(Bloomberg Opinion) --
Former presidential candidate Julian Castro endorsed Senator Elizabeth Warren for the Democratic presidential nomination on Monday, which naturally started Twitter speculation about whether Warren should name Castro as her vice-presidential pick right now.
That’s not likely to happen, and there’s a good reason why we don’t see candidates naming running mates at this stage of the selection process. Several reasons, really.
One is that the upside is limited: It’s simply not likely to win a lot of votes. Nomination voters are picking a nominee, not a ticket. The reason that Castro is available as a potential running mate, along with two dozen other hopefuls who dropped out either before or after formally declaring their candidacies, is that they all failed to win enough support to continue their campaigns. They simply don’t command votes to supply to the top of the ticket.
There’s more, however. One of the problems with having a vice-presidential nominee during primaries and caucuses is that it opens up new lines of attack. Warren would immediately assume responsibility for any weaknesses Castro might have. And nomination voters are more likely than general-election voters to be sensitive to small differences in policy preferences. General-election voters, after all, mostly vote based on party. Voters in primaries are looking for ways to sort through and eliminate candidates, and a bad vote or action in a running mate’s past could supply an easy way to narrow the field.
Policy coordination between the two halves of the ticket would also be harder to pull off over the full year than during the more limited fall campaign. In part, that’s because of the dance that nomination candidates have to perform to move from trying to stand out from the field to attract attention — what they’re doing now — to achieving the party consensus they need to form a winning coalition within the party, to eventually shifting again toward policy positions that are best for the general election. A vice-presidential candidate joining a ticket now would have to complete all of those moves, plus whatever shifts are needed to match the presidential candidate’s positions, and then mirror the other shifts as well. That’s a lot to ask.
And there’s at least one more reason to hold off. Right now, there are probably a dozen or so politicians who have hopes of joining Warren’s ticket if she gets the nomination. Maybe more. Choosing one of them now would lock out all of the others, who might then become more interested in helping those candidates who still have a second slot available to offer if they are nominated. And if it would play to some groups within the party, it would also lock out lots of other groups. It’s simply not a winning move.
By the way, a lot of this logic applies as well to the pundit fantasy that a nominee would name a cabinet during the campaign — another thing that might be appealing in the abstract, but wouldn’t help a candidate succeed.
None of this is to say that the Castro endorsement is meaningless. Even if the former San Antonio mayor can’t bring other high-profile Democrats with him, it’s still a positive story for Warren, and with under a month until the first contest, the Iowa caucuses on Feb. 3, any day with a positive story is good for a campaign. Endorsements are also good indicators of underlying support from party actors, and so it might be an indication of currently existing, but perhaps not obvious, strength.
Just don’t expect it to lead to a vice-presidential nod anytime soon.
1. Seth Masket has a must-read on Democratic donors and the nomination battle. As with most indicators of what party actors are up to, this one finds Senator Bernie Sanders showing very limited appeal, although in this case it’s possible that some of that is really just about how Sanders supporters may include party actors who are unusually hostile to formal party organizations.
2. Jackie Schneider at the Monkey Cage on Iran’s cyber attack capabilities.
3. Dan Drezner on what we’ve learned about Trump and Iran.
4. Paul Kane on the sorry state of the Senate. Blame Harry Reid for it; blame Mitch McConnell for even more of it. But mostly blame the other 98 Senators (and their counterparts during the years of Democratic majorities) who have allowed themselves to be sidelined by their leaders, even though they have — and still have — the tools available to fight back.
5. Geoffrey Skelley looks at the Democratic nomination polls through the lens of the history of nomination polling.
6. And my Bloomberg Opinion colleague Daniel Moss on central banks and the 2019 markets.
To contact the editor responsible for this story: Jonathan Landman at jlandman4@bloomberg.net
This column does not necessarily reflect the opinion of the editorial board or Bloomberg LP and its owners.
Jonathan Bernstein is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist covering politics and policy. He taught political science at the University of Texas at San Antonio and DePauw University and wrote A Plain Blog About Politics.
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