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Notes -
I'm not sure you can call it DEI, in the sense of being non-meritocratic. Harris isn't planning to pick a midwestern white guy because she believes that midwestern white guys are unfairly underrepresented or suffer discrimination or she believes that x% of politicians should be midwestern white guys because of vague equity reasons.
She's planning to pick him because she thinks it will help her win, and helping her win is the VP candidate's only job (at least before the election). In that sense, she's trying to pick the most qualified candidate.
Now of course there are cases of quotas where 'representation' may actually be part of the role, even if it isn't exactly part of the job's day to day tasks. For example, in Northern Ireland the police force had quotas for Catholic recruits in order to get rid of the (basically correct) perception that the force was a protestant militia. This is very different from the recent case with air traffic controllers.
When people criticise DEI quotas, the criticism is usually directed towards the latter and much less towards the former. Having a police force that is trusted by the majority ethnic group or having a ticket that wins an election are far more sympathetic aims than getting (percentage) of (demographic) in (industry) for unproven assertions that (industry) would be exactly (percentage)(demographic) without claimed discrimination.
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