When Veeps Lose

What the record tells us about where Kamala Harris is sitting.

It’s a long, long way from here to the first primaries in 2028. And yet you can be sure that candidates on the Democratic side are already in the preliminary stages of poking around and wondering whether they have what it takes to win the nomination that year.

Of course normal people want nothing to do with the 2028 election, and won’t until a long time from now. Even most primary voters, who are already a fairly small subset of the electorate as a whole, are unlikely to really engage until the weeks just before their state votes in winter or spring of the election year.

But the even smaller group of party actors — the politicians, campaign and governing professionals, formal party officials and staff, volunteers and donors, and party-aligned interest groups and the partisan media who together are the party network?They’re already thinking about it. Not only do many of them care very much who wins the nomination, but they also take part in the even more important re-definition of the party that it goes through when it makes nominations. That includes potential changes in policy positions and priorities; it also includes questions about other ways that various party groups will be represented, and how central they all are to the party as a whole.¹

I do urge people to focus on those questions more than on which candidate winds up as the nominee. But I also know that people naturally do care about the nominee. And for a while now the biggest questions will be about Vice President Kamala Harris. Will she run? If so, how strong a nomination candidate will she be?

So it does seem like a good time to run through the comps. Here’s the story of the other sitting vice-presidents to win the party’s nomination and then lose the the general election, and what happened next.

Until the mid-twentieth century, it basically didn’t happen. James Buchanan’s vice-president, John Breckinridge, won the southern part of the split Democratic Party’s nomination in 1860 and became a Confederate after losing to Abraham Lincoln, but that’s about it. Vice president just wasn’t a stepping stone to the presidency in most cases, unless they did it directly because the president died.

Indeed, no sitting vice-president was nominated for the big job, win or lose, from the Civil War until 1960. Richard Nixon had only served two years in the Senate from California (after four in the House) before he became Dwight Eisenhower’s running-mate in 1952, and he successfully captured the 1960 nomination only to lose narrowly to John Kennedy in 1960. Nixon then was defeated for Governor in California in 1962, passed on the 1964 presidential election, and returned and won the 1968 nomination and the election. Nixon had been a very young vice-president; he was only 56 when he took office in 1969.

Next up was Hubert Humphrey, who was vice-president when Nixon defeated him in the very close 1968 election. Humphrey then ran again for the nomination in 1972, and nearly won it despite starting late and failing to understand the brand-new reformed nomination system. As it was, Humphrey won the most primary votes of any candidate, and may well have won the nomination had he defeated George McGovern in the California primary that year – an early June contest McGovern only won by 5 percentage points.²

There’s only one more before Harris: Al Gore, who lost another extremely close election in 2000. Gore never ran again.³ Like Nixon, Gore was a young vice-president, so he was only 55 in 2004 and 59 in 2008. He certainly would have been a serious contender for the nomination in either of those years; while many candidates drop out after testing the waters because they found little interest, it seems more likely that Gore simply wasn’t willing to do it.

Just to be complete about it, a fifth sitting vice-president, George H.W. Bush in 1988, ran and won the nomination and the general election. Three former vice-presidents have run: Walter Mondale in 1984 won the nomination and was crushed in November, while Dan Quayle and Mike Pence dropped out of the nomination contest before the Iowa caucuses. But none of that gets to what we’re interested in here, which is Harris’s future after losing a general election as the sitting vice-president.

Again: None of this can tell us all that much. To the extent that the Nixon and Humphrey cases are predictive at all, we could guess that Harris would be a strong nomination candidate but short of a lock. What we know about Gore’s non-campaigns in 2004 and 2008 suggests the same. But would those cases actually tell us anything about the Democrats in 2028? There’s no way to know. Harris, at 60, is older than the other three when they lost as sitting vice-presidents. She had a flop of a presidential campaign before serving as vice-president; so did Humphrey and Gore. She didn’t have Humphrey’s credentials in the Senate, but neither did Gore or especially Nixon. The party will interpret the 2024 election however it does, but at least on the surface it doesn’t appear that Harris’s loss was any more or less impressive than Nixon’s in 1960 or Humphrey’s in 1968. Gore had the narrowest loss of the four (and won the total vote despite losing the Electoral College), but he also had the most popular president of the four. Very much more so than Johnson in 1968 or Joe Biden this year.⁴

There are a number of specifics to the 2028 nomination that will come into play, but at this point I’d caution against being too confident about them. For example, people are speculating that the Democrats will, as they did in 2020, try to nominate an Anglo man. Maybe so! But no one in 2020 deliberately wanted to nominate a 77-year-old; it just worked out that way. It’s too early to know for sure what 2028 Democrats will collectively want. Let alone what they will settle for.

So take all this, for now, for nothing more than what it is: The comparable cases. How it plays out this time? I’m not making any predictions.

1. With a normal second-term president, the same thing would be happening for the incumbent party, although probably more discretely at least for the next year or so. With this dysfunctional Republican Party, and with Donald Trump as the second-term president already “joking” about a third term? I have no idea how they’re going to proceed.

2. McGovern would still have had the most delegates after the primaries and caucuses, but not a majority and Humphrey was better positioned to win those who supported other candidates. It’s possible that an actual contested convention could have developed with some other candidate winning. Which reminds me of my favorite Watergate theory: The first break-in to the DNC was shortly before the California primary, at which point the nomination outcome was actually uncertain and, given the then-new process reforms, it wasn’t exactly clear how things would play out. In other words, it seems quite plausible to me that Nixon’s people broke into the DNC because at that particular moment it might have had useful information, even though that’s not often the case.

3. At least so far! He’s still younger than Joe Biden.

4. Similarly, I wouldn’t put any weight at all on Nixon’s general election win in 1968. Indeed, I just don’t think we can say much about candidates and general elections; the fundamentals of the election such as the economy, war and peace, and presidential popularity probably matter much more than anything about the candidates who are on the ballot.