Did Walz Cost Harris the Election?

In hindsight, Kamala Harris’s crushing loss to Donald Trump seems overdetermined. The Biden/Harris administration’s poor record and Kamala’s lack of political ability were more than enough to account for the outcome.

But the New York Post is reporting on an exit poll that suggests that Harris would have run better with Jewish voters in Pennsylvania if she had stuck with her original decision to select Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro as her running mate:

Vice President Kamala Harris’ first major campaign decision — selecting Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz over Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro as her running mate — backfired big-time with Jewish voters, an exit poll exclusively obtained by The Post reveals.

The Harris-Walz ticket won Pennsylvania Jewish voters by seven percentage points, 48%-41%, over the GOP ticket of Donald Trump and JD Vance, according to the survey conducted by the Honan Strategy Group for the Teach Coalition, an affiliate of the Jewish Orthodox Union.

However, 53% of Jewish voters said they would have pulled the lever for the veep if Shapiro was her No. 2, while support for Trump-Vance would have dropped to 38%.

If that exit poll is correct, passing over Shapiro, in response to a campaign by the Democrats’ anti-Semitic wing, caused Harris to win the Jewish vote by seven points rather than 15 points. But Trump carried Pennsylvania by around 145,000 votes. There apparently are approximately 300,000 Jews of voting age in Pennsylvania. Presumably a large majority of them, but not all, vote. Eight percent of those votes can’t be more than about 24,000. Adding those votes to Harris’s total would not have made the race materially closer.

Of course, Shapiro as the veep nominee would have attracted more gentile votes in Pennsylvania, too. Harris lost Pennsylvania by 2.1%; would Shapiro have closed that gap? We will never know, but the conventional wisdom that vice presidential candidates don’t move many votes probably applies.

Harris’s decision to replace #GenocideJosh, as liberals on Twitter called Shapiro, with Tim Walz was a calculated risk. Harris hoped to hang on to Pennsylvania, while also carrying Michigan. Her ability to carry Michigan was threatened by Muslim voters, unhappy with the Biden administration’s support for Israel. Dumping Shapiro was an effort to palliate those Michigan Muslims (as well as anti-Semites on the party’s left wing).

But it didn’t work. Even though Trump is more pro-Israel than Joe Biden, and massively more pro-Israel than Kamala Harris, he ran strongly in Michigan’s Muslim precincts. That is how it goes when you are an incumbent.

So Kamala’s gamble failed, and she lost both Pennsylvania and Michigan.

In addition to all of that, of course, we have Walz’s performance as a vice presidential nominee, which was abysmal. His debate showing against JD Vance was arguably the worst such performance in the history of televised presidential and vice presidential debates, and Walz was quickly relegated to a series of second- and third-tier appearances.

Shapiro certainly would have been less embarrassing, but is there a state where a better VP showing would have swung the balance? Almost certainly not. That just isn’t how voters see presidential elections.

So it is interesting to have confirmation that Governor Shapiro could have brought more Jewish votes to Harris in Pennsylvania, and no doubt more Pennsylvania voters in other demographics, as well. But it wasn’t the veep decision, or Tim Walz’s poor performance, that doomed Kamala Harris’s campaign. Her own ineptitude was more than sufficient to the task.

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