Kamala Harris Should Not Pick Mark Kelly for Veep

Senator Mark Kelly scored the highest net favorability rating (10 points) among nine vice presidential prospects in an ABC News/Ipsos poll conducted July 26 and 27. Good for him. Still, Kamala Harris should not choose Kelly to be her running mate.

Let’s start with the obvious point that a 10-point net favorability rating is nothing to write home about when 65 percent say they either don’t know who Kelly is or have no opinion about the man. Majorities were similarly undecided about Governors Andy Beshear, J.B. Pritzker, Josh Shapiro, Gretchen Whitmer, Roy Cooper, and Tim Walz. The only two prospects about whom a majority ventured an opinion were Governor Gavin Newsom and Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg, and large minorities were undecided about them too (45 percent and 46 percent, respectively). Newsom’s net favorability was underwater at minus 12, while Buttigieg’s was plus four.

Where do these vice presidential prospects come from? From an apparition that the late New York Times columnist Russell Baker, writing in December 1963, identified as the Great Mentioner. “It is one of the deeper mysteries of Presidential politics,” Baker wrote,

but the fact is that getting “mentioned” is the first essential step to the White House and one of the hardest. Who is the kingmaker who grants the supreme boon of “mention”? Nobody knows. Nobody has ever seen him, but there is not the slightest doubt about his existence.

The Great Mentioner has been working overtime since the June 27 presidential debate made it clear that President Joe Biden would have to be replaced at the top of the ticket. After Kamala Harris became the putative Democratic nominee, the Great Mentioner dropped from His list two African American politicians, Governor Wes Moore and Senator Raphael Warnock, probably out of fear that a Democratic ticket with two African Americans couldn’t win. A second reason not to consider Warnock is that Georgia’s governor, Brian Kemp, is a Republican and would therefore replace Warnock with a Republican were he to enter the White House.

Kelly remains on the list because he doesn’t have that problem. Arizona’s governor, Katie Hobbs, is a Democrat—and even if she were a Republican, under Arizona law she’d have to replace Kelly with another Democrat. But a special election would be held in 2026—three years before Kelly’s current Senate term is due to expire. And in a state like Arizona, a Democratic victory would be far from assured. Compensating for this loss, in theory, would be that Kelly might help Harris win the swing state of Arizona. But there’s little evidence that vice presidential candidates help with winning their home states. Just ask Geraldine Ferraro, Lloyd Bentsen, Jack Kemp, John Edwards, and Paul Ryan. They all lost their home states when they ran for vice president.

The Democrats are projected to lose their Senate majority in November, and even if they confound expectations and keep it, that majority will be razor-thin, as it is today. No current senator should be under consideration for the Democratic vice presidential slot (and, for that matter, no current representative either, though the Great Mentioner tends to disdain the House of Representatives). The Republicans can perhaps spare a Senate seat if Senator J.D. Vance becomes vice president; the Democrats cannot.

Another reason Harris shouldn’t name Kelly, and the one to which I’m going to devote the rest of this piece, is that the Arizona senator has a lousy record on labor.

The Protecting the Right to Organize, or PRO, Act, which would eliminate various barriers to organizing in the workplace, is labor’s highest priority. The bill is co-sponsored by every Democratic senator save one—Kelly. He told HuffPost’s Igor Bobick and Dave Jamieson three years ago that although he supported “the overall goals” of the bill, he opposed a part of the bill that narrowed the definition of “independent contractor,” thereby making it more difficult for employers to deny workers unemployment and other employee benefits and to dodge paying payroll taxes.

“Sometimes employers use that to their advantage,” Kelly conceded. That’s an understatement. When a worker is classified as an independent contractor, that person can end up working full-time for a single company and still not get paid minimum wage. But, Kelly continued: “In other cases, I do think people should be able to be independent contractors.”

Point taken—sometimes workers prefer contract work because it gives them the freedom to set their own hours. But the PRO Act grants exceptions in these and other legitimate instances, allowing workers to be independent contractors so long as they remain “free from control and direction in connection with the performance of the service,” or work “outside the usual course of the business of the employer,” or have “an independently established trade, occupation, profession, or business.”

Kelly’s resistance raised suspicions that he was caving to Arizona’s business community, which is fiercely anti-labor. Arizona’s unionization rate, at 4.2 percent, is the fifth-lowest in the nation, after Utah (4.1 percent), South Dakota (3.6 percent), North Carolina (2.7 percent), and South Carolina (2.3 percent). The national rate is 10 percent if you count public employee unions, and 6 percent if you don’t. Arizona is a right-to-work state, meaning workers are free to enjoy the benefits of collective bargaining without paying for them. Kelly’s and fellow Arizona Senator Kyrsten Sinema’s “willingness to withstand organized labor’s ongoing pressure campaign [to support the PRO Act] speaks to their independence and commitment to do what is right for Arizona,” Danny Seiden, president of the Arizona Chamber of Commerce & Industry, observed with approval in January 2022.

