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Notes -
Kamala's VP pick is in: Tim Walz, governor of Minnesota. Shapiro was apparently off the board because of some botched case from a decade ago. Although Walz is an unknown to most American voters, he conveys "midwestern good vibes" and seems like a pleasant enough white guy. Probably will be harder to go after than JD vance. Any minnesotans got any cool stories about him?
If the two main candidates were Shapiro and Walz, I am not surprised that Harris went with Walz. To maximize her chances of winning, Harris needs a "generic white guy" to balance out her being a black/Indian woman. So it's understandable if she and her team did end up deciding between two generic white guys. However, Shapiro's being Jewish and his history of being strongly pro-Israel and working for Israeli organizations does not make him a good Democratic VP pick in today's political environment. Trump voters aren't going to go vote for Harris just because she picked Shapiro. On the other hand, it is possible that a decent number of Democratic-leaning voters in swing states where the election will come down to a difference of a few tens of thousands of votes would just decide to not vote instead of voting for Harris/Shapiro.
It’s a tricky one and I think it could easily be argued that Shapiro would have been the better choice. Nate Silver had a ranking of swing states by importance to probability of winning the electoral college, and in both cases whoever wins Pennsylvania has a ~90% chance of winning the election.
Shapiro is popular in Pennsylvania and that’s probably enough to tip the state to the democrats.
But yeah there does seem to be one too many skeletons in his closet and I’m sorry, the IDF thing (whatever you want to call it, it’s at least a conflict of interest) is fucking “weird” and probably should disqualify him from any kind of national office dealing with foreign policy.
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