As the Democratic Party coalesces around Vice President Harris to be its nominee following President Biden’s withdrawal from the race on Sunday, attention is quickly turning to the next matter at hand: Who should she pick for a running mate?
It’s a decision she should make as quickly as the vetting process allows. Lucky for her, Harris has a wealth of appealing options among her party’s next generation of leaders. That starts with its governors, some of whom come from states Democrats need most to win, including Gretchen Whitmer of Michigan, Roy Cooper of North Carolina and Josh Shapiro of Pennsylvania.
It is easy to make an argument for any of them, but I think Harris’s smartest selection would be Sen. Mark Kelly of Arizona.
Kelly’s credentials begin with his dazzling biography as a combat-tested Navy pilot and NASA astronaut who commanded shuttle missions aboard both the Discovery and Endeavour and traveled more than 20 million miles in space.
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He has also turned out to be a supremely skillful politician in a tough state where the Biden-Harris ticket has been running behind. Kelly won a close race in 2020 to fill the unexpired term of John McCain (R) and then turned around to win it again two years later — this time, with a more comfortable five-point margin against a hard-right Republican election conspiracy theorist endorsed by Donald Trump. Kelly significantly outperformed late polls showing him behind in the race. (If Kelly were to be elected vice president, Arizona Gov. Katie Hobbs, a Democrat, would appoint a replacement to serve as senator until a special election in 2026.)
Picking Kelly, who at 60 is roughly the same age as Harris, would help inoculate her in areas where she is likely to be vulnerable. That starts with immigration. Trump’s campaign has already made clear this would be a line of attack against Harris. The former president has labeled her Biden’s “border czar,” an inaccurate description of her portfolio dealing with the root causes of migration from Central America.
Kelly has been critical of his party’s hesitance, until recently, to take a strong stand on border security. But he also calls out Republicans for wanting to score points on the issue rather than making progress.
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“When I first got to Washington, it didn’t take me long to realize that there are a lot of Democrats who don’t understand our southern border and a lot of Republicans who just want to talk about it, don’t necessarily want to do anything about it, just want to use it politically,” he told me shortly after his 2022 victory. “So my approach has been — to the extent that we could and can — to make progress on securing it, but also doing it in a way that’s in accordance with our ethics and our values, not to demonize people.”
Kelly retired from NASA and the Navy after a 2011 assassination attempt at a Tucson grocery store left his wife, then-Arizona Rep. Gabrielle Giffords, severely disabled and six others dead. While overseeing her care as she slowly regained some of her ability to speak and walk, Kelly developed a new understanding of how this nation’s gun laws work — and don’t.
“I was a gun owner, supporter of the Second Amendment, as I still am,” he told me in a July 2022 interview for a profile I was writing about Giffords. “But I didn’t really know the details.” The couple founded an organization that has helped pass sensible gun laws in nearly every state.
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What many Second Amendment supporters don’t realize, Kelly told me, is “how we make it really easy for criminals and domestic abusers and people who are dangerously mentally ill to get access to guns like no other country on the planet. Nobody else does this. Because of it, we have a really high rate of people getting shot and people die.”
Kelly remains a gun owner who is comfortable talking about the issue in a way that other Democrats are not. I once asked him how many firearms he has. “Probably have more guns than the average Arizonan,” he replied.
Gun safety is an issue that should gain more prominence again after a 20-year-old with access to an AR-style rifle tried to kill Trump at a rally on July 13. Corey Comperatore, a former fire chief who was in the audience, was killed while trying to protect his family, and two others were seriously injured.
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Kelly has learned some fundamentals in the short time he has been in politics, which he would surely bring to a national ticket.
“When you’re running for the United States Senate or any statewide office, you’ve got to go and talk to everybody and talk to them about things they care about, whether it’s the cost of gasoline or, especially in Southern Arizona, about the border, which is a crisis,” he told me in 2022. “So don’t run away from the issues.”
He made his name as an astronaut. But in politics, Mark Kelly can tell you, the most important thing is to stay close to the ground.
