Was Walz Winning Weird?

The veepstakes in retrospective, the fate of the Harris-Walz ticket, and more: a politics update by Jacob Cohen (@Conflux).

A former senator from North Dakota predicted the Harris-Walz ticket in 2020!

Oh, wait. You’re telling me North Dakota Senator Milton Young died in 1983? So this isn’t the real “Mr. Wheat,” the last member of the Lost Generation to serve in the Senate? I thought Elon was requiring parody accounts to declare themselves… 

Well, whoever runs this Twitter account, even if you may not be the real Senator Milton Young, we’d love to have you here on Manifold.

Our record was more mixed. We considered Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz — the ultimate winner of the veepstakes — a real contender, but we didn’t have him higher than 20-30% until two days ago. The conventional wisdom was pointing toward Josh Shapiro of Pennsylvania, and Manifold mostly bought it. Still, we didn’t count Walz out.

So What’s the Impact on the Election?

Not a ton. The election is still officially a coinflip — we give a 49% chance to both Trump and Harris, with the rest allocated to various unlikely alternatives. Harris’s odds may have declined a percent or two after the announcement of Walz, if you squint. In Pennsylvania, where Shapiro’s popularity likely would’ve helped out Harris, the drop from 60% to 50% was clear. 

Walz did seem to cause an increase of Democratic chances in Minnesota, but Minnesota is not going to be the tipping-point state, so it doesn’t matter as much.

 

 

So that’s the future of the election. It’ll be close…

In the rest of this article, I’ll discuss the path toward Harris’s selection of Tim Walz, more information about him, and some other miscellany.

Before I continue with the article, you know how Manifold sometimes goes down when there’s big news (like Biden dropping out)? With sweepstakes markets on the horizon and an election coming up, site traffic will increase, and so we’re worried we might go down again. We want to change that!

Manifold Is Hiring: Backend Engineer

So we’re looking for a backend engineer! Here’s the job posting:

Signs you may be a good fit

• 4+ years experience with backend systems

• Deep familiarity with databases like Postgres, deploying servers, and maintaining them on a cloud provider like GCP

• Strong technical design abilities from multi-server architectures to database schemas

Responsibilities

• Own critical systems including our entire trading infrastructure, API layer, and database

• Able to work independently and flexibly to accomplish Manifold's goals

Something Manifold isn’t paying me to say: as I write this, I’m sitting on a really comfortable couch in the Manifold office, with a blanket and a stuffed blåhaj (though many team members work at desks). In my interactions, the Manifold team has consistently been super kind and generous. It’s a place where employees work hard and play hard. And selfishly, I really hope they hire for this position to decrease the risk the site goes down at awkward times…

The market projects a 61% chance we’ll hire a backend engineer by the end of August, but we’d love it if you could change that for the better!

 

Alright, let’s get back to politics.

The Path to Walz

Tim Walz was one of the three VP candidates who I profiled in my last newsletter … but all I did was link James Medlock’s Venn diagram and say this:

I don’t know anything else about Tim Walz — other than that he’s the governor of Minnesota, a state which is unlikely to matter but is correlated with more critical states in the Midwest. I think of him as similar to Tim Kaine, but maybe that’s because they’re both named Tim. 

Floating around 20%, he’s a bit less likely than Shapiro or Kelly, but if Harris picks him, we’ll all learn about him together!

Chart Legend

• green = Tim Walz

• yellow = Josh Shapiro

• light blue = Kamala Harris

• dark blue = Mark Kelly

• orange = Roy Cooper

Josh Shapiro just seemed like an obvious choice — he was elected governor of a crucial swing state, Pennsylvania, in a landslide — and when the Harris team said they’d announce the vice president in Pennsylvania, some bettors interpreted that as a sign of Shapiro. Others noted that historically, VPs have been announced in a somewhat random collection of states. 

Still, with the governor of Pennsylvania as such a strong contender, it seemed like the signs were pointing his way. There were a few less bullish signs: some reporting about scandals associated with Shapiro (such as a sexual harassment complaint), “concerns” from Sen. John Fetterman, potentially the inclination to “avoid news cycles about a disappointed left and Democrats’ internal squabbling over the War in Gaza,” as Nate Silver puts it. 

