Last week, Kamala Harris picked Minnesota Governor Tim Walls to be her running mate.
He was picked in part because of his background winning elections in a Midwestern state and because Harris was looking to balance the ticket with her vice presidential pick, like many candidates before her.
There are a lot of under theorized narratives floating around during the vice presidential selection process.
There's the idea that the vice president should help deliver votes in their home state.
There's also the idea that voters want a gender balanced or racially balanced ticket.
And there's this idea that women face a significant electoral penalty for their gender.
For how much these ideas have become conventional wisdom, they're remarkably thin on evidence.
Of course, no one on the outside can definitively say why Walls was selected to be the nominee, but his selection has come among a flurry of assumptions around the type of partner Harris needs needs in order to bolster her electability this fall.
There's this idea that his previous performance in rural Minnesota will help her campaign attract rural voters, and also the sense that his, for lack of a better word, vibe will help reassure voters that Democrats are not just the ticket for coastal elite liberals.
This is good on paper, a policy show that questions what we really know about popular narratives.
I'm your host, Jerusalem Dempsis, and I'm a staff writer here at the Atlantic.
When we're talking about electoral politics, I like to mention that before I was a journalist, I worked on Democratic campaigns, including one for Kamala Harris.
And today I'm joined by my friend Matt Iglesias.
He's a longtime journalist and political commentator who runs the newsletter Slow Boring.
We briefly co hosted a podcast when we worked together.
So this is a little bit of a reunion of sorts.
Podcasts about live elections should probably all come with a warning label.
After all, just a few months ago, no one was publicly predicting the series of events that unfolded following President Joe Biden's disastrous debate performance.
It's a reminder that trying to find a signal in the noisy mess of politics is a difficult game and one that should be played with a lot of intellectual humility.
But the purpose of this show is to find the places where we can put a marker down and say this is what the evidence tells us and how much confidence you should have in it.