As much fun as Tuesday night’s election was for Republicans, things are about to get a lot more enjoyable moving forward. With Donald Trump having secured a historic landslide in the presidential race and the GOP all but certain to hold both chambers of Congress, the post-mortems are beginning to roll in.
Shorter: The Democratic Party civil war is on.
Shortly after midnight on Wednesday, with the race for the White House already decided, DNC official Lindy Li spoke to White House correspondent Jacqui Heinrich, and she did not hold back. Here’s what she had to say.
– Tim Walz was a bad choice of running mate, Shapiro would have carried the blue-wall states.
LI: “People are wondering tonight what would have happened had Shapiro been on the ticket. And not only in terms of Pennsylvania. He’s famously a moderate. So that would have signaled to the American people that she is not the San Francisco liberal that Trump said she was, but she went with someone actually to her left Minnesota….In the eyes of the American people, Walz was the governor who oversaw the protests,”
Li is half right. There is no doubt that Harris would have been more competitive with Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro on the ticket. He’s extremely popular in his state, and it’s possible he would have made the difference there. Would he have delivered Michigan and Wisconsin? Almost certainly not given the rightward shift we saw during the election. Polls also showed that while Shapiro was a big swing in his home state for Harris, he was bordering on a drag in the other two “blue wall” states.