Nevertheless, the day before the pick was announced, his chance floated around 75%. Reuters had reported that it was down to Shapiro or Walz, which Manifold believed, and Shapiro seemed like the frontrunner. I told my mom it was gonna be Shapiro.

Midday, there was finally market movement toward Walz. Someone on Twitter saw “black suburbans” “outside the Tim Walz residence.” And then yesterday, Harris officially announced the pick: Tim Walz.

(His last name is pronounced not like “waltz” but like “walls” … like what Trump wanted … )

The Backstory of Tim Walz

Tim Walz was born in Nebraska in 1964. Starting at age 17, he served in the National Guard for 24 years. He went to Chadron State College, enabled by the GI Bill, and became a high school teacher and football coach for a while (including being the faculty advisor of the gay-straight alliance in 1999). In 2006 he ran for Congress against Gil Gutknecht, a Republican who had been in office for 12 years. (He had actually pledged in the 90s to only serve for 12 years, but then he reneged.) It was a neglected race; the district was red, and Walz was the only Democratic candidate. Campaigning on the Iraq War, he won 53-47. Then he was repeatedly reelected (including by a razor-thin 50.4-49.6 in 2016) until he was elected governor in 2018.

His first big moment in the spotlight was when he said about the Republican ticket, “these guys are just weird.” At the Pennsylvania rally where he was introduced as VP, he repeated the attack angle, and also alluded to the JD Vance couch joke, saying “I can’t wait to debate this guy … that’s if he’s willing to get off the couch and show up. See what I did there?” The Daily Show characterizes him as a “Midwestern Dad.” 

“The Veepstakes Only Has Winners”

Liam Donovan wrote a good Substack post analyzing Walz’s selection, and it ends this way:

And this is what it boils down to. Harris had a chance to effectuate a marginal boost in a key state, and instead went with a do-no-harm coalition pleaser. Whether you think that’s a sign of timidity (she kowtowed to online progressives), confidence (things are going so well she’s thinking bigger than 270), or simply a reflection of the personal rapport and comfort level she enjoyed with Walz, this pick will be judged by what happens in November. Like everything else in presidential politics, it will look like a stroke of genius or a colossal mistake, with little room in between.

All that said—and I have stated this from the beginning—this veepstakes only has winners. Walz gets the job he wants and becomes an unlikely star in the process; Shapiro elevates his national profile, keeps his powder dry, and avoids hitching his fate to Harris’; the base gets what they’ve been clamoring for.

But the one with real stakes is Kamala Harris, and she has the next three months to prove she made the right call.

There’s a nonzero chance we’ll have a president Walz in the next decade:

 

 

xkcd on the Veepstakes

[Political pundit on the ScrabbleTV News channel] "After four years of defying orthographic pressure, Joe ceded the top of the ticket to Kamala, who--after considering Josh, Mark, Andy, Roy, and Pete--picked Tim."

So maybe that’s what it boils down to.

Trump’s Forecasting Question

Donald Trump recently published an interesting forecasting question on Truth Social:

Ignoring questions like “what does Kamabla mean” (we don’t know) and focusing on the meat of the post, Manifold has an answer: less than 1%. 

 

One Last Market

My tradition in this newsletter is to spotlight a “fun” market. Today, I’m doing two! (Though one of them is mine, admittedly.)

James Austin Johnson has been portraying Donald Trump on Saturday Night Live. Maya Rudolph has been portraying Kamala Harris. We’ve gotten two VP nominees: JD Vance and Tim Walz. Which member of the cast — or other celebrity! — will play them on the popular show?

 

 

As usual, I’ve given each of the markets a M1,000 subsidy to encourage accuracy.

I’ve been Jacob Cohen, known on Manifold as Conflux. I blog at tinyurl.com/confluxblog, make puzzles at puzzlesforprogress.net, and don’t release any new episodes of the Market Manipulation Podcast on your favorite podcast platform. Check out Manifold Politics at manifold.markets/election, or via its Politics or 2024 Election categories. And if you enjoyed this newsletter, don’t forget to like, share, and/or subscribe to Above the Fold on Substack!