Advertisement

A Cautionary Song

One thing to note about the Biden pick, is that all the prognostication about the implications of this for the campaign are almost certainly wrong. In practice, VP choices — despite the fact that they’re sometimes hugely consequential after the election (LBJ, Dick Cheney) — rarely impact the election and there’s little reason to believe that either presidential campaign will substantially alter its approach to bring it into closer accord with the strict logic of the choice:

By contrast with VP choices, which rarely matter politically but sometimes matter substantively, the national conventions coming up over the past two weeks are undeniably silly affairs but the best evidence available suggests that they are among the relatively small number of “campaign events” that can be clearly shown to influence election outcomes.

Advertisement