This past Wednesday Kelly altered his position on the PRO Act, one day after it was reported that he was one of five potential candidates who’d furnished vetting materials to the Harris campaign. (The others were Cooper, Shapiro, Whitmer, and Walz.) Speaking once again to HuffPost’s Bobick and Jamieson, Kelly said, “Unions loom large in our life, and I’m supportive of the PRO Act.” He continued:

I would have voted for it on Day One. I would vote for it today. I am, like a lot of legislation, working to make it better. But if it came to the floor today or any day going back to the day I was sworn in, I would vote for it.

But as Bobick and Jamieson made clear, Kelly had never before stated that he would support the bill as written. All he’d said was that he would favor allowing certain unspecified parts to be included in a reconciliation package—excluding, presumably, the independent contractor language to which he objected.

Kelly’s PRO Act endorsement, welcome though it is, does not wipe the slate clean. It’s too late for Kelly to change his March 2022 vote against the Labor Department nomination of David Weil for wage and hour administrator, a post that Weil held in the Obama administration. The only other Democrats who voted with Kelly against Weil aren’t Democrats anymore: Sinema and Joe Manchin. As Sarah Tsai observed in On Labor, “Even business groups were surprised by the defeat.” Weil’s was the first Biden nomination to fail on the Senate floor, and Biden’s only executive branch nomination ever to do so. The vote to bring the nomination to the floor failed, and Biden withdrew Weil’s name. The post remained vacant for 19 months until the Senate confirmed Jessica Looman in October 2023.

As I wrote at the time, there was no good reason for a Democrat to vote against Weil. Weil had outraged the business lobby during his previous term by enforcing the wage and hour laws on the books, and that was enough for Kelly. “I heard from a lot of business owners,” Kelly told Politico, “and being somebody who started a business myself, it’s hard. There were concerns about how he’d interpret things and he had served in the position before. So there’s precedent there.” Kelly’s queasiness about cracking down on independent contractors likely played a role, because business groups made an issue of that, even though (as I also explained at the time) their complaint was baseless.

Kelly was also a longtime holdout against the nomination of Julie Su for labor secretary. He eventually agreed to vote to confirm her, but only after Manchin announced he would oppose Su, dooming her nomination (because Sinema opposed Su more quietly). As a result, Su has ended up performing the role in an acting capacity only. I should point out that, according to an Arizona Republic review of Kelly’s campaign contributions, Kelly has collected $6.5 million from business interests, as against $673,000 from labor, since he entered politics in 2019.

One might argue that a single blind spot should not disqualify Kelly. But I submit that labor is not just some Democratic interest group. It’s the party’s heart and soul. Democrats desperately need to reestablish their historical identity as the party of the working class. I’ve proposed some ways to do this, pointing out that (despite shortcomings as a candidate that weren’t his fault) Biden leaves behind a very strong record on working-class issues.

Harris’s own working-class credentials are a little wobbly. Ruy Teixeira, co-author of last year’s Where Have All the Democrats Gone?, about how the party lost its working-class majority, reported earlier this week that although Harris, according to an average of postdebate polls, does better than Biden among women, Blacks, college graduates, and voters under 30, she does worse among men, whites and Latinos, seniors … and the working class, defined conventionally as voters who lack a college degree. This is a serious problem because even Biden wasn’t doing especially well with working-class voters during this period; Trump was up 11.2 points in a matchup against Biden and up 11.6 points in a matchup against Harris. Teixeira further noted that a July 24 Harris campaign memo about assembling a “winning coalition” neglected to mention, in enumerating various constituencies, the working class. Other words missing from the memo: “workers,” “union,” and “labor.”

Harris needs to sharpen her pitch to the working class, because it’s doubtful she can win without a (multiethnic) working-class majority. Biden was the first and only Democrat in 100 years to win the presidency without a working-class majority, and he couldn’t have pulled it off without the fluky circumstance of Trump’s spectacular mismanagement of the Covid-19 epidemic. For Harris to choose as her running mate someone whose credentials in this area are not merely wobbly but poor would send a terrible signal to a working class that already thinks Democrats don’t care about them.

Putting Kelly on the ticket might seem like an electorally smart strategy because he’s from Arizona. But Kelly brings with him so much baggage on important working-class issues that Vance, by comparison, might start to look like the plausible tribune of the proletariat he tries so hard to be. It isn’t worth the risk.