Michael LaRosa (a former special assistant to President Biden and a former press secretary for Jill Biden) writes in the NYT: The Trump Running Mate Who Threatens the Blue Wall.
That running mate?
Marco Rubio.
The argument?
Pennsylvania has been political ground zero in presidential elections for nearly a quarter-century, and 2024 will be no different. Joe Biden carried his birth state by almost 82,000 votes in 2020, and will need to win it again this year.
As a native Pennsylvanian, I have confidence that he can. But my confidence can be shaken. There is one person on Donald Trump’s reported shortlist of running mates who has the ability to carve a Pennsylvania-shaped slice out of the so-called blue wall of rust belt states that Democratic presidential candidates typically need to win: Senator Marco Rubio of Florida.
[…]
there is something Latino voters have in common: their Latin American roots and the pride that comes from casting a vote for someone who looks and talks like them. Mr. Rubio would break a significant cultural barrier as the first Latino on a national ticket. We’ve seen how that feeling of cultural and identity pride can marshal voters and transcend ideological and partisan preferences, and it should never be underestimated.
Look, I understand the notion that in a race that is tight nationally and in states like Pennsylvania every little thing could matter. So in the sense that there are hundreds of variables that could affect a razor-thin result in Pennsylvania (Biden won, as noted above, in 2020 by roughly 80,000 votes), could Rubio make the difference for some voters?
Maybe. But, I am not buying it.
First, it is evergreen for someone (usually multiple someones) to write columns every four years about how choice X or Y will push a ticket over the top.* Not only are these people often not the ones who are chosen, but when they are chosen they rarely deliver what the given columnist promises.
There is just no evidence that vice presidential selection affects electoral outcomes. I am open to an argument that LBJ helped JFK in 1960 more than most, but that was an era in which the tickets were true attempts at intra-party coalition building and, more importantly for this issue, an era in which local machine-based politics was effective, and LBJ had a lot of capacity in parts of rural Texas. Even in that case, it is overly reductive in my view to say that LBJ was the decisive variable (if anything, because JFK would have won the EC without Texas).
Regardless, I see no actual evidence in the La Rosa piece that having Rubio on the ticket would produce the results that he claims it would (which is the basic case for these kinds of columns).
*And to be somewhat self-aware, it is probably evergreen for me to complain about these columns. If only we could harness the energy of the point/counter-point of it all!
