| There is a long history of bad feelings between Joe Biden’s inner circle and Elizabeth Warren. |
| She accused Biden of protecting banks rather than ordinary families during debates over bankruptcy legislation in the 1990s. Later, Obama administration officials regularly bad-mouthed Warren for criticizing their response to the financial crisis. |
| And yet Warren has emerged as a serious candidate to be Biden’s vice president, as Adam Nagourney and Jonathan Martin explain. |
| To understand why, I think it helps to look at political history. As strange a pair as Biden and Warren might seem, they also might be the ticket that most closely matches successful previous tickets. |
| When pundits talk about the selection process, they often imagine that a vice-presidential nominee can excite voters from the same state or demographic group. But there is little evidence that’s true. |
| In 2016, Tim Kaine didn’t seem to help Hillary Clinton win more white men. In 2012, Paul Ryan didn’t help Mitt Romney win Wisconsin, and John Edwards didn’t win North Carolina in 2004 for John Kerry. |
| Only one strategy has a long track record of success: ticket balancing. Winning presidential candidates have often chosen running mates with obviously different political personas — who shore up weaknesses at the top of a ticket. |
| Consider: Donald Trump, a divorced reality-television star, chose a religious conservative. Barack Obama and George W. Bush, both worried about seeming inexperienced, chose party elders. Ronald Reagan, who was labeled a radical conservative, chose an establishment figure: George H.W. Bush. (Bush’s harsh earlier criticism of Reagan — for “voodoo economics” — is reminiscent of the Biden-Warren history, Adam Nagourney told me.) |
| Biden’s biggest weakness among the Democratic coalition is young, progressive voters. And many of them are Warren fans. Stan Greenberg, a top Democratic pollster who has pushed for Warren, recently told the Biden campaign that such voters were “dangerously not” united behind Biden. |
| Biden has multiple options for vice president (and in future newsletters, I’ll focus on others, like Kamala Harris and Amy Klobuchar). If anything, though, the candidate who seems most different from him may be the one who’s historically most typical. |
