Several names are being floated for a possible running mate should Kamala Harris get the Democratic nomination in this year’s presidential race. One is North Carolina Gov. Roy Cooper.
WRAL in Raleigh has laid out five reasons why Cooper is being considered, and WRAL's Paul Specht joins me now to go through them.
Marshall Terry: So, first reason you list is Cooper is “a winner in a right-leaning battleground state.”
Paul Specht: That's right. Roy Cooper has been in state politics since the mid-'80s, and he's never lost a race. That sounds sort of crazy, but it's true. He was a legislator for many years and then ran for attorney general in the year 2000 and served four terms. He won four elections and then ran for governor in 2016, and that year he beat incumbent Republican Pat McCrory.
He's been in office a long time and he seems to have what one expert called the “magic sauce.” You know, he wins in Democratic cycles, he wins in Republican cycles. He's able to message to a wider swath of the electorate than Democrats in other states.
Terry: Next you have “a safe party pick.” What does that mean?
Specht: Well, he's largely avoided major personal or political scandals. Of course, he has his critics on the Republican side, and I'm sure in the middle too. People don't agree with everything he does, but there's not one big political scandal that he's found himself in and he's not particularly gaffe-prone.
You know, some of these politicians we see in Washington, they flub a line they're trying to deliver, either at a press conference or at the state Capitol or, you know, someone catches him off guard. Cooper, he's pretty polished, he's never really had anything like that. And experts say, you know, with Kamala Harris being from California, Cooper would offer some balance there. You know, California is known as this very liberal state. Cooper comes from a state that is sort of pinkish, if not purple.
Terry: Ok. You also mention that Cooper and Harris already have a relationship. How so?
Specht: Well, they were both top prosecutors of their respective states at the same time. I mentioned that Cooper was the attorney general for 16 years between 2001 and 2017. Harris was the attorney general of California from 2011 to 2017, so there's about six years of overlap between them.
And recently, you know, Harris has been in our state a lot, twice just in the last month. She's referred to Cooper as her dear friend and says they've known each other for 20 years. When we think about who could be the vice presidential pick, Cooper is the oldest of the people whose names we've seen, you know, like Josh Shapiro, Andy Beshear, Mark Kelly. They're all younger than [Cooper] is. However, they don't have that long of a relationship with Harris, so that could come into play.
Terry: You also point out that Cooper is on his way out of the governor’s office because he is term-limited. So he's available. And you say Cooper connects with rural voters, right?
Specht: That's right. We don't know how important it is that someone is available, but Cooper is on his way out of office. He can't run for governor again. The next big seat he could run for would be U.S. Senate in 2026. That's when Republican Thom Tillis, that’s when his term is up. [Tillis] could run again or choose not to,. We don't know. Cooper hasn't signaled any plans beyond just serving out the remainder of his term that ends at the end of this year. Shapiro was just elected in Pennsylvania to be their governor. Beshear still has time left in Kentucky. Mark Kelly has another four years, I believe, on his term as Arizona’s U.S. senator.
Cooper has a little more flexibility than some of these other candidates, and as you mentioned, one thing that that makes him special is there aren't that many Southern Democrats in high offices. It's mainly just Beshear and Cooper.
Cooper grew up on a tobacco farm, and he's been winning rural voters in North Carolina for years now. North Carolina is a split state. He's not winning in landslides, but he's able to win some voters that other Democrats likely wouldn't, in places like eastern North Carolina that have been traditionally blue for a long time, but have been trending more and more conservative over the years.
Terry: So any idea when a decision will be announced?
Specht: Well, we've seen reports that Harris wants to make a decision soon, of course, in political speak. We don't know what that means, but there are a couple of things to keep an eye on.
One is some of these picks going in national media and making a case for themselves. Roy Cooper and Andy Beshear, Kentucky's governor, were both on "Morning Joe" recently, that's on MSNBC. And each one of them took sort of different text for how they would approach the job.
You know, Cooper has been talking about the accomplishments of the Biden administration for a long time, and that's what he did during his interview. Beshear went after J.D. Vance, Trump's vice presidential pick and directly targeted him saying, hey, you've said a lot of things about people from Appalachia, and I'm here to push back on those and try to represent them and get those votes back. So that's one thing to watch, is some of these guys in the media.
The other thing would be to check and see how many of them are interested. I don't want to name names, but I've seen a couple of the governors mentioned as possible VP picks and people close to them saying they're not interested. We don't know if any of those are true, but there could be signals in the media that Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer, she may not be interested. Or Shapiro, you know, he's young, he could have a bright future and want to run some other year. It'll be interesting to see what he says about this opportunity, and whether he's in the mix or if he's going to run some other time.
