A look at past vice presidential picks and how Trump could do itExBulletin

In 2016, Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump, left, and his running mate, Indiana Governor Mike Pence, celebrate after accepting the Republican nomination for president at the Republican National Convention in Cleveland. Christopher Evans/MediaNews Group/Boston Herald via Getty Images .

rock caption Christopher Evans/MediaNews Group/Boston Herald via Getty Images

Over the past year, the process by which the two major political parties choose their presidential candidates has unfolded with little, if any, suspense. Yet the aftermath of any presidential election, not to mention the drama and omens of this particular election, commands the attention of voters and the media.

Yet it's only in recent weeks that many of us have focused on the process of selecting the party's vice presidential nominees. One reason for this is simple: no such process exists. Or at least no process that the public can follow.

We hold dozens of primaries and caucuses and spend hundreds of millions of dollars in a frantic campaign to get the top spot. On the other hand, we spend relatively little, if anything, on the other half of that ticket.

This is because the bottom half is simply selected by the top half. The presidential candidate decides his running mate and there is rarely significant resistance to this at the party convention where the candidates become official (thus guaranteeing access to the ballot in each state).

Sometimes primaries have featured a winner and a runner-up who became running mates. This was the case when Senator John Kerry, the Democratic candidate in 2004, chose fellow Senator John Edwards as his running mate. More often than not, though, if a candidate has a choice, the choice comes from primary rivals who finished far back in the pack.

This was the case when Barack Obama chose Joe Biden in 2008. Both senators from Illinois and Delaware ultimately won. But in choosing Biden, Obama left out another senator, Hillary Clinton of New York, who gave him a long, hard fight for the nomination and nearly matched him in primary votes.

Eight years later, Clinton herself did much the same thing by knocking out Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont, the choice of about 40 percent of the convention delegates. She chose another senator, Tim Kaine of Virginia, who had not participated in the primary.

Former President Donald Trump, when first nominated in 2016, completely ignored his primary rivals and instead reached out to then-Indiana governor Mike Pence.

We've let the best dog bark for so long that we hardly notice it anymore. That will be the case again this year, but there's a chance more people will notice. That's because the only decision maker on the Republican side is Trump, a man who we can all agree has brought a certain show business flair to politics.

Enter the showman

Trump knows that the choice of his vice-presidential candidate has become the only truly suspenseful element of the campaign at this point. And he sure knows how to milk for a moment.

It's possible, even likely, that he'll travel all the way to Milwaukee next month and have the final four (or another act) on stage during the convention's prime-time presentation. Maybe we would each give them a chance to express themselves. And then, one imagines, there could be more suspense and dramatic lighting and Trump could put his hands, figuratively or not, on the shoulders of his anointed.

It may seem exaggerated or implausible, a takeover of a historic event by reality TV rooms. Until Bill Clinton showed up midweek in New York in 1992, it was considered bad form for a candidate to even come to the convention hall until the final evening for an acceptance speech. Until 1932, when Franklin Roosevelt flew to Chicago to accept his first nomination, candidates did not appear at the convention at all.

But this will not be an ordinary or old-fashioned convention. It will be a Trump show. And if you look back at the first night of the Trump convention in Cleveland in 2016 and how the lights and music were used to bring him on stage on the first night, the notion of an Apprentice-style game show in Milwaukee seems less far-fetched.

Criteria and impacts of running mates

Our system has long internalized the lesson that vice presidents are chosen largely for effect, despite all the rhetoric about someone being the most qualified person to be a heartbeat away.

The very existence of the position of vice president has often been seen as an appendage, an afterthought of the founding fathers. If this is some sort of flaw in the system, it has most often been fixed by trusting in luck.

Why don't Americans seem more interested in who is vying for the second-highest job in the federal government?

The answer has to do with power. Because the vice-president of the United States, the number 2 who would replace a deceased person, has almost no real authority in other circumstances. That is why its very first occupant, John Adams, called it the most insignificant office that man's invention ever conceived or his imagination ever conceived.

Later occupants of this relatively colorless position have generally only mattered if they subsequently became president themselves, or if they made a measurable or obvious difference in the outcome in the year of their appointment .

