![]() And, since Trump desperately needs a show of unity next week, and a show of support from Ryan, that matters quite a bit. Minutes after Trump confirmed the selection, Ryan released a statement saying that there could be “no better choice for our vice-presidential candidate.” The Speaker will now be anticipating next week’s Convention, which he is chairing, with less trepidation. But, if he can’t yet find it in himself to say nice things about Trump, he has no such hesitation when it comes to Pence. And, although Ryan has publicly endorsed Trump, he has done so with all the enthusiasm of a man en route to a colonoscopy. Paul Ryan likes him. **These days, the forty-six-year-old Speaker of the House is the most influential establishment Republican. That might not help him much with Republican voters-the primaries made it clear that they don’t necessarily agree with the establishment line on many issues-but it will make it easier for Trump to mount a national campaign. Selecting Pence, a former head of the Republican Study Group on Capitol Hill, sends a signal that Trump is willing to work with the Party establishment and listen to what it says. But, since he won the nomination, it has become patently obvious that he doesn’t have a campaign operation of his own to speak of, which means that he is depending on the Party apparatus, and especially the Republican National Committee, to raise money, organize the Convention, and put together a ground game. Establishment Republicans like him. **As my colleague Ryan Lizza pointed out months ago, Trump’s victory in the primaries represented a hostile takeover of the Republican Party. Although his ardent social conservatism may turn off some people in the suburbs of Detroit and Cincinnati, he can claim to be a Midwesterner through and through. That left Pence, who runs the most staunchly Republican state in the region. And no one in Michigan or Pennsylvania was particularly suitable, either. ![]() Nor did Rob Portman, the Ohio senator who served in the Bush Administration, or Scott Walker, the governor of Wisconsin. To this end, his ideal choice would have been John Kasich, the popular governor of Ohio, but Kasich didn’t want the job. ![]() He’s a Midwesterner. **Further to my previous point, Trump’s only realistic, or semi-realistic, chance of getting to two hundred and seventy electoral votes is to storm through the Midwest and the Rust Belt, racking up huge majorities of white votes. As Rudy Giuliani found out in 2008, and as Christie himself discovered in this year’s primaries, many Republicans who inhabit the far-off regions of the famous Saul Steinberg drawing tend not to warm to brash products of the metropolitan area on the Presidential ticket. Plus, he hails from just across the Hudson River, which means he’d be a liability from a geographical perspective. And, with the Bridgegate scandal still rumbling on, Christie is an opposition researcher’s delight. He’s not Chris Christie. **Many of the potential problems with picking Gingrich also apply to the New Jersey governor, who is loud and domineering, and has an equally dismal approval rating: thirty-four per cent, according to Gallup. The last time Gallup surveyed Gingrich’s approval numbers, in 2012, he had a favorability rating of twenty-six per cent. (My colleague Amy Davidson has more on that story.) For Trump, indeed, about the only benefit of having the former Speaker on the ticket would have been to make his lowly approval rating-35.5 per cent, according to the Huffington Post’s poll average-look better. As Gingrich demonstrated on Thursday night, with his call for American Muslims to be subjected to a Sharia-law test, he’s not one of nature’s number twos. ![]() The running mate’s role is to support and amplify the boss’s message, not to usurp it. (No, Lowry didn’t use those exact words.) But that wouldn’t have been a smart move. He’s not Newt Gingrich. **The other day Rich Lowry, the editor of National Review, argued that, since Trump is running a media campaign, he might as well double down by selecting Gingrich, a fellow blowhard who can’t resist appearing on television. History suggests that Vice-Presidential candidates don’t make much, if any, difference to the outcome of Presidential elections, but here are some reasons why, from Trump’s perspective, Pence was the best bet: Over the past couple of months, Donald Trump hasn’t done much right, but in picking Mike Pence, the staunchly conservative governor of Indiana, as his running mate, he probably made a wise choice. ![]() In picking Mike Pence, the staunchly conservative governor of Indiana, as his running mate, Donald Trump probably made a wise choice. ![]()
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