I feel like Hillary is about to drive her campaign into a massive wreck, and all I can do is watch.

[heresAthingdotcom]

135. Rachel Maddow said there are 3 choices to make

an August Choice, a November Choice or a January Choice.....

MADDOW: In political science, there is a basic model for explaining
the strategy when a presidential nominee picks their running mate. My
friend Steve Benen at Maddow Blog writes about this every four years for
both parties and every four years, it blows everybody`s mind and people
think Steve made it up because it`s such a good model and helpful
understanding it.

But it is an old political science model. It`s been around for a
long time. And the basic idea of it is this – it`s totally worth getting
because I think it clarifies these choices. When a presidential campaign
is looking for a vice president, they pick either an August, a November, or
January.

If you pick an August, that means you are picking a running mate who
will help you in August and help you bring your own party at your party
convention in July or August, you want your own party to put aside past
infighting. You want everybody not only in your whole party structure but
your whole party base to agree this is a great choice and the two of you
together are a great ticket. You`re trying to repair or at least paper
over any hard feelings that might still exist in the primary. That`s an
August choice.

The classic example of an August choice was in 1980 when Ronald
Reagan picked Poppy Bush not because he particularly liked Poppy Bush, but
because Poppy Bush had come in second to him in a very difficult primary
and the primary was divided and that was way to bring Republicans together.
In that case, it worked. So, Poppy Bush would be a prototypical August
choice.

You can also choose a November choice, a running mate who`s designed
to help you win in November, in the November election. Now, I don`t want
to prejudice you against November choices by saying this, because honestly,
sometimes a November choice makes a ton of sense, but the prototypical
example of somebody who is in November as a running mate would be John
McCain picking Sarah Palin.

Don`t jump to conclusions. It made sense at the time. He thought
after the Democrats had had their fractious primary between Obama and
Hillary Clinton in `08, John McCain thought picking a woman would help him
get disaffected voters who didn`t like Obama.

John McCain was also – excuse me, really old and he`s a Washington
institution. He thought he could compensate for both things by picking
somebody young and somebody completely unknown on the national stage. So,
Sarah Palin was a November choice. She`s a prototypical November choice.

She also ended up being a lot of other things but November was the
strategic thinking between – behind why they chose her. So, you can pick
an August, you can pick a November or you can pick a January.

And a January is somebody who you don`t necessarily think is going to
help you consolidate your party at your convention, you don`t necessarily
think they`re going to help you win the general election in November, but
you do know come inauguration day, when you are sworn in as president, that
person is good at governing. They`re going to be good and responsible at
helping you put together your administration.

And I know that sounds like the sort of the more admirable of these
three choices, but I don`t mean it that way. The prototypical January
choice as a vice-presidential running mate is probably the worst vice
president in this modern history of our country, Dick Cheney. So, don`t
let these prototypical examples of these kinds of choices make you think
one is better than the other.

They`re all just reasonably strategic differences to the same
problem, right? These are the three classic strategic categories for how
you pick a running mate, August, November, January.

Which one of these problems are you trying to solve? Do you have
worries within your own party? You have worries about the general
election. You have worries about your ability to govern? Do you want to
settle those worries among anybody in the electorate?

I mean, if that`s the framework in these poli-sci 101 barebones,
Elizabeth Warren would obviously be an August for Hillary Clinton, right?
I mean, that`s not to say she wouldn`t be great at governing or that she
wouldn`t help win the general election in November. But the first and
fundamental thing she would bring to the ticket would be consolidation of
Democratic and liberal support for Hillary Clinton. I mean, Hillary
Clinton is not going to put Bernie Sanders on the ticket, but putting
Elizabeth Warren on the ticket is probably the next best thing.

There have been some rumblings in the beltway press Democratic Wall
Street journals might be turned off by Elizabeth Warren getting tapped by
V.P. But you know what? That`s exactly the kind of of intraparty dispute
Hillary Clinton not only wants right now, she`s going to want to pound her
chest about and brag about if she is going to excite and consolidate the
Democratic Party base, as he wants to try to win over every Bernie Sanders
voter in the country and if she wants to run as an unabashed progressive
and even more progressive successor to Barack Obama and Joe Biden. A fight
with Democrats on Wall Street would actually be helpful to her with the
rest of the party.

So, Elizabeth Warren would be an August. Here`s the thing, though.
New polling just out, especially new polling just out from the “Washington
Post”/ABC poll suggests that maybe the Democratic Party doesn`t need an
August right now? Maybe the Democratic Party doesn`t need all that much
more unifying. It doesn`t need that much more persuading when it comes to
getting behind Clinton.

A month ago, when “The Washington Post” and ABC polled Bernie Sanders
supporters, 20 percent of Bernie Sanders supporters said they were going to
vote for Donald Trump in the general election. Now, one month later in the
same poll, that number is down to 8 percent. I know, it is still kind of
shocking to imagine even 8 percent of Bernie Sanders supporters voting for
Donald Trump, but in context, that`s a remarkably small number.

Compare it with the Obama-Clinton primary in 2008. This same poll,
“Washington Post”/ABC, they kept going back over and over again asking
Clinton supporters in `08 in the lead up to the general election, OK, your
candidate didn`t become the nominee? Didn`t become the nominee, are you
going to vote for the nominee, or are you going to vote for Obama, or are
you still so mad about the primary that you`re actually going to vote for
John McCain?

And a lot of Hillary Clinton supporters said they were going to vote
John McCain. And they didn`t give that up. This time eight years ago, 20
percent of Clinton supporters in the Democratic primary said they were
going to vote for John McCain. It actually went up in July to 22 percent.
Stayed around 18 percent and 19 percent in August and September.

By October 2008, a month before the election, still, the proportion
of Hillary Clinton supporters from the Democratic primary who said they
couldn`t bring themselves to vote for Obama and they were going to vote for
John McCain instead, it was still 14 percent in October. The equivalent
Bernie Sanders number right now is already down at 8 percent already.

So, straight up poli-sci analysis says the Democratic Party doesn`t
need an August right now, doesn`t need an August choice for vice president
in August coming out of the Democratic Convention in Philly, the Democrats
are going to be fine in terms of party unity.

But you know what? Poli-sci isn`t life. And the Clinton campaign
knows all that stuff I just said like everybody does, everybody knows those
basic details if you care about them. Still, the Clinton campaign is doing
something here with Elizabeth Warren today that really makes it look like
they`re going to pick her.

Regardless of those poli-sci expectations, they are raising real life
expectations that they`re going to pick Elizabeth Warren. You don`t do an
event like this with somebody you`re not going to pick, do you? If you
are, you`re raising the prospect of a real letdown, a real disappointment
in the Democratic base if they don`t now that they`re doing stuff like
this.

So, who knows? Maybe they`re throwing the common wisdom out the
window here. And you know what? There`s one last point on that common
wisdom. It has generally been assumed by just about every observer of this
race that it would be too demographically ambitious, it would just be a
bridge too far for the Democratic Party to not just nominate a woman for
president for the first time, but to run an all-female ticket, to nominate
a woman for president and vice president.


http://www.msnbc.com/transcripts/rachel-maddow-show/2016-06-27