Cases of the latter are rare. John F. Kennedy would not have won the Electoral College in 1960 without the state of Texas, and it is difficult to see him winning the state without his son Lyndon Johnson as his running mate. As it stands, this list only prevailed in the national popular vote by about 100,000 votes.

In 1972, Democratic candidate George McGovern, a South Dakota senator and leading critic of the Vietnam War, was unlikely to ever unseat incumbent President Richard Nixon that fall. But his chance was seriously damaged when his running mate, Senator Thomas Eagleton of Missouri, abandoned his candidacy after revelations about his electroshock therapy for depression.

There have been vice presidential candidates who have both helped and hurt. Sarah Palin, then-governor of Alaska, was the first woman on the national GOP ticket. She kicked off the 2008 convention and drew huge crowds, often overshadowing presidential candidate Sen. John McCain of Arizona. But ultimately, Palin's lack of experience and problematic media interviews seemed to cost undecided voters ground.

There was also considerable enthusiasm in 1984 when a Democratic congresswoman from New York, Geraldine Ferraro, became the first woman nominated to a national ticket by a major party. But then again, the surge seemed to happen on Earth as summer stretched into fall. And the difficulty of defeating a popular incumbent president, in this case Republican Ronald Reagan, was far too great. That year, Democrats lost 49 states, the same as in 1972.

In 2020, former Vice President Joe Biden, Democratic presidential candidate, and Senator Kamala Harris, Democratic vice presidential candidate, wear protective masks while holding hands next to Jill Biden, in left, in front of the Chase Center during the Democratic National Convention in Wilmington, Del. . Stefani Reynolds/Bloomberg via Getty Images ..

. Stefani Reynolds/Bloomberg via Getty Images Who will it be? And when?

Trump has narrowed his plethora of possibilities down to a half-dozen, a dozen, or even eight, depending on which news you believe. He says he has a pretty good idea who the winner will be. But he also says he'll probably wait until the convention for the Big Reveal, telling TV host Phil McGraw: I think that's pretty normal.

Well, yes and no. Candidate #2 has generally been known for at least a few news cycles before the convention. It has almost become a tradition for a non-incumbent presidential candidate to use the one big issue to generate interest in a party gathering that has no other suspense. But it is considered necessary to prepare the media and delegates at least a little before the event.

This was the case for current Vice President Kamala Harris in 2020 and Trump's No. 2 in 2016, both announced days before their national debut. Trump was seen as reaching out to elements of the party who, like Pence, had supported Texas Senator Ted Cruz (who had not yet endorsed Trump at the convention).

Biden announced Harris had just started his virtual convention during the COVID summer of August 2020. Biden secured the nomination amid party peace, but months earlier Biden had pledged to name a woman on the ticket and had shown strong inclinations toward a woman of color.

There is always speculation about replacing the vice presidential candidate in a re-election campaign, but no serious effort has been made to unseat Pence or Harris in their re-election cycle. (Pence, however, fell out 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 ticket after one term was in 1944. (Franklin Roosevelt, poised to win a fourth term this fall, had a vice president at the time). liberal president named Henry Wallace (Senators, concerned about FDR's failing health, engineered his ouster and replaced him with Senator Harry Truman of Missouri.)

Over the 80 years and 20 presidential cycles that followed, we have seen a number of vice presidents emerge as the party's new top man. This happened while 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 vice presidents ascend to the presidency midterm and run as incumbents, as presidential candidates, as was the case in 1964 (Johnson) and in 1976 (Gerald Ford).

Several vice presidents left office and became private citizens, then ran successful campaigns for the party's nomination for president, as Joe Biden did in 2020. Walter Mondale did in 1984 and Nixon in 1968.

Overall, 15 of the 45 people who have served as president first served as vice presidents. Nine of them rose directly to the top job due to the death or resignation of the previous president, and four of them were later elected to an independent term.

Many of those who ascended to the Oval Office in the 20th century are among the most memorable White House leaders of that period, including Truman, Johnson and Theodore Roosevelt.

So whether vice presidential choices seem marginal or prove monumental, they are undeniably among the most important decisions ever made in American politics.

It is therefore all the more surprising that we leave such decisions to the deliberations and mental gymnastics of a single politician.

Sources 1/ https://Google.com/ 2/ https://www.npr.org/2024/06/22/g-s1-5723/vice-president-trump-history The mention sources can contact us to remove/changing this article

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