With Eddie Haskell back in the news with his new House GOP budget, Steve Kornacki had a piece this morning about the history of those who were Veepstakes winners but general election losers. His conclusion: it doesn't really help them, and may even hurt them.
Ed Kilgore looks at the same examples and interprets it much more favorably for the VP losers.
I'm with Kilgore here. Take, for example, Bob Dole. Sure, he received terrible reviews for his debate performance and his 1980 presidential campaign was a dud. And, yes, his stints as Finance Chair and then GOP Senate Leader certainly helped him in his marathon quest for a GOP nomination. Still, it's hard to overall say that his career arc was damaged by 1976. It's not as if he would have had a better chance in 1980 if he wasn't on the ticket in 1976. And who knows; some of the contacts he made and the experience he earned in 1980 (and even 1976) may well have helped him be a viable candidate in 1988, and then eventually the nominee in 1996.
The easily overlooked point that I'll add to the discussion is that if Dole, John Edwards, and the rest of them hadn't been nominated...someone else would have been. Suppose, in 1976, Ford picks Paul Laxalt instead. Laxalt probably wouldn't have challenged Reagan in 1980, but it's easy to imagine the national exposure helping him emerge as the mainstream conservative alternative to Bush in 1988, no? At any rate, it surely would have elevated a potential Dole rival. The same would be true had John Kerry selected Joe Biden or Bill Richardson in 2004; if either of them had come even a little closer to the top tier in 2008, it might well have made it harder for Edwards to get as far as he did. And the same is true of the one that Kornacki leaves out, Ed Muskie. Like Edwards, he wound up as a serious candidate who fell far short; like Edwards, he probably was helped not only by being on the ticket, but by blocking some other politician with a similar profile getting the VP nomination instead of him.
The only real exception, I think, is the Gerry Ferraro one -- not because things didn't work out for her as a national politician, but because (as Kornacki points out) that if she had stayed in the House, she might well have wound up high in the leadership, and even Speaker. Giving up a safe seat in the House with a path to the leadership in order to run as VP (assuming you have to give it up, which depends on the state) really does have a major downside risk. For everyone else, however, winning Veepstakes is generally a good move.
Wednesday, March 13, 2013
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I don't think there's really much disagreement here. My point isn't that they were all damaged; it's that they mostly didn't get much out of it. That doesn't mean Dole didn't go on to be a power player in the Senate and ultimately claim the WH nod; just that he probably would have achieved the same without being Ford's pick in '76. The reaction from R's to his performance that year really did set him back politically, at least in the short term. Yes, he overcame it, but you could just as easily argue he would have been better off without running. And let's say Kerry picked Gephardt (his fallback option) in '04 instead of Edwards. Wouldn't have affected Edwards' '08 positioning at all -- and would have given him a jump start on the truth-telling outsider act he embraced after 11/04. I'm not saying it's always a bad thing to be a losing VP candidate, or that it can't be a good thing. Just that it mostly leaves pols where Ryan is now -- which is to say, pretty much where they were before they were picked in the first place.
ReplyDeleteHey hey, it's a TV celebrity! Personally I think if you look at "political success" outside of actually getting to the White House it doesn't really look so bad. Sure Lieberman imploded in 2004 but he got to live out his dream of being a shrill hawk who criticized the Democrats for the next eight years. That's not the career I would choose, but that career is more successful that 99.9% of people who run for office ever get. The thing here is that most people who run for President (and most people who get the VP nod have run for President) do so in their political prime, and since most fail they decline afterwards. That doesn't mean running or getting on the ticket is a bad choice, it's just the nature of the beast.
DeleteAlright, this is a real tangent, but I was taken a little aback by Kilgore's remark, "Gore would not have been in a position to get robbed in Florida had Lieberman not been on the ticket to vastly boost Democratic margins in South Florida." I'd like to see some evidence for that assertion. I know that nationally Gore didn't get any higher a share of the Jewish vote than Clinton did. I suppose you could argue that Gore would have done a lot worse among Jewish voters if not for Lieberman, but that's hard to prove one way or the other.
ReplyDeleteIt reminds me of 2008 when there were a couple of news stories about the head of Jews for Jesus speaking in Sarah Palin's church and saying offensive things about the Jewish victims of suicide bombers in Israel, which led Andrew Sullivan to remark that the Republicans "just lost Florida." It sounds like Kilgore might be falling prone to the same fallacy, thinking of Florida as a kind of big Jew-land simply because it's the only major swing state with a significant Jewish population. In fact, Jews make up only about 3% of Florida's populace--higher than their national share, but still far from overwhelming. And it's hardly clear that Lieberman had an effect on Jewish voters comparable to Obama's effect on African American voters, leading to higher turnout and increased support.
