It’s Veepstakes season! Or at least, it would be in a normal campaign. One with a normal out-party nominee who wasn’t campaigning as an authoritarian in between breaks from courtroom appearances.
Republicans obviously don’t have that kind of nominee, to say the least. Yes, it’s true as Sean Trende says in his Veepstakes item this week that Trump’s selection of Mike Pence in 2016 was an excellent one by all normal standards…but it’s also among the decisions that Trump presumably regrets the most, what with Pence turning out to be more loyal to the law and the Constitution than he was to Trump.
Indeed, if the question is who Trump will pick, as opposed to who he should pick, I’ve always thought the underrated possibility is some yahoo we haven’t heard of yet who he happens to see on Fox News or one of the loonier cable news channels the day before he has to decide. Maybe some state legislator, or secretary of state, or perhaps even someone who committed violence against Trump’s opponents and is seeking (or already received) a pardon.
Or…Hell, if some random rich person offered him say $5 million for the slot, what do you think Trump would do?
I’m not predicting something like that will happen. Just saying the chances of it are underrated by all those speculating about more normal potential candidates.
As for Pence last time: It’s worth remembering that Trump’s hold on the nomination in spring 2016, between the end of the primaries and the beginning of the convention, was still somewhat precarious – as was his ability to appeal to core Republican constituencies in the general election. Pence helped solve both those problems. Neither of which really exists for Trump this time around. And he appears to blame normal Republicans – a category which includes a lot of very conservative, very partisan, politicians – for all sorts of things.
Again, no predictions. Maybe he winds up with a conventional pick, regardless, maybe because someone conventional flatters him sufficiently that he’ll be convinced they’re really a Trump loyalist. Just…don’t count on it.
For normal nominees, my advice is always to be risk-averse. The evidence that a good VP pick can actually help the nominee, except perhaps marginally in the running mate’s home state, is extremely limited. But failed picks can hurt the campaign, or the presidency, or are just a headache no one wants.
Fortunately, there’s a relatively easy formula to avoid a failed pick – a list that in the modern era includes Richard Nixon in 1952. Spiro Agnew in 1968, Tom Eagleton in 1972, Gerry Ferraro in 1984, Dan Quayle in 1988, and Sarah Palin in 2000.1 It’s simple: None of them had received the vetting that presidential candidates typically undergo. Of course, plenty of perfectly adequate VP selections had never run for president, such as Pence and Tim Kaine in 2016. But none of the previous presidential candidates – Hubert Humphrey in 1964, George H.W. Bush in 1980, Jack Kemp in 1996, Joe Biden in 2008, Kamala Harris in 2020, and more – can fairly be classified as a failure.2
What this suggests is that presidential nominees should choose from a relatively short list. In Trump’s case now, that would include Nikki Haley and Ron DeSantis, Marco Rubio and Ted Cruz, and several others. Granted, figuring out who counts as having run for president can be very tricky, but for this purpose what matters is pretty simple; what counts is surviving the vetting involved in national media coverage. The more the better.
Not all of those who pass the national campaign test would be good choices; for one thing, it’s possible that the reason they weren’t nominated in the first place (and therefore are available for the number two slot now) is that they didn’t do well in their presidential runs. Overall, however, that doesn’t seem to be true, as the cases of Biden and Gore indicate, both of them having not done well at all as presidential candidates prior to their selections).
But overall I’d suggest paying a lot less attention to advancing narratives or other such nebulous ideas and just concentrate on doing no harm.
One more serious consideration: All of this assumes that good candidates would want the job. In fact, one could make a pretty good case that the very fact of wanting to be Donald Trump’s running mate should automatically be a disqualification on the grounds of extreme foolishness. After all, Trump’s last running mate was last seen running a sub-Quayle attempt at this cycle’s nomination – and before that, he was hiding from a mob summoned by his boss to quite literally string him up, with some evidence that he also feared that if he followed Secret Service instructions something dire would result.
Yet we know that lots of ambitious Republicans are angling for a chance at going through the same dangers. Ambition is good! But while some of them may be true believers who see no chance that they’ll ever break with Trump, I suspect a lot of them have told themselves that they’re just smarter than Pence was, and that they would be able to navigate four (or more?) years as Trump’s vice-president without having to choose between, say, the constitution or their personal safety.
In other words, a bunch of fools.
Each of which was dropped, came close to being dropped, or resigned the vice-presidency.
It’s tricky, because when the nominee loses it’s likely that every choice will look bad in hindsight; if the nominee wins, the running mate becomes vice president, and almost all vice presidents look pretty bad while they’re in office, often become figures of ridicule. But with Nixon, Agnew, Palin et al. there was more to it than just looking bad or seeming to be a poor choice.