In 2016, Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump, left, and Indiana vice presidential candidate Mike Pence, celebrate after receiving the Republican nomination for president at the Republican National Convention in Cleveland.
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Christopher Evans / MediaNews Group / Boston Herald via Getty Images
Over the past year, the process in which the two major political parties choose their presidential candidates has opened with little, if any, suspense. Still, the consequences of the presidential election – not to mention the drama and signs of this particular election – are forcing the attention of voters and media alike.
But just a few weeks ago, many were focused on the process of choosing a vice presidential candidate. One reason is simple: There is no such process. Or at least a process that the public can watch.
We have dozens of primaries and caucuses and spend hundreds of millions of dollars on frantic campaigns for the “top of the ticket”. In contrast, we spend relatively little or nothing on the other half of the ticket.
This is because the bottom half is only chosen by the top half. Presidential candidates decide on a “running mate” and it is rare that there is no significant opposition at the party convention where the nominees become official (in order to secure ballot access in each state).
Sometimes, the primaries have been the winner and the runner-up who are the running pair. That happened when Sen. John Kerry, the Democratic candidate in 2004, chose Sen. John Edwards was vice president. More often than not, though, if a nominee has a choice, that choice is from a major competitor who has done well in the pack.
This happened when Barack Obama nominated Joe Biden in 2008. The two senators from Illinois and Delaware went on to win. But in choosing Biden, Obama bypassed another senator, Hillary Clinton of New York, who had given him a long and hard fight for the nomination and was close to him in the primary vote.
Eight years later, Clinton herself did the same when she passed Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont, who was elected by about 40% of the delegates at the convention. He chose another senator, Tim Kaine of Virginia, who has yet to enter the primaries.
Former President Donald Trump, when he was first nominated in 2016, ignored his main rival and instead reached out to Mike Pence, the governor of Indiana.
We’ve let our top dogs do the barking until now we hardly notice them anymore. It will happen again this year, but there’s a good chance more people will see it. That’s because the sole decider on the Republican side is Trump, someone we can all agree has brought a certain show business flair to politics.
Enter the playwright
Trump knows that his choice of running mate has become a truly suspenseful element of the campaign in this phase. And they sure know how to milk a moment.
It is possible, if not likely, that he will milk it all the way to Milwaukee next month and have the final four (or some other number) on the stage during the prime presentation of the time of the convention. Perhaps everyone will be given a chance to speak. Then, one can imagine, maybe there will be suspense and drama lights and Trump can put his hand – figuratively or not – on his anointed shoulder.
This may seem above or beyond the pale, the takeover of historic events by reality TV theater. Until Bill Clinton appeared midweek in New York in 1992, it was considered poor form for the nominee to even come to the convention hall until the final night for his acceptance speech. Until 1932, when Franklin Roosevelt flew to Chicago to accept the first nomination, the nomination did not appear at the convention.
But this will not be an ordinary or archaic convention. This is going to be a Trump show. And if you look back at the first night of Trump’s convention in Cleveland in 2016 – the way the lights and music were used to bring him on stage that first night – the understanding of apprentice-like a “game show” in Milwaukee seems less far-fetched.
Criteria and impact walking mate
Our system has long absorbed the lesson that the vice president is elected by the general public for effectdespite all the rhetoric about people being “the most qualified people” to be “heartbeats”.
The presence of the vice president’s office has often been viewed as an appendage, which the Founders thought of. If there is a kind of defect in the system, it has most often been solved by believing in luck.
Why don’t Americans seem more interested in who will be working as number two in the federal government?
The answer has to do with power. Because the vice president of the United States, No. For this reason, its first occupant, John Adams, called the office “the least important office that man or his imagination can ever hold.”
Subsequent occupants of non-colorful offices usually only matter if they become president themselves, or if they make a measurable or tangible difference to the outcome of the year in which they are nominated.
The latter incidents have been few and far between. John F. Kennedy would not have won the Electoral College in 1960 without the state of Texas, and it is hard to see him winning that state without his native son Lyndon Johnson as his running mate. So, the ticket only won the national general election by about 100,000.
