Given all that, this might sting them a little bit. But there's little reason to believe it will hurt Clinton.

First, let's run through why some liberals don't love Kaine. Over at Wonkblog, Max Ehrenfruend details three issues on which Kaine could be a particular disappointment to the Warren/Sanders crowd: trade (he's generally pro-free trade), banking (he has suggested softening some Dodd-Frank regulations) and abortion (he is personally pro-life but votes pro-choice).

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That last one is particularly telling. Kaine's political rise took place in what was then a red state. Accordingly, he's taken some pretty nuanced positions over the years. On abortion, that meant pro-choice groups haven't always been onboard, and NARAL Pro-Choice America declined to endorse his 2005 campaign for governor, when his platform included reducing the number of abortions and upholding certain abortion restrictions.

But since joining the Senate in 2013, Kaine has had nothing but 100 percent ratings from NARAL and Planned Parenthood. And he has crafted a largely progressive record as a senator. Conservative groups Heritage Action, the Club for Growth and the American Conservative Union have given him a series of 0 percent ratings in recent years.

What does that mean? It means he hasn't really taken big votes that are dealbreakers for liberals. He might have some warts, but no tumors.

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And as Mother Jones recently reported, there is plenty in Kaine's record that will appeal to progressives — from his earliest days as a lawyer:

A reserved, polite Midwesterner, Kaine isn't temperamentally suited to satisfy liberals who want to see Donald Trump torn apart and his fellow billionaires demonized. Instead, Kaine is a devout Catholic driven by the gospel of social justice and less concerned with the social issues that have become political wedges. Over the course of his career, he has dedicated himself to incremental progress in a red-turned-purple state. In this way, Kaine bears a political resemblance to the candidate he might join on the Democratic ticket, sharing a political pragmatism focused on inching policy along and eschewing grand gestures. To those who accuse him of insufficient progressivism, he might respond that he is, as Clinton has called herself, "a progressive who gets things done."

The Clinton-Kaine comparison is a good one. Clinton has hardly been a true-believer, liberal champion over the course of her political career. She's a pragmatist. She was a late adopter on gay marriage. Her ties to Wall Street are well-established and will be chewed over plenty in the general election campaign. And she was for the Trans-Pacific Partnership as secretary of state before being against it as a presidential candidate. (Kaine has also expressed reservations about TPP, for what it's worth, and those should allow him to toe the ticket's line on this issue without his position looking too nakedly political.)

And not only is Clinton the candidate whom Democrats picked as their nominee, but she has also rallied Sanders supporters to her side rather quickly. Polls show more than 8 in 10 of them going to Clinton in a two-way matchup, with fewer than 1 in 10 going to Donald Trump.

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Indeed, Trump is such an unattractive alternative at this point that Clinton's VP pick probably never really mattered that much. People generally don't vote much on running mates, but in an election in which the two candidates are so polarizing, it seems likely it will be all about voting against the worse presidential nominee.

All of which suggests she didn't need to pick a Warren type as an olive branch to Sanders backers. It might have been nice to have a vice presidential pick that the left would get excited about in a way they're not excited about Clinton, but there was no obvious pick in that regard. Her history with Warren was just too uneven, and Sanders was never really a consideration.

Given the rest of her options, a Spanish-speaking former Christian missionary with plenty of progressive bona fides and a good reputation in Washington was a pretty obvious choice.

There could be a fair amount of griping on the left in the short-term — just as there were plenty urging Sanders to keep hope alive and saying that they would never, ever back Clinton.