Hillary Clinton’s choice of Virginia Sen. Tim Kaine as her running mate can either be read as a sign of supreme confidence or extreme risk aversion (or both).
The former Virginia governor, Democratic National Committee chairman and Richmond mayor is a solid but uninspiring pick, especially as compared to other bolder options like Elizabeth Warren, Cory Booker, Julian Castro or Tom Perez, all of whom would have made history.
Perhaps Clinton decided she would take care of all the history-making on the ticket herself and rely on Donald Trump to replicate the Obama coalition for her. Clinton is likely to win African American, Hispanic and millennial voters easily, of course, but the key to Barack Obama’s success was turning them out in huge numbers.
Where Kaine could come in handy is putting Virginia out of Trump’s reach. Pre-Kaine, Clinton’s lead over Trump in the commonwealth was less than 5 points, though the businessman struggled in the Northern Virginia suburbs even in the Republican primary.
Kaine’s career is a symbol of how Virginia, the first Southern state to become reliably Republican at the presidential level and the only one to vote against Jimmy Carter, the home of Pat Robertson and Jerry Falwell (Jr. and Sr.), has become bluer in recent years.
When Mark Warner was elected governor in 2001, he had to present himself as a centrist who was very different from the national party, much less Democratic Sen. Chuck Robb and even Gov. Douglas Wilder before him. He didn’t rely solely on Northern Virginia but cut into Republican vote totals in the southwest too.
Then Kaine came along. He positioned himself similarly in his Virginia gubernatorial campaign, emphasizing his religious convictions and his “personally pro-life” views, although he was probably a tick to Warner’s left. Kaine won at a time when the Iraq war was really starting to batter the Republican brand.
Jim Webb was a veteran of the Reagan administration — and the Vietnam war — with a culturally conservative past who was to the right of his party on guns and capital gains taxes, ambiguous on judges, even as his combative nature and antiwar stand made him a darling of the netroots. He still didn’t run as a cookie-cutter Democrat.
Yet Warner, Kaine and Webb largely got away with voting in the Senate as a party-line Democrats, save a few exceptions. The election of Terry McAuliffe as governor in 2013 ultimately proved that a standard-issue liberal Democrat with ties to the Clintons and a checkered past could win in Virginia with few concessions to the state’s conservative past, something that once would have been unthinkable even in light of Bob McDonnell’s problems and Ken Cuccinelli’s struggles in the D.C. suburbs.
Progressives, especially Bernie Sanders voters and Democrats pining for Warren, are unlikely to be sated by Kaine. Understandably so. But he does show how they are gaining inroads throughout the country through demographic changes, even places not long ago viewed as safely Republican.
