An underappreciated benefit of Kamala D. Harris becoming the de facto Democratic presidential nominee is the opening it creates for the vice-presidential slot. The candidate tryouts for the role show Democrats are blessed with a lot of talent.
The names on the widely circulated lists make sense to me, and many of the governors in their ranks are people I interviewed and wrote about last year. See my columns on Govs. Andy Beshear of Kentucky, Josh Shapiro of Pennsylvania, Tim Walz of Minnesota and Gretchen Whitmer of Michigan.
They each give off different vibes but are all practical progressives intent on reaching new constituencies. They don’t think winning over some of Donald Trump’s voters means selling out Black, Latino or younger progressive voters. It’s the right way for coalition-builders to think.
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“You’ve got to show up everywhere, and you’ve got to speak to everyone, and you’ve got to speak in plain language and in practical terms,” Shapiro told me last August. “I went to counties the Democrats had written off a long time ago and spoke about workforce development and spoke about how we’re going to bring back the economy and talked about it in very tangible, practical ways.”
Follow this authorE.J. Dionne Jr.'s opinionsHis emphasis on opportunities for those without college degrees might be seen as a bow to the White working class, but, as I wrote, the actual working class is heavily Black and Latino.
Whitmer pitched a comparably big tent last year, too. “There are a lot of similarities between poor inner cities and small towns and rural parts” of her state, she told me. “A feeling that they’re just a number or they don’t matter or they’re not on anyone’s radar.” Her word of advice to those in her business: “Listen.”
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Yes, being a governor means accentuating the practical, but it can also mean being visionary. Walz, whom I interviewed in June of last year, spoke to me about the avalanche of progressive legislation — “the Minnesota Miracle” — passed with just a two-vote Democratic majority in the state House and one-vote advantage in the state Senate.
Walz and Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg may be the biggest winners in the audition period for their contributions to Democratic messaging. One of Walz’s gifts: His skill at pushing back hard against labels such as “big government liberal.” He’s been at this for a while. “There’s nothing extreme about feeding kids,” he told me. “There’s nothing extreme about women making their own health-care decisions. There’s nothing extreme about saying don’t demonize these trans children. Just make a place for them. We’ll all be okay.”
Meanwhile, Beshear, whom I spoke to just before his reelection last November, showed, as I wrote then, how his party’s brand “can be detoxified on hostile terrain with a focus on jobs, education and health care — and by intensely personal campaigns that encourage voters to forget culture wars and partisan loyalties.”
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Beshear was also very open about a Christian faith grounded in ideas quite different from those of the right. “For me, faith is about uniting all people,” he told me. “It says all children are children of God. And if you’re truly living out your faith, you’re not playing into these anger and hatred games.” It would be nice to hear more preaching like that.
My explorations brought home to me that Democrats outside of Washington have been thinking hard about how to escape the snares, limitations and divisions of Trump-era politics. It’s promising how focused they are on Americans who have felt left out — and bracing that a new generation is now getting its shot.
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