Notes

Inherent vice. Kamala Harris, the presumptive Democratic nominee for this November’s U.S. presidential election, has chosen Minnesota’s Governor Tim Walz as her running mate. The selection followed weeks of impassioned speculation in the American press about who among the potentials would be most electorally useful for the Harris campaign: Could Arizona’s Senator Mark Kelly help on the politics of immigration? Would Pennsylvania’s Governor Josh Shapiro “deliver” his swing state? Did Walz have enough national name recognition? The questions have been circulating constantly in the media; the answers have been as varied as they’ve been confident.

Meanwhile, the Republican nominee, Donald Trump—whose own running mate, J.D. Vance, has unusually low approval ratings—said, “Historically, the vice president in terms of the election does not have any impact. I mean, virtually no impact.” … Which is it?

The truth appears to be: No one knows. Not even professional historians. As William Hogeland has noted, since Trump’s election in 2016, there’s been a tendency among historians operating as public intellectuals to talk about the future as though it were written in the past—including, recently, to claim, with great conviction, that truly to understand American history is to understand that Biden departing the race this late would doom the Democrats. A variation, it seems, on what James Fallows refers to as the “predictive style in American journalism.”

Trump may be right that vice presidential nominees often haven’t mattered much. But there’s a reasonable case that in 2008, the Republican presidential nominee that year, John McCain, wasn’t helped by choosing Alaska’s Governor Sarah Palin to join his ticket. Looking to past elections to predict future ones may be less like science and more like counting white swans to prove all swans are white: Even if the VP pick hasn’t mattered in the past, it means little about what will matter now.

—Gustav Jönsson