Nothing — and I mean nothing — better captures the DC chattering class at its speculative worst than the Veepstakes. And that’s saying something. It’s not just that most of the speculation is baseless. And it’s not that most of it is utterly inane. It’s that, from an electoral standpoint, it just doesn’t matter. As I’ve mused about before, it’s entirely possible that the effects of VP selection on the election outcome is normally zero, except in cases of extreme blunder. As is the case with so many things like this, the best places to read about the Veepstakes are at the political science blogs, where the Veepstakes-type articles are set aside (or at least toned down) and people are thinking about this institutionally. Andrew Gellman had a nice quick post the other day; Jon Bernstein has been making a series of smart points on the topic. Here’s what I’d add to the discussion, which I promise is devoid of Veepstakes conjecture.
People tend to forget that both sides get to pick a vice-presidential candidate, and therefore the potential advantage gained is not an absolute, but instead a net, number. If I can get Henry Clay below me on my ticket, that’s pretty awesome. But not if you have Ulysses S. Grant on yours. And so while you obviously want to maximize the marginal positive effect of your candidate, you have to accept that the actual overall effect is going to be highly dependent on a choice over which you have no control. So most of the time you are best off just picking someone ultra safe and vetted, and hoping that your opponent makes a major mistake. But don’t get your hopes up. Yes, your opponent can screw up (i.e. Palin 2008), but it takes a pretty darn egregious vetting error. There are just far too many people who pass the “bad choice, poor candidate, but not enough voters care to make the net advantage a marginal difference in the election” test. It’s just really tough to make the direct electoral value-added argument when you are talking about a few percentage points — at most — in one or two states. And again, that’s as a net effect balanced against the few percentage points in some other state that your opponent is grabbing.
In fact, I don’t think it’s crazy to suggest that VP selection has never altered the binary outcome of the presidential election in the United States. This isn’t to say that picks haven’t been made with the thought that they might cover the difference. (The GOP in 1864 comes instantly to mind, when they replaced a moderate but absolutely orthodox anti-slavery Republican from Maine, Hannibal Hamlin, with a War Democrat from Tennessee, Andrew Johnson.) The point is that the marginal net effect of [the winning VP candidate minus the losing VP candidate] has probably never put a ticket over the top. Or at least there’s no proof it has. As it turned out, Lincoln didn’t need a War Democrat on the ticket to get over the top in ’64. And everyone likes to say that LBJ delivered the South in 1960, but it’s not an obvious case: Kennedy did worse in the South than Stevenson had done in ’56, so the logic only holds if you can demonstrate that either LBJ radically minimized the segregationist/anti-catholic flight to Byrd or that Nixon was poised to win electoral votes the deep south ex ante in ’60. I’m more than happy to listen, but I’m skeptical on both counts.
Of course, there are other, indirect considerations that might make the choice important. VP candidates could be awesome fundraisers. Or come with great organizational setups and connections. Or be incredible persuasive when assembling interest coalitions. But there’s no reason to think anyone has all that much of a comparative advantage on any of these dimensions, regardless of the absolute magnitude of the effect such advantages might convey on their own (which, I think, is quite small anyway). And, yes, there are clear secondary electoral reasons, too: VP candidates can satisfy wings of a party that are disgruntled with the presidential nominee, or they can play to ethnicity or race or gender or other ascriptive vote-getting techniques. And, of course, they can fill in policy or background voids of the candidate at the top of the ticket. But again, there’s no reason to believe these things add much, if anything, to the electoral strength of the ticket.
Still, there’s one situation in which a VP candidate can have a huge effect: if the President ends up dead. I don’t mean that as a joke. We’re in the 56th presidential term in the history of our nation. Eight out of the previous 55 have resulted in dead president (WHH, Taylor, Lincoln, Garfield, McKinley, Harding, FDR, Kennedy). That’s just under 15%. Over 16% if you add in Nixon’s resignation as a 9th instance (which, I think, is probably slightly different since the President’s decision to resign might be somewhat endogenous to the VP heir, but nonetheless completely defensible to include). The resulting Presidencies of those VP’s, I think, were mostly unlikely to occur on their own. There’s just no imaginable way that Andrew Johnson was going to end up President on his own accord, and I think that’s probably also true of Tyler, Arthur, Coolidge, and Truman. TR, LBJ, and Fillmore were certainly players in the game, but even they were far from likely future Presidents. And short of circumstance, Jerry Ford would have died a respected but mostly-forgotten Congressman from Michigan.
And, like all Presidents, those 9 men left their mark on the office and on the country. And to varying degrees, those marks were different than the marks that would have been left by a completed regular term of the dead president and the subsequent next few regular elections. In some cases vastly so. And thus to say that the selection of the VP is irrelevant, while certainly true in the instant electoral sense, is just plainly not true in the broader sense. Again, ask the Civil War Republicans. How many of them wish they had just sucked it up, taken the risk, and renominated the moderate, but strongly anti-slavery and definitely Republican, Hannibal Hamlin? I’ll tell you the answer: every last one of them. I’m pretty sure the Radicals would have taken Bill Buckley’s random draw from the Boston phone book over Johnson.
And this points us to a blind spot that political parties, I think, have in these circumstances: they overvalue the relative importance of the short-term electoral benefits from VP selection in contrast to the potential impact of the vice-president on the fortune of the party in the case of a dead president. There’s certainly merit in doing every last thing you can to maximize your chance of winning the next presidential election, but when taken to the extreme, you can end up in the Andrew Johnson situation. Granted, those were desperate times, an extreme example, and perhaps a justifiable move under circumstance. But the same rationale can be applied to any election. Unless you honestly believe that 2 percentage points in one state is going to make or break the election, you are probably better off picking a nominee who fits squarely into your ideological vision and whom you can see yourself backing in the next election. (This holds for a party and its activists, at least; I’m less certain about this from the point of view of an individual presidential candidate, although I think it still holds.)
Now, most current VP candidates fulfill this need. The GOP tends to pick VP candidates from the mainstream of their party, and the Democrats do likewise. But I think the typical party (and chattering class) goals — pick a person who “balances” the ticket, or adds some geographic pull, or shakes up the narrative — are wrongly prioritized over the more basic idea of picking someone who would be a competent President and a compelling leader for the party and its ideological goals if they were at the top of the ticket. Because there’s a serious chance — much higher than most people assign at any rate — of them actually being the President at some point in the following eight years. It seems to me the biggest VP selection mistakes are made precisely when the decision deviates from the dimension of “best president if it came to that.”
And that’s also why I try to never make “warm bucket of piss”*** jokes about the vice-presidency. It’s less apt than it appears. Unless you are a serious first-flight contender not in your virgin go-around, being vice-president is probably a more likely route to the Presidency than entering the party primaries. Which sort of explains why everyone makes fun of the vice-presidency, but people rarely turn down nomination to it.
***I refuse to use the sanitized “warm bucket of spit” line, since I think the evidence is clear than Garner said, and meant, “piss.” And the original is way funnier. This is politics, not children’s television, folks.
