How to Spot Joe Biden’s VP Pick in Advance [UPDATED]
If past history is any guide, Senator Kamala Harris is going to be Joe Biden’s pick as his vice presidential running mate. And by past history, I mean, how often her Wikipedia page has been edited in the last SIX weeks.
Um, but if you only look at the last three weeks of edits, it’s going to be former Obama national security advisor Susan Rice.
Or, if you want to assume only the latest edits are the tell-tale signs, the winner of the VP sweepstakes might be Sen. Tammy Duckworth.
Yes, it’s time for the quadrennial guessing game known as “Who will be VP?” and this year, while most of the rituals of the presidential nominating process have been demolished by the pandemic, there’s been a robust competition for the office once described by FDR’s Vice President John Nance Garner as “not worth a bucket of warm piss.”
I would append to that statement that predictions about who will be picked as VP are probably worth even less than a bucket of warm piss. That said, in 2008 and 2012, eagle-eyed tech-and-politics junkies discovered a tell, a way to get an advance tip-off on the likely winner of said bucket: Wikipedia edits.
Days before Alaska Governor Sarah Palin was announced in 2008 as John McCain’s running mate, her Wikipedia page was edited more than 100 times, as the Washington Post reported after the fact. Other better known Republicans whose names were in the running, like Mitt Romney, Kay Bailey Hutchinson and Tim Pawlenty, saw far fewer edits. The same flurry of late edits took place on Joe Biden’s Wikipedia page before he was named by Barack Obama as his running mate. Before the public heard the news, someone — presumably a campaign staffer or two — was given the job of polishing their Wikipedia pages.
In early August 2012, remembering this obscure and ultimately meaningless piece of political trivia, I did about 15 minutes of digging and discovered that then-Congressman Paul Ryan of Wisconsin had seen a modest surge (let’s call it a burplet) of edits on his Wikipedia page for the previous week, surpassing Marco Rubio, Rob Portman and Bobby Jindal by single digits. Armed with this convincing piece of information, I wrote for techPresident.com, a news-site I used to edit, “if Wikipedia changes offer any hint of what’s coming, then today might be a good day to bet on Ryan.” Smartly, I covered my bet, noting that Ryan’s page wasn’t getting nearly as many page-views as the others.
Somehow, probably because it was the summer news doldrums, my little story made its way into the brain of a Fox News producer, who took note of Wikipedia’s predictive power on Palin, and from there the story jumped into the greasy palms of Stephen Colbert, who gleefully urged his viewers to go to town editing the pages of their favorite VP candidates. Soon thereafter, Wikipedia’s editors locked all their pages. Game over.
(In 2016, I don’t remember caring who Hillary Clinton or Donald Trump was going to pick as their VP. I think I was a bit more concerned about the possibility that Trump might win the White House. I still think that’s a much more important thing to pay attention to!)
With all that in mind, I share my findings. In the first three weeks of July, the VP contender with the most Wikipedia edits was Senator Harris, with 272. In a distant second was Rep. Tammy Duckworth, whose page had been edited 97 times in the first three weeks of the month. Susan Rice, another top VP contender according to the prediction markets, saw her page edited 51 times in all in the first three weeks of July. Senator Elizabeth Warren was edited just a lonely 13 times in all during that period.
Biden-Harris. That has a pleasing ring to it, yes?
Maybe! But in the following three weeks, to present, Susan Rice’s Wikipedia page has gotten more attention, a total of 151 edits. Rep. Karen Bass of California, who has been the subject of much press speculation of late, got 135. Harris has had 128 edits during the same period.
And if the last few days are the indicator, a late break towards Sen. Tammy Duckworth could be the clue. So, go figure.
