All eyes have been on Vice President Kamala Harris ever since President Joe Biden’s poor performance during the first presidential debate in Atlanta. Recent surveys have shown that Harris polls better than Biden among key demographic groups like young people and people of color — and so it’s unsurprising that, when Biden officially announced he was dropping out the race on Sunday, he also endorsed Harris.
Harris now has the unenviable task of picking a running mate to go toe-to-toe with Trump’s newly-minted running mate, Senator JD Vance of Ohio.
A presidential nominee’s selection of a running mate signals what kind of campaign and administration they want. Biden’s selection of Harris back in 2019 signaled that he valued the Black voters who propelled him to the Democratic nomination for president and the suburban female voters who had joined the anti-Trump coalition. Trump’s selection of Vance shows he values someone who shares his ideology rather than someone who will grow the base.
As a Black and Indian woman, the reality is that Harris will likely need to pick a white male Democrat to assuage concerns from some blocs within the Democratic Party.
Here’s The Independent’s list of potential replacements who could fall out of a coconut tree and exist in the context of the campaign that came before them.
Roy Cooper
The Democratic Governor of North Carolina has three assets in his favor. For one, he’s known Harris since their days as attorneys general of North Carolina and California, respectively. The Independent spoke with Cooper earlier this year and he said that he always tells Harris how many times she has visited the Tar Heel state, a place Democrats want to win but have not figured out how to crack since Barack Obama did in 2008.
“She can obviously relate to women and what they are going through,” Cooper said. “And plus, she has been on the front lines of protecting women’s healthcare, both as attorney general, as a United States senator and now as vice president.”
Cooper can also say that he has run on a ticket with Donald Trump and won twice. He won in 2016 mostly in opposition to a bill that would have banned transgender people from using public restrooms aligned with their gender. In 2020, he won re-election thanks to his management of disasters in the state and management of the Covid-19 pandemic.
As governor, he’s battled and collaborated with the state legislature in equal measure; he vetoed the state legislature’s 12-week abortion ban — though the legislature quickly overrode it — but he also passed Medicaid expansion under Obamacare. As a term-limited governor, he also would not take a seat that could go to a Republican.
His downside is that at 67, he could likely be seen as a relic. And his years as an attorney general give Republicans a gold mine of opposition research.
Josh Shapiro
Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro has multiple plus factors. He’s a wildly popular governor of Pennsylvania, who enjoys the support of plenty of Republicans as well as Democrats. In 2022, he beat the ultra-MAGA Doug Mastriano, whom Trump had endorsed. Similarly, he’s received high marks for his handling of multiple crises, including the train derailment in East Palestine, Ohio, which borders Pennsylvania.
Similarly, when the I-95 bridge in Pennsylvania collapsed, Shapiro received praise for helping to orchestrate the quick reconstruction of the bridge.
A former attorney general, Shapiro has focused heavily on combating crime in Pennsylvania, which has at times rankled progressives in the way Harris’s record as a prosecutor has, but has also insulated him from the criticism that Democrats are soft on crime. Shapiro practices Conservative Judaism and has sought to tamp down demostrations on campuses that many Jewish people perceive as antisemitic. He also has another ace up his sleeve: when Trump sued Pennsylvania to challenge the 2020 election results, Shapiro beat him back in lawsuits, something he bragged about, saying, “By the way, the former president went 0 and 43. I went 43 and 0.”
But Shapiro remains incredibly new to politics, having only two years under his belt. He’s faced criticism for being too eager for the national spotlight. But his popularity in a swing state might help him.
Andy Beshear
The words “Democrat” and “Kentucky” — the home state of Mitch McConnell — are rarely used together anymore without the word “loses” in the middle. But Governor Andy Beshear is one of the rare exceptions to that rule.
JD Vance shot to fame when he wrote his book Hillbilly Elegy, which chronicled the plight of the white working class. But as governor, Beshear has pushed for investments in that community. He even had a photo op with Biden and McConnell at the Brent Spence Bridge as a result of the bipartisan infrastructure bill.
Beshear has also championed the CHIPS and Science Act and private investment in the state. That, combined with his support for abortion rights in deep-red Kentucky, propelled him to re-election last year.
At the same time, Beshear departing Kentucky would leave the state bereft of Democrats. And he only won in two off-year elections where turnout is low, which means it is unclear how well he would perform on the national stage.
Mark Kelly
Senator Mark Kelly often gets overshadowed by his more flamboyant counterpart from Arizona, Independent Senator Kyrsten Sinema. But Kelly has a record most Democrats could only dream of, being as he is both a Navy veteran and a former astronaut.
Kelly stepped into politics after his wife, former congresswoman Gabby Giffords, was shot in the head and was forced to retire in 2011. Since then, he’s become an outspoken advocate for ending gun violence.
In 2020, when Biden and Harris won Arizona, Kelly outpaced the top of the ticket in a special election to finish out the term of Senator John McCain. Two years later, he roundly beat ultra-MAGA candidate Blake Masters, who, like Vance, is a disciple of venture capitalist Peter Thiel.
Kelly is also a prolific fundraiser who would have little trouble bringing cash to the ticket.
Picking Kelly would signal that Democrats are serious about keeping the West in their column. A border-state Democrat, he could push back on criticisms from Republicans that Trump would be better at handling immigration. And as a veteran, he has taken up McCain’s mantle as an ardent defender of Ukraine, which would contrast with Vance’s opposition to supporting the country against Putin’s aggression.
But Kelly’s record in Arizona might be the exact reason Democrats want to keep him in the Senate.
Tim Walz
Like Kelly, Minnesota Governor Tim Walz is a veteran, albeit of the US Army. A former congressman, he represented a rural area of Minnnesota and won a district that Trump had won that same year.
He later ran for governor and shepherded the state during the unrest after the killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis. As governor, he’s focused heavily on protecting abortion rights and LGBTQ+ rights while also expanding free school meals to children regardless of their parents’ income.
A midwesterner, Walz could appeal to voters in important-to-win states like Michigan; indeed, he’s been a surrogate for the Democrats during the Republican National Convention in neighboring Wisconsin.
At the same time, serving as governor during Black Lives Matter protests could be used against him by Republicans running on a “tough on crime” platform.