Charles Lipson

When the sitting president is not running for reelection, the party typically turns to his vice president as the “natural” nominee. That’s true again this year, now that the Democratic Party powerbrokers forced Biden out of the race, fearing he would not only lose the White House but sink down-ballot Democrats alongside him. So, the party turned to his vice president to lead the ticket. That’s commonplace in the modern era, but it’s a relatively new development. It wasn’t true before the 1950s. That change raises three questions: 1. What was the earlier role of the vice president? 2. Why has that role changed? and 3. Why do those changes make it likely, though not certain, the VP will become the party’s next nominee?

America has a peculiar — indeed, unique — way of deciding national elections. Instead of a cumulative national vote, the president and vice president are determined by fifty separate state elections. The top ticket in each state (except Nebraska and Maine) receives all that state’s electoral votes, no matter how slim the margin of victory. Each state’s electoral votes are equal to its number of House members plus its senators. The winner needs 270 electoral votes.  What if, in this razor-thin election, both Donald Trump and Kamala Harris fall one vote short? Fortunately, that’s only a remote possibility, but it’s not impossible. It all depends on how some six or seven closely divided “swing states” split between the two candidates.

This Tuesday’s debate is the most consequential moment of the “second” campaign, just as Trump’s debate with Biden was the most consequential of the “first” campaign. Biden’s self-immolation ultimately forced his withdrawal. His withdrawal sets the stage for the current debate, and not just because it produced a new Democratic candidate. It produced her so quickly, with so little discussion or opposition, that Kamala Harris was not forced to persuade the party’s progressive voter base. A “primary” campaign would have damaged Harris, and the powers behind the Democratic throne, Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer, saved her from it. How would it have hurt her?

This is one very strange presidential campaign.  That’s not just because it seems to go on forever. This one seemed to begin shortly after Eisenhower left office. It’s also because there have been two general election campaigns in a row. The first pitted Donald Trump against Joe Biden and ended with Trump’s decisive victory. The clincher was Biden’s humiliating debate performance, which showed the world what his aides, his party and a compliant media had been hiding: the president was suffering serious cognitive decline.  Once voters had peeked behind the curtain, they were convinced Biden could not serve another four years. Indeed, it was questionable whether he was competent to serve now. That question still hovers, unanswered, over the White House.

If you felt the ground shaking, it was Democrats jumping for joy after dumping Joe Biden and settling on a new, more energetic replacement. Joe was the old clunker. Kamala has that new car smell. The switcheroo raises three fundamental questions for the election. First: how long will Harris’s novelty last? Answer: until Labor Day, but probably not longer. Second: how does Harris deal with the Biden administration’s policy failures? Answer: by emphasizing a hopeful future with few details and avoiding talking about her role in the administration’s mistakes. Third: how does Harris deal with her record of very progressive positions, on tape from her last presidential run?

On Thursday, Donald Trump and Kamala Harris agreed to debate September 10 on ABC. That’s good news for voters. They deserve to see and hear the two candidates contest the issues and explain their differences, unfiltered. The differences are dramatic. They need to be fleshed out, and they need pushback from the other side. In fact, voters deserve more than a single debate. They deserve two or three so the issues can be explored in depth, away from scripted speeches, advertising spin, and biased media coverage. The debates will be more valuable if they follow the model set by CNN’s Jake Tapper and Dana Bash, who moderated the face-off in Atlanta between Trump and Joe Biden, then the presumptive Democratic nominee.

The best way to understand Donald Trump’s choice of J.D. Vance for vice president is to ask how different choices would have helped with different problems. That Trump didn’t choose them tells us that Trump isn’t worried about those problems. He has different goals. If Donald Trump was deeply worried about winning swing states, he probably would have selected Glenn Youngkin. The popular Virginia governor would probably give him the most help with independents in those states. If Trump were worried about Evangelicals, he wouldn’t have passed over Doug Burgum because of his strong stance on early-term abortions.