someone chips in $10 zero times, once, or a bunch of times between now and November.

There is no one person who checks every box from an election-winning perspective, and we can debate at length whether the best choice would be geared toward a given ethnic or ideological cohort. I’m fairly agnostic on the topic. But it’s lazy to dismiss a nod toward progressives as securing votes that are already locked in: if Biden goes that route, it’s because he’s trying to marshal their energy for the actual work of campaigning, which means much more than just voting: it means a whole lot of voter contact with people for whom the parlor game of strategizing a vice presidential pick is much less scintillating than changing the limiting factors in their day to day life.