Vance or Harris: Can choosing a vice president help win the US election? | 2024 US Election News

Donald Trump on Monday selected Ohio Senator JD Vance as his Republican running mate in the US presidential election, following weeks of speculation over the real estate mogul and former president's choice.

On the opposing ticket is Kamala Harris, who is running alongside Democrat Joe Biden. Harris is the incumbent vice president who ran alongside Biden in 2020, when the California senator became the first Black woman and first Asian American to run on a major party presidential ticket.

Since Vance's announcement, analysts have pondered possible reasons why Trump might have chosen the former venture capitalist and author who, until a few years ago, was a vocal critic of the ex-president.

But does the choice of vice president really increase a presidential candidate's chances of winning the election? Al Jazeera has analyzed decades of election results, polls and analysis to find out.

Do Presidents Perform Better in the Vice President's Home State?

It's often a central consideration that political insiders cite in hopes that the vice presidential choice might help the ticket win their state.

However, researchers who have studied election results for decades say there is no evidence that this calculation is actually useful.

It's very rare to see a running mate win a particular state, Kyle Kopko, an assistant professor of political science at Elizabethtown College in Pennsylvania, told Al Jazeera.

Kopko has conducted extensive research and written on the electoral effect of running mates with Christopher Devine, a professor of political science at the University of Dayton.

In his research, Kopko found that vice presidents can mobilize more votes for presidential candidates if they come from a small state and have extensive political experience. That's not the case with J.D. Vance.

An example of such a running mate was Biden himself, when he served as former President Barack Obama's vice president in the 2008 and 2012 elections, Kopko said.

Biden is from Delaware, a small state with just three counties. He gained considerable political experience as a senator from Delaware, Kopko said.

But Delaware was already a fairly consistent Democratic state in the Electoral College.

How have presidents historically behaved in their vice-presidential state?

Although presidential candidates typically win elections in their running mates' home states, in recent decades they have almost always chosen vice presidents in states they were expected to win anyway, not in swing states.

When they chose vice presidential candidates from the states at stake, the results were mixed at best.

Consider 1960, when Democrat John F. Kennedy won Texas, the home state of his running mate Lyndon B. Johnson, with 50.5 percent of the vote.

Both Kennedy and Johnson said that without Johnson, Kennedy would not have made headway in the South. Kopko said that's where the myth of the vice president's home-state advantage comes from.

Democrats, who traditionally dominated Texas politics, had lost in the state in 1952 and 1956 and could have benefited from a boost. However, Kopkos' analysis of survey data from that election shows that Johnson was actually unpopular among voters in the state and could have hurt Kennedy in Texas. The race in the state was close, with Kennedy beating Richard Nixon by 2 percentage points.

In 1992 and 1996, Democrat Bill Clinton won Tennessee, his running mate Al Gore's home state. It was the first time Democrats had won Tennessee since 1964. But was Al Gore responsible for that victory? In 2000, when Gore was his party's presidential nominee, he lost in Tennessee to George W. Bush.

If Gore's 2000 defeat in Tennessee showed that presidential candidates are not guaranteed to win in their state, the same is true for vice presidential candidates.

In the 1968 election, while Republican Richard Nixon comfortably won the presidency, his Democratic opponent Hubert Humphrey won in Maryland, the home state of Nixon's vice president, Spiro Agnew.

What about the last few years? In 2020, Biden won California, Harris’ home state, with 63.5% of the vote. However, since 1992, a Democratic candidate has always won in California. Indiana Governor Mike Pence was Trump’s vice president, and Trump won the state with 57% of the vote. Since 1968, Republican candidates have won in Indiana in every election except 2008, when Democrat Obama won. In 2016, Trump, running with Pence, won Indiana with 57.2% of the vote. Hillary Clinton ran with Virginia Senator Tim Kaine for the Democratic Party. Clinton won Virginia with 50.2% of the vote. In 2012, Obama ran with Biden as his vice president and swept Delaware with 58.6% of the vote. Wisconsin Rep. Paul Ryan was Republican challenger Mitt Romney's running mate. Romney lost in Wisconsin, where Obama received 52.8 percent of the vote. In 2008, Obama won Delaware with 62 percent of the vote. His Republican opponent, John McCain, chose former Alaska Governor Sarah Palin to run with him. McCain won Alaska with 50 percent of the vote.

What do past polls tell us?

Even if presidential candidates perform slightly better in their running mate's home state, as some studies suggest, their overall national popularity appears largely unchanged.

In the last election, Biden announced Harris as his running mate on August 11, 2020.

According to the average of 2020 presidential election polls from polling platform FiveThirtyEights, Harris has not had a significant impact on Biden's popularity with voters.

In late February 2020, Biden and Trump were very close in the polls, with Biden only 3.8 percentage points ahead of his Republican challenger. That gap tripled to 9.5 percentage points by late June 2020, before Harris was named Biden's running mate.

On August 3, 2020, Biden had an 8.2-point lead, or 50.5%, to Trump's 42.3%. By August 24, polls had only slightly increased Biden's lead, to 51.4%.

For the 2016 election, Trump announced Mike Pence as his running mate on July 15, 2016, while his Democratic rival Clinton selected Kaine as his vice president on July 22, 2016.

The race between Trump and Hillary Clinton was tight on June 9, 2016, with Clinton leading by just 4 percentage points, according to the FiveThirtyEight national poll average that year. The gap narrowed further to 3.5 points on July 14, 2016.

On July 30, 2016, after the two vice presidents announced their candidacies, Clinton and Trump were neck and neck, with nearly identical poll numbers. However, the gap widened, and the percentage point difference between Clinton and Trump was greatest in August and September, peaking at 8.1 points during that period.

(Al Jazeera) Do vice presidents help presidential candidates perform better with certain demographic groups?

When Biden chose Harris as his running mate, analysts predicted it would boost support for Biden among black voters.

A poll conducted by Northwestern University's Center for the Study of Diversity and Democracy in the summer of 2020 found that 57% of African Americans said they would be more likely to vote for Biden if he chose an African American woman as his vice president.

After the election, a CBS exit poll showed that 90% of black women voters supported Biden. However, black women made up only 9% of the sample of 15,285 respondents.

Kopko said his analysis found little evidence that vice presidents improved votes among specific groups of voters.

For example, he said, there was little statistical evidence that Geraldine Ferraro, Democratic nominee Walter Mondale's running mate in 1984, or Sarah Palin, John McCain's vice presidential pick in 2008, were able to mobilize women voters for their tickets, even though both were popular among women voters in opinion polls.

In fact, a Pew Research Center report analyzing the 2020 election results showed that Trump made gains with women voters, winning 44% of the female vote, up from 39% in 2016. And this was in a year when Harris was on the opposing ticket and Trump had Pence as his running mate.

What other factors do presidential candidates consider?

If presidential candidates aren't choosing their running mates based on their ability to swing key states or because they can attract demographic groups that might not otherwise vote for them, what other factors are at play?

Kopko said some presidents choose a vice president who aligns with their political beliefs to reinforce their policy agenda with voters. He said that while it is difficult to determine Trump's overall motivation behind choosing Vance, he speculated that Trump chose Vance because he would be easier to work with if Trump won the election, since their policy priorities overlap.

There could also be another reason. In this third presidential campaign, Trump finds himself facing a number of Republicans who challenged him in 2016, 2020 or 2024, before siding with the Republicans and saying yes to them.

Vance, though a former Trump critic, has never run against him in an election.

JD Vance was not running for president. He was not attacking Trump during the campaign, Kopko said.

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