In 1972, Democratic candidate George McGovern, a senator from South Dakota and a leading critic of the Vietnam War, was unlikely to unseat President Richard Nixon that fall. But what chance has been ruined when his running mate, Sen. Thomas Eagleton of Missouri, left the ticket after revelations about electro-shock therapy for depression.
There have been vice presidential candidates that have helped and hurt. Sarah Palin, then governor of Alaska, was the first woman on the national ticket in the GOP. He lit up the 2008 convention and attracted a large crowd, often upstaging the presidential nominee, Senator John McCain of Arizona. But in the end, Palin’s lack of experience and problematic media questions seemed to cost the ticket weak among swing voters.
There was also great excitement in 1984 when a Democratic member of Congress from New York, Geraldine Ferraro, became the first woman to be named to the national ticket by a major party. But here again, the skyrocket seems to come to Earth during summer until fall. And the difficulty of overcoming a popular incumbent, in this case Republican Ronald Reagan, is far too great. Democrats lost 49 states that year, as they had in 1972.
In 2020, former Vice President Joe Biden, the Democratic presidential candidate, and Sen. Democratic vice presidential candidate Kamala Harris wears a protective mask as she holds hands next to Jill Biden, left, outside the Chase Center during the Democratic National Convention in Wilmington, Del.
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Who will it be? And when?
Trump has whittled the odds down to half a dozen — or a dozen, or eight, depending on which news you believe. He said he had a “good idea” who the winner would be. But he also said he would wait until the convention for the Big Reveal, telling TV host Phil McGraw: “I feel 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 a tradition for non-incumbent presidential candidates to use “one big question” to drum up interest in otherwise tense party meetings. But it is considered necessary to prepare the media and delegates at least before the event.
This is the case for current Vice President Kamala Harris in 2020 and for Trump’s No. 2 Pence in 2016, both announced a few days before the debut on the national ticket. Trump appears to be reaching out to elements of the party who, like Pence, support Texas Senator Ted Cruz (who has yet to endorse Trump at the convention).
Biden announced that Harris was the only party to start a virtual convention in the summer of COVID in August 2020. Biden had the nomination amid the peace of the party, but several months earlier, Biden had committed to naming a woman for the ticket and showed a strong inclination towards women of color.
There has always been some speculation about changing running mates for the re-election campaign, but there has been no serious attempt to unseat Pence or Harris in the re-election cycle. (However, Pence lost to Trump on the 2020 election results certification 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 ticket after a term in office was in 1944. (Franklin Roosevelt, on his way to winning a fourth term in the fall, had a liberal vice president at the time named Henry Wallace. Southern conservative senators, concerned about FDR’s frail health, planning to dissolve and replace him with Sen. Harry Truman of Missouri.)
In the 80 years and 20 presidential cycles since then, we’ve seen quite a few vice presidents become party newcomers at the top of the ticket. This happened when some were still vice presidents: in 1960 (Richard Nixon), 1968 (Hubert Humphrey), 1988 (George HW Bush) and 2000 (Al Gore). And we have also seen the vice president rise to the presidency in the mid-term and run as an incumbent, as a presidential candidate, as happened in 1964 (Johnson) and 1976 (Gerald Ford).
Some vice presidents have left the office and become private citizens and then mounted successful campaigns for the party’s nomination for president, as Joe Biden did in 2020. Walter Mondale did this in 1984 and Nixon in 1968.
Overall, 15 of the 45 people who have served as president became first vice president. Nine went directly to the top job due to the death or resignation of a previous president, and four of those nine were later elected to office themselves.
Some of the people who rose to the Oval Office in the 20th century have gone on to become some of the most memorable White House leaders of the era, including Truman, Johnson and Theodore Roosevelt.
So whether the choice of vice president seems marginal or monumental, it is undeniably one of the most important decisions made in American politics.
What makes it all the more shocking is that we leave the decision up to the deliberations and mental gymnastics of a single politician.
