Nate Silver Declares Harris ‘Blew’ a ‘Big Opportunity’ By Not Making Josh Shapiro Her Running Mate

(AP Photo/Jacquelyn Martin)

Elections analyst Nate Silver declared that Vice President and Democratic presidential nominee Kamala Harris “blew” a “big opportunity” by not picking Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro to be her running mate on Sunday.

Harris ultimately opted for Minnesota Governor Tim Walz , who has governed as a progressive in the Gopher State over Shapiro, who was widely seen as the more moderate pick.

In a blog post about a New York Times /Siena College poll showing that Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump has a small lead over Harris nationally, Silver argued that Harris’s “articulation of highly progressive positions” during the 2020 Democratic presidential primary could come back to bite her given that they “have become a talking point for the Trump campaign and one where the facts are mostly on their side.”

“Harris has flip-flopped on some of these positions, like on Medicare for All and decriminalizing border crossings,” wrote Silver, but “the flip-flopping may explain why Harris has been weirdly reluctant to do media hits or articulate policy specifics.”

“This strategy may have worked well enough when she was riding high off the vibes of the Democrats’ candidate swap, but it’s causing her more problems now,” he submitted before citing the Times /Siena survey’s finding that 47% of likely voters think Harris is “too liberal/progressive.”

Silver continued :

Still, Harris is limited by her own past progressive policy positions. So the strategic aim is probably to fight this liberal/conservative question to a draw, and then win on having considerably more favorable personal attributes than Trump. She is a more talented politician than she showed in 2019, and it’s shame that her campaign that year was run by people who seemingly thought Elizabeth Warren was a right-winger.

But Harris also blew one big opportunity to tack to the center with her selection of Tim Walz rather than Josh Shapiro: that a tiny minority of progressives objected to Shapiro was an argument in Shapiro’s favor, if anything. I think Walz was a decent enough pick on his own merits, but given an opportunity to offer a tangible signal of the direction her presidency was headed, she reverted to 2019 mode.

In early August, Silver wrote that Harris would be wise to pick Shapiro, in no small part because Pennsylvania is considered the state most likely to decide the election.