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Shapiro was such an obviously good pick (popular, moderate, highly increases chances of winning an important swing state) that not selecting him his strong Bayesian evidence that being a Jew is considered electoral poison by the DNC. If he's the nominee, leftist anti-Semitism becomes a major campaign issue and major source of internal strife for the Democrats.
They're not in disarray, they're in freefall, posting record low popularity ratings. Meanwhile, Trump is polling in the 60's with Hispanics. A lot can change in three years, but Democrats are facing relegation.
Also, I think you are wildly overestimating how much people give a fuck about experience. Obama was plenty inexperienced, and look how that turned out.
I don't think we can rule out that Shapiro looked at the odds and turned them down, deciding he was better off trying in a later cycle.
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The DNC has factions, and the Harris faction disliked Shapiro for some reason (maybe Jewishness, maybe not -- personally I think not choosing him was galactically stupid). The same faction is unlikely to be to driving the boat in 2028.
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Why? The case for Walz was that he was the most left-wing candidate available that could LARP as a regular guy. Shapiro is only an obviously good pick if you see Harris as too left-wing for the median voter and want to balance the ticket with a centrist. Choosing Walz over Shapiro is the obvious thing to do if you are running a left-wing base mobilisation campaign, which is what the Groups wanted Harris to do. It is also the obvious thing to do if you think you are the candidate as a result of a centrist coup and need to shore up credibility with the left (which is what the campaign staffers Harris inherited from Biden did think).
P(Walz as VP|Harris is too left-wing) and P(Walz as VP|Harris is afraid of anti-Semites) are both close enough to 100% that Walz as VP is not strong Bayesian evidence for one over the other. It is Bayesian evidence for both of those theories over something like "The Democrats are sensible moderates at heart, but too incompetent to communicate this to the voters", but if your prior on this in summer 2024 was still high enough for it to be worth collecting evidence against it then I want some of what you are smoking.
Also there might simply be that DNC got mad at what seemed like a ploy to force their hand to pick Shapiro and disqualified him for that reason.
Even if the DNC formally endorsed the decision, I think Harris and not the DNC chose Walz. I find Harris picking Walz as pushback against a underhand media campaign just as plausible as the DNC doing so.
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