What Harris’ VP Pick Will Say About the Campaign She Is About to Run (2025)

It has been nearly five years since we last knew what Vice President Kamala Harris thinks. But we didn’t really know then, either.

Harris withdrew from the 2020 Democratic presidential primary at the beginning of December 2019. Her campaign, despite showing early promise with her launch and a subsequent blistering performance in the first presidential debate, was a disappointment. She never seemed comfortable deciding who she wanted to be. She pursued the left by supporting Medicare for All, though not really. She roasted then-candidate Joe Biden in that first debate over his decades-old position on busing, then clarified she had no interest in busing, either. Whether she ran on her experience as a prosecutor or not depended on the week, and the audience. The cumulative effect of this regular shape-shifting was to leave her without a base of support with which to continue her campaign.

Harris’ campaign wasn’t a complete flop, though. Had it been, she wouldn’t be finding herself as the Democrats’ presumptive nominee for president, addressing rapturous, packed crowds, in the very next election cycle. While Harris couldn’t find a passageway to the nomination—or even the beginning stages of primary voting—she didn’t disqualify herself with any faction of the party. That broad acceptance within the party, and the fact that she’d been put through the rigors of a campaign, made her the consensus choice for Biden’s running mate months later.

As soon as she took pole position in that veepstakes race, though, it was effectively the last time we heard from her. Sure, we’ve heard a lot from the vice president in the years since. But the vice president’s job is to support the president. And given the peculiar nature of the race this year, there was no lengthy primary season for Harris to develop her own positions, or share her own way of thinking, to vet with the public.

It’s not hard to imagine where she lands on policy at this late stage in the game: grasping with both hands for the prevailing mainstream Democratic position. What’s less clear is how she thinks of herself as a candidate, and what her political instincts will be in a national, general election, with a handful of narrow races to win in states ranging in geography, demography, and personality, from the Sun Belt to the Midwest to the Northeast. What frightens her more? Risking irritating the left, or another element of the Democratic coalition whom she’ll need to turn out? Or turning off the center, who she’ll need to persuade?

Her abbreviated search for a running mate, set to reach a verdict any day now, will offer the first substantive look at how she navigates competing political pressures since her 2020 presidential bid. She has a strong shortlist, tapping into the deep Democratic bench awaiting its time once the page turns on the Biden-Harris era.

But even in the week-plus or so since that list’s genesis, fault lines have emerged.

The list was never going to produce leftists’ dream candidate. The Republican strategy against Harris is to frame her as “dangerously liberal” and infuse the discourse with dog whistles about her race and gender. To balance the ticket, then, Harris is looking at white men from the party’s mainstream.

Among the options, it’s Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz who seems to have best captured progressives’ attention. Of all the candidates under consideration, Walz is the newest candidate to the national conversation, having made a slew of heavily shared cable news and podcast hits over the past week. A clear and forceful speaker, Walz’s greatest contribution to the ongoing political discourse has been his popularization of “weird” as a Democratic descriptor for MAGA Republicans, turning the word into something meatier than a meme, though not quite a message.

Progressives see Walz—a veteran, a former social studies teacher, and a football coach who spent a dozen years representing a swing district in the House before his election as governor in 2018—as proof that Democrats can have their cake and eat it, too. Since his reelection, Walz and the Democratic Legislature spent capital to pass a flurry of progressive legislation on everything from trans rights to family and medical leave to abortion rights and beyond, and Walz has remained popular on the other end of it. While progressives might see more as time goes on about Walz’s record, particularly as a swing-district member of Congress, and notice some complications, he stands as the running mate option most closely aligned with their view. Washington Rep. Pramila Jayapal, the chair of the Congressional Progressive Caucus, is in his corner.

Another pick who excites progressives is Kentucky Gov. Andy Beshear, just a year after winning a second term in a red state by hammering Republicans on, among other things, abortion. I’m giving him a bit of short shrift here, in part because he’s reportedly not among the top three finalists, according to a Bloomberg report that could be completely wrong. But a Tuesday letter to Harris from state-level progressive Democratic leaders across the country recommended Walz and Beshear as “persuasive advocates for core Democratic values” who “will energize voters across America without marginalizing any of the communities that we must engage in order to win the electoral college.”

The authors of that same letter advocated directly against another candidate. While observing that Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro is “a valued member of the Democratic coalition,” they argued that he “will be an unnecessary obstacle to grassroots organizing, fundraising, and excitement.”

Shapiro is the popular Democratic governor of the most important swing state in the presidential race. If Harris found a way to win Nevada, Arizona, Wisconsin, and Michigan but lost Pennsylvania, she’d lose the presidential race. She’ll be doing her first stop with her running mate next week in Philadelphia, not necessarily to announce Shapiro, but to assert Pennsylvania’s primacy in the election. Another way to assert that primacy, of course, would be to pick Shapiro.

But the prospect of Shapiro has generated the most intraparty howls coming from members of the coalition. His defense of Israel as both attorney general and governor has been controversial among progressives amid the war in Gaza. (It’s worth noting that Shapiro’s views on the war, domestic protests, and “one of the worst leaders of all time” in Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu have been shaded in gray more than the discourse may acknowledge.) His support for private-school vouchers runs afoul of teachers unions. And while Shapiro doesn’t let the natural gas industry operate without regulation, he’s supported fracking within his state. Harris, who in 2019 called to “ban fracking,” could use Shapiro as a human reinforcement of her renunciation of that position.

The gripes with Sen. Mark Kelly of Arizona—another swing state coming back into view following Biden’s replacement atop the ticket—are of a similar nature to those over Shapiro, albeit with different issues. Kelly, another top VP contender, only announced his support for the PRO Act, organized labor’s top legislative priority, when his name entered the vice presidential mix. And he’s often been at odds with the Biden administration over its border policies.

The choice for Harris, then, is less about which person—though a proper vetting is important!—than about which tactic. What do her instincts tell her to do? Choose someone who would do the least to ruffle the sudden Democratic unity around her candidacy? Or choose someone who would pique a coalitional interest, but could neutralize some of Republicans’ strongest attacks against her?

We’ve had some small signals here or there since Harris was released last week from her carbon-frozen state in service of President Biden. She didn’t sit for Netanyahu’s speech to a joint address of Congress, but did meet with him the following day, and issued a sharp statement condemning the protestors outside of D.C.’s Union Station. She’s flipped on just about all of her more left-wing positions from the 2020 primary with little explanation. She’s fully embraced her prosecutorial background as a frame for her candidacy. One of her first ads squarely takes on one of Democrats’ worst issues, the border, by noting that Harris supported the bill to hire more Border Patrol guards. When we last saw Harris in her own campaign in 2019, she was attempting to negotiate the demands between the left and the center-left. She’s reemerged in a new context altogether.

Usually by the time a presidential nominee selects a running mate, we have a good sense of their thinking: It’s been on display for the previous 18 months or so of campaigning. That Harris has to decide this at the same time that she is, effectively, introducing herself to the country makes the decision itself central to how she defines herself. So welcome back to the fold, Vice President Harris. What’s been on your mind?