“He wrestled with it Sunday,” said a person close to Shairo, because he “loves his job” and, only two years in, has more he wants to do. “[He’s] all in for her, no matter where he sits,” the source added.
By the end of the weekend, Harris had been speaking so much with candidates and advisers that her voice was growing hoarse, and she took to carrying throat lozenges to the nonstop meetings.
Meanwhile, beyond the black iron fence of the observatory, the apparatus to support the eventual running mate began to whir to life.
Former Biden State Department official Liz Allen was tapped to be the eventual running mate’s chief of staff, while “jump teams” were dispatched to the finalists in case they were chosen. Staffers at the campaign’s headquarters in Wilmington, Delaware, began preparing graphics, videos, talking points and even stump speeches for each of the finalists.
Aides tried to buy Harris as much time as possible, printing signs with different potential candidates and even changing party rules — ironically via a party committee Walz chaired — so she could make her pick after the party formally nominated her.
“People were like it was ‘The Bachelor’ playing out in real time,” Rep. Elissa Slotkin, D-Mich., joked outside a polling place Tuesday.
Candidates who have gone through vetting processes in previous years describe it as a grueling and uncomfortable process that more than one have compared to a proctology exam.
There are exhaustive questionnaires about the candidates’ legal, financial, political, personal, family and employment backgrounds, followed by hourslong interviews known as “murder boards” at which dirty laundry is aired and hypothetical scenarios are presented to see how the candidates react. And then, maybe, they get to meet with the candidate for the actual job interview.
“It’s a grind of a process,” said former Housing Secretary Julián Castro, who was vetted to be Hillary Clinton’s running mate in 2016.
Loyalty to Biden
If Walz was the underdog, Shapiro was seen as the front-runner from the beginning, followed by Kelly — and all three ended up as finalists.
In the small world of Democratic politics, the two governors are friends, and they attended a Bruce Springsteen concert in New Jersey last year, along with former Rep. Beto O’Rourke of Texas, who served in the House with Walz and has been boosting him behind the scenes.
“Lori and I consider Tim and Gwen to be good friends of ours and we are excited for them and for the country to get to know the great people we know them to be,” Shapiro said in a statement Tuesday.
Kelly had the most impressive résumé of any candidate, but many Democrats see him as an underwhelming speaker and personally cool.
Some Harris allies also felt he was not loyal enough to Biden in the trying weeks after his poor debate performance and believed he had not done enough to defend the administration’s border policies, according to a person familiar with the process.
Kelly praised Walz in a statement, noting that his wife, Gabby Giffords, served with Walz in the House.
“Gabby and I are going to do everything we can to make Kamala Harris and Tim Walz the next president and vice president,” he said.
Kelly’s team did not respond to a request for additional comment.
While Shapiro, a golden-tongued prosecutor with presidential ambitions of his own, attracted the most vocal support, he also saw the most public campaign against him on Harris’ short list — especially over his stance on Israel and his criticism of pro-Palestinian protesters.
But her team was not convinced that he or any of the other candidates could really deliver their home states.
“Polling showed Shapiro wouldn’t help that much more than the others,” said a Democratic strategist familiar with the polling the party rushed to complete before Harris had to decide. “And bringing Gaza back into the foreground would just be awful all the way around. Nobody wanted to return to that.”
Other Harris allies raised concerns about his support for school vouchers, his handling of a sexual harassment claim against one of his closest former aides and a complicated legal case stemming from his time as attorney general.
But perhaps more important than any specific issue was concern that Shapiro’s personal ambitions could conflict with hers — something raised directly to Harris’ team by an adviser to Sen. John Fetterman of Pennsylvania, who has clashed publicly with Shapiro.
“I would not want to be ahead of Josh Shapiro in the line of succession,” said a senior Democrat who has worked with him.
Shapiro’s team did not respond to a request for additional comment.
People close to Harris said that given the unusual way she was nominated and recognizing that internal dissent and a primary challenge are possible in 2028, from the beginning she was looking for someone who would be willing to stand behind her and defend her thick or thin.
“MAGA is just going to unleash. These are going to be terrifyingly crazy days. She needs someone who will be able to prop her up during hard times and someone who, when these memes take hold, when the deepfakes take hold, when all those things start happening, will be able to stand by her,” said a person familiar with the Harris campaign’s thinking.
Walz, on the other hand, is seen as an affable team player who came up in the military and the classroom, not the arena of power.
He was seen as someone who would not “sabotage” her, as a person familiar with the vetting process put it, by leaking or talking behind her back should she become president.
White House officials took notice that he was one of the only ones who went to the cameras to publicly defend Biden after his tense July 3 meeting with Democratic governors after his poor debate performance.
Among Biden aides and advisers, the word most commonly used to describe Walz is “loyal.”
“She really does need someone who’s going to be a true partner to her, just like she was to President Biden,” said a person familiar with her thinking.
The case for Walz
Harris and Walz had met only a handful of times, most notably when she visited a Planned Parenthood clinic in St. Paul in March.
But Harris and her team were watching as the candidates auditioned, in a way, through appearances on TV and the stump, and they were impressed as Walz became an overnight sensation by labeling Republican JD Vance as “weird” the day after Trump chose him.
The word showed up in a campaign news release two days after Walz used it, and then, a few days later, Harris herself used it at a fundraiser in the Berkshire Mountains of western Massachusetts, and it became widely used across the party.
“Shapiro looks and talks like the next Obama, which is what a lot of folks were excited about,” said Caitlin Legacki, a veteran strategist who has worked with moderate and Midwest Democrats.“Walz looks and talks like [Sen.] Jon Tester [of Montana], which gives us running room in suburban, exurban and maybe even rural places.”
On Capitol Hill, Minnesota Democrats began pitching him to reporters and colleagues — before realizing that no one had given Walz a heads-up about the effort.
“I had to call Tim, because I hadn’t actually talked to him about whether he might want to be VP or not,” Rep. Angie Craig, D-Minn., said. “So, kind of got the cart before the horse. … It truly happened organically.”
And for Democrats concerned about Muslim and Arab voters, especially in Michigan, Walz’s history winning a state with a large Muslim community is a relief.