Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump, left, and his running mate, Indiana Gov. Mike Pence, celebrate after accepting the Republican presidential nomination at the Republican National Convention in Cleveland in 2016.
Christopher Evans/Media News Group/Boston Herald via Getty Images
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Christopher Evans/Media News Group/Boston Herald via Getty Images
Over the past year, there has been no suspense in the selection of presidential candidates by the two major political parties. Still, the aftermath of any presidential election — not to mention the drama and portent of this particular election — will capture the attention of voters and the media.
Yet it’s only in recent weeks that many of us have begun paying attention to the process of selecting our party’s vice presidential nominee. The reason is simple: no such process exists. Or at least not one the public can watch.
We held dozens of primaries and caucuses and spent hundreds of millions of dollars on a frantic campaign to get the “top vote.” In comparison, we spent relatively little or nothing on the other half of the tickets.
This is because the lower half is simply selected from the upper half. The presidential nominee decides his or her “running mate,” and there is rarely any meaningful resistance at the party convention where the nominee becomes the official nominee (thus ensuring each state’s vote).
Sometimes primaries produce a winner and a runner-up who becomes the running mate. That was the case in 2004 when Democratic candidate Sen. John Kerry chose Sen. John Edwards to be his vice president. More often, however, if a nominee has a choice, he will choose from among his lower-ranked primary rivals.
That was the case in 2008 when Barack Obama selected Joe Biden. But in choosing Biden, Obama ignored another senator, Hillary Clinton of New York, who fought long and hard for his nomination and lost almost all of the primary votes. Be even with him.
Eight years later, Clinton himself did much the same thing, abandoning Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders when about 40 percent of the convention’s delegates chose him. She chose Virginia’s Tim Kaine, another senator who did not participate in the primary.
When former President Donald Trump first secured the nomination in 2016, he completely ignored his primary rival and instead reached out to then-Indiana Governor Mike Pence.
We’ve had the pack leader barking for so long that now we barely notice it anymore. It will happen again this year, but chances are more people will notice. That’s because the only decider on the Republican side is Trump, and we can all agree that he brings a certain showmanship to politics.
Performers appear
Trump knows his running mate choice has become a real suspense factor at this stage of the campaign. He sure knows how to milk a cow.
It’s possible, if not likely, that he’ll squeeze all the way to Milwaukee next month and put the final four (or some other number) on stage during the convention’s prime-time speech. Maybe each of them will have a chance to speak. Then, one imagines, there could be more suspense and dramatic lighting, and Trump could put his hand on the shoulder of his designated person — figuratively or not.
It seems a bit excessive or out of bounds, a reality TV show taking over a historic event. Before Bill Clinton’s midweek appearance in New York in 1992, it was considered impolite for a nominee to not come to the chamber until the last night to deliver an acceptance speech. The nominee did not attend the convention at all until 1932, when Franklin Roosevelt flew to Chicago to accept his first nomination.
But this won’t be a regular or old-fashioned conference. This will be a Trump show. If you look back at the first night of the Trump convention in Cleveland in 2016 – the way the lights and music were used to bring him to the stage that first night – apprentice-A “game show” like Milwaukee doesn’t seem so far-fetched.
Running Partner Criteria and Influence
Our system has long since learned the lesson that the vice president is largely elected for effectalthough people say that someone is “the most qualified person” and “only one step away from us.”
The existence of the Office of the Vice President is often treated as an addendum, an afterthought by the Founding Fathers. If this is a flaw in the system, it’s usually just luck.
Why do Americans seem more interested in who qualifies for the No. 2 job in the federal government?
The answer has to do with power. Because the vice president of the United States, the second-in-command to succeed the outgoing person, has little real power in any other situation. That’s why its first owner, John Adams, called it “the most insignificant office ever invented or imagined by man.”
Subsequent incumbents of this relatively colorless office typically make an impact only if they later become president themselves, or if they have some measurable or noticeable impact on the outcome in the year they are nominated.
