Why Arizona’s Mark Kelly could end up being Kamala Harris’s response to JD Vance

A first-term senator from Arizona, on paper, sounds like a perfect foil against a junior senator from Ohio, at least as running mates go.

With Kamala Harris ascending to the rank of presumptive Democratic nominee and nobody in her party apparently willing to challenge her for the nomination now that Joe Biden has dropped out of the race, all eyes have turned to Harris’s selectionof a potential running mate ahead of her party’s convention in August.

Reporting of her selection process consumed much of the latter half of last week, her first at the top of the Democratic ticket. According to various outlets, the first female, Black vice president is looking at a list of (for lack of a better term) white guys as she seeks “balance” on the 2024 ticket and, importantly, an ally who can deliver a major swing state for her side. Essentially, she’s looking for a better option than her rival Donald Trump picked — a celebrity senator from a state he is virtually guaranteed to win, whose unfavorables have climbed since his nomination and whose past comments have forced his campaign on the defensive as they are unearthed by the press.

Enter Mark Kelly. The astronaut-turned-senator is reportedly on the shortlist of running mate finalists, along with a few others like Minnesota’s Tim Walz and Pennsylvania’s Josh Shapiro. Kelly hails from an important swing state — Arizona in his case, which was one of the Biden campaign’s surprise pickups in 2020. A win in that state would be an important step in preventing Donald Trump from reaching 270 electoral votes, and a member of the state’s congressional delegation on the ticket could theoretically boost Harris’s profile.

But Kelly’s importance on this factor is where his usefulness, at least in