Of course, I realize that 2000 is an exceptional case, and that even a marginal effect on Jewish voters could have been enough to swing the entire election.
This is probably even more off-topic, but how much did Lieberman actually help Gore with Florida Jewish voters, I mean when the final votes were tallied?
DeleteIf memory serves, the 20,000 or so incongruous Gore votes that ended up for Pat Buchanan due to Teresa LaPore's awful Palm Beach County ballot would have been disproportionately Jewish voters. Applying 3% to 4 million voters leaves about 100,000 or so Jewish voters in Florida. So somewhere up to 20% of the Florida Jewish vote for Gore disappeared in Teresa LaPore's ballot.
I'm sure this doesn't matter, and its likely no one else cares, but when we say Lieberman "helped" Gore, do we mean net of the shocking Palm Beach county effect? It would seem that even King David himself on the ballot wouldn't create a 20% sequential increase, which may have been what was necessary to offset Teresa LaPore's stupidity.
" I know that nationally Gore didn't get any higher a share of the Jewish vote than Clinton did. I suppose you could argue that Gore would have done a lot worse among Jewish voters if not for Lieberman, but that's hard to prove one way or the other."
ReplyDeleteThe nation as a whole went from an 8.5 percentage point Democratic victory in the presidential popular vote in 1996 to a near-tie in 2000. There was no corresponding decline in Jewish support for the Democrats. It does not seem unreasonable to suggest that this was at least in part due to Lieberman's presence on the ticket.
It is true that the Jewish population of Florida as of 2011 was estimated to be only 3.4%. But in the first place this was probably higher in 2000 (partly because there was a large amount of Latino immigration to Florida in 2000-2008 which lowered the percentage of all non-Latino groups). Second, a higher percentage of Jews are eligible to vote than other groups, because a smaller percentage of them are under 18 or non-citizens. Third, even among eligible voters, Jewish turnout has historically been higher than with most other groups.
See http://www.jewishjournal.com/rosnersdomain/item/the_most_interesting_question_about_the_florida_jewish_vote_20120123 which quotes an article that said in 2012 "“The state’s nearly 640,000 Jews are just 3.4 percent of Florida’s population. But because they vote in extraordinarily high numbers, they are 6 to 8 percent of Florida’s turnout” I would imagine that the percentage was even higher in 2000, when African Americans were not as motivated to vote as they were in 2008 amd 2012.
The nation as a whole went from an 8.5 percentage point Democratic victory in the presidential popular vote in 1996 to a near-tie in 2000. There was no corresponding decline in Jewish support for the Democrats. It does not seem unreasonable to suggest that this was at least in part due to Lieberman's presence on the ticket.
DeleteOnly if you assume that the differences in a party's vote total from one election to the next has a uniform effect across all groups, including Jews. A quick glance at the Jewish vote in recent history casts doubt on that hypothesis:
Clinton, 1992: 80% of the Jewish vote, compared with 43-38% of the general populace
Clinton, 1996: 78%, compared with 49-41%
Gore, 2000: 79%, compared with 48-48%
Kerry, 2004: 76%, compared with 51-48%
Obama, 2008: 78%, compared with 53-46%
Obama, 2012: 69%, compared with 51-47%
Except for 2012, where there was a sharp (though hardly consequential) drop, the Jewish vote has remained fairly constant in recent history, hovering in the 75-80% range for the Democratic candidate. If there is any relationship between the marginal rises and falls in the Jewish vote and the Democrat's fortunes with the general electorate, I can't discern it.
I would imagine that the percentage was even higher in 2000, when African Americans were not as motivated to vote as they were in 2008 amd 2012.
According to this 2001 article citing official statistics, "Florida has a Jewish population of approximately 640,000, about 4.2 percent of the state's residents, who comprise close to 5 percent of the state's electorate." That's hardly nothing, but it's still an exaggeration to suggest that a candidate's fortunes in Florida depend on his courting the Jewish vote--especially since the Jewish vote is so constant. At best, only about 10% of this group--that would be 0.5% of 2000's Florida electorate--are in any way up for grabs. In an election like 2000, that could have mattered (and it probably did, in the Butterfly Ballot fiasco). But I still have yet to see any concrete evidence that Lieberman's presence on the ticket helped Gore in Florida (or anywhere else, for that matter).
I have a question: does the frequency with which Paul Ryan puts out a budget help the American people understand how flimsy the GOP position on balanced budgets are? By my count, he's put out two and sort of a third during the election in the last 3 years and after each one the response has gotten progressively less favorable. He's gone from being regarded in the press as a wonk to mimbo destroying medicare in a very short period of time.
ReplyDelete