Reports are suggesting that Kamala Harris may have ruled out all but one of the Ohio-bordering potential vice-presidential candidates for the Democratic ticket; of them, only Pennsylvania governor Josh Shapiro appears to remain in contention. But an additional name has emerged as a favorite: Arizona senator Mark Kelly.
Kelly could bring some obvious advantages to a Harris ticket. Purple Arizona is one of the five states that switched from voting for Donald Trump in 2016 to voting for Joe Biden in 2020. Kelly is not only from the state but has also won two Senate elections there. He has a reputation, albeit undeserved, as a moderate, as well as an appealing background (naval aviator, astronaut, husband of former congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords). Kelly might, in theory, help the Democratic ticket put back in play the Sunbelt states (including Nevada) in which polling suggests Biden had been faring worse than he had been in the Rust Belt states.
There is another potential asset Kelly could bring to a Democratic ticket. In 2022, he ran for Senate against Blake Masters. Masters, like Trump vice-presidential pick J. D. Vance, is a protégé of tech billionaire Peter Thiel. Vance and Masters are friendly: They have spoken highly of each other, are ideologically aligned, and even co-authored an article during their respective Senate campaigns. (Masters is now running, with Vance’s endorsement, for an Arizona House seat; Trump has endorsed Abe Hamadeh, Masters’s opponent.)
Kelly defeated Masters handily, despite the latter’s high self-regard. Masters’s campaign demonstrated that he was a poor candidate. And Kelly had his number. Masters performed worse than any other statewide candidate running in Arizona in 2022 — including Hamadeh, who lost the race for attorney general by a few hundred votes. Putting Kelly up against another Thiel protégé might be an appealing prospect for the Democrats.
There are a few problems with this, however. One is that, though Vance may have underperformed statewide candidates in Ohio in 2022, he did win his race. He is clearly a superior political talent to Masters. More important: Kamala Harris is a superior political talent to . . . basically nobody. Harris did not even make it to Iowa when she ran for the Democratic presidential nomination. She last had a competitive election against a Republican in 2010. She is unpopular. She will have to sink or swim on her own merits. It is a fantasy that even a popular purple-state politico at the bottom of the ticket could make people forget that they would be voting for Kamala Harris.