Examples of the latter are rare. Without Texas, John F. Kennedy would not have won the 1960 Electoral College election without Texas’ son Lyndon Johnson as his running mate , he would also have a hard time winning the state. In fact, this ticket won the national popular vote by only about 100,000 people.
In 1972, Democratic candidate George McGovern, the South Dakota senator and leading critic of the Vietnam War, might never have unseated President Richard Nixon that fall. But his chances were severely damaged when his running mate, Sen. Thomas Eagleton of Missouri, dropped out of the race after revelations that he used electroshock therapy for depression.
Vice presidential nominees can both help and hurt. Sarah Palin, then the governor of Alaska, was the first woman on the Republican national ticket. She created a buzz at the 2008 convention and drew huge crowds that fall, often upstaging presidential candidate Arizona Sen. John McCain. But in the end, Palin’s inexperience and questionable media interviews seemed to cost swing voters their support.
There was also great excitement in 1984 when Geraldine Ferraro, a Democratic congressman from New York, became the first woman to be nominated as a national candidate by a major party. But here, as summer turns into fall, rockets seem to be coming to Earth again. And it would be too difficult to defeat a popular incumbent president, Republican Ronald Reagan. As in 1972, Democrats lost 49 states that year.
Former Vice President and Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden and Democratic vice presidential candidate Sen. Kamala Harris outside the Chase Center during the 2020 Democratic National Convention in Wilmington, Del. , wearing a protective mask, shakes hands with Jill Biden (left).
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Stephanie Reynolds/Bloomberg via Getty Images
Who is the one? when?
Trump narrowed his many possibilities down to six, or a dozen, or eight, depending on which news tease you believe. He said he had a “very clear idea” of who would be the winner. But he also said he might wait until the convention to make the big reveal, telling TV host Phil McGraw: “I think that’s normal.”
Well, yes and no. The No. 2 nominee is usually known for at least a few news cycles before the convention. It has become almost a tradition for non-incumbent presidential candidates to use “a big issue” to drum up interest in a party gathering where nothing else is on the line. But it was felt necessary to give the media and representatives at least a little preparation before the event.
That was the case with current Vice President Kamala Harris in 2020 and Trump’s No. 2 in 2016, both of whom announced just days before the national election. Trump is thought to be reaching out to Pence and other party figures who support Texas Sen. Ted Cruz (who has not yet endorsed Trump at the convention).
Biden announced that Harris’ party had just begun a virtual convention in August 2020 during the COVID-19 summer. , and showed a strong preference for women of color.
There was always some speculation about changing a reelection running mate, but there were no serious efforts to oust Pence or Harris during the reelection cycle. (Pence, however, feuded with Trump over the certification of the 2020 election results and, after ending his own bid for the 2024 nomination, said he would not vote for Trump this fall.)
The last time a sitting vice president was replaced on the national slate after his term ended was in 1944. .
In the following 80 years and 20 presidential cycles, we have seen many vice presidents become new leaders in the party. This happened while some men were still serving as vice president: 1960 (Richard M. Nixon), 1968 (Hubert Humphrey), 1988 (George H.W. Bush), and 2000 (Al Gore). We also see vice presidents ascend to the presidency in the midterms, running as incumbents and presidential candidates, as happened in 1964 (Johnson) and 1976 (Gerald Ford).
Several vice presidents have left office, become private citizens and later launched successful campaigns for their party’s presidential nomination, as Joe Biden did in 2020. Well, Nixon did it in 1968.
Overall, 15 of the 45 people who have served as president first served as vice president. Nine people were moved directly to the top job due to the death or resignation of the previous president, and four of those nine went on to be re-elected.
Several people who entered the Oval Office in the 20th century were some of the most memorable White House leaders of their time, including Truman, Johnson and Theodore Roosevelt.
So whether the vice presidential choices seem trivial or monumental, they are undoubtedly among the most important decisions in American political history.
What’s even more surprising is that we leave such decisions to the deliberation and mental gymnastics of a single politician.
