The latest WaPo column from former Bush and Rumsfeld speechwriter Marc A. Thiessen asserts, “A sitting VP has won once in 188 years. Harris isn’t likely to be next.” It is an exercise in wishful thinking around a factoid.
The Democrats are coming out of their Chicago convention brimming with confidence. But to win in November, Kamala Harris will have to defy history — because only once in the last 188 years has a sitting vice president been elected president of the United States.
Many vice presidents have gone on to become president. Some, like Joe Biden, ran after leaving office. Others, like Theodore Roosevelt, Calvin Coolidge, Harry S. Truman, Lyndon B. Johnson and Gerald Ford, assumed the presidency because of the death or resignation of the incumbent, and then ran for a full term on their own. Still others, including Al Gore and Richard M. Nixon, tried and failed to succeed popular two-term presidents. (Nixon ran again eight years later and won.)
The only sitting vice president to win the nation’s highest office in the modern era was George H.W. Bush in 1988 — and he was the first to do it since Vice President Martin Van Buren, the “Little Magician,” was elected president in 1836.
Because there have only been 59 presidential elections in U.S. history, it’s easy to find things that have never or rarely happened. Indeed, every President has been the “first” at many things. Further, a great many of those elections featured a sitting incumbent, essentially precluding their Vice President from contesting the seat.* There have only been 49 U.S. Vice Presidents, many of whom never sought the presidency; indeed, seven of them died in office.
Harris will need some magic of her own to pull off the same feat. Bush succeeded where other modern vice presidents failed for one simple reason: Americans wanted a third Reagan term. Today, no one wants another Biden term. (If voters did, then Biden, and not Harris, would still be the Democratic nominee.) Ronald Reagan left office with a 63 percent approval rating. Today, Biden has 57 percent disapproval.
Which would be a sound argument if those were the only facts. Such as the fact that the same Reuters/Ipsos poll shows Harris with a 42-37 lead over her Republican opponent nationally and 42-30 in the seven “swing states.” They don’t poll the favorability of non-office-holders, so a direct comparison of Trump and Biden in that particular poll is not possible. But Trump has a 52.5% unfavorable rating in the 538 aggregate. An August 14 Pew survey (thus conducted before a Democratic National Convention that most believe boosted her approval, at least in the short term) found that Harris has a 52% unfavorable rating while Trump is at 56% unfavorable.
The rest of Thiessen’s column argues that Americans should blame Harris for everything wrong in the country, treating it as though Biden were running for a second term.
When Bush ran in 1988, it was still “Morning in America.” The economy was growing and inflation was finally under control. Well, it’s not Morning in America today. Americans are still struggling under the weight of the historic inflation that Biden-Harris unleashed, as well as skyrocketing interest rates. Six in 10 are racking up record credit card debt just to pay for groceries and other necessities.
In 1988, the world was at peace. Russian troops were withdrawing from Afghanistan, the Berlin Wall was soon to fall, and the Soviet Union would peacefully collapse not long after. Today, the world is on fire, with wars raging on two continents and Iranian-backed proxies attacking U.S. troops with impunity in Iraq, Syria and the Red Sea.
So, look, I was an enthusiastic backer of Bush even in the GOP primaries. But the situation wasn’t that rosy. We were, after all, still mired in the Iran-Contra scandal, several proxy wars in Latin America, and a whole slew of Iran-sponsored terrorist activities in the Middle East. While Bush eventually won in a blowout—he was the last Republican to carry California—his Democratic opponent, Michael Dukakis, actually led in the polls early in the campaign.
The closer historical analogy to Harris’s bid is not 1988 but 1968, when Vice President Hubert Humphrey ran to succeed the deeply unpopular Johnson amid crushing inflation, global turmoil and antiwar protests. The difference between then and now is that Biden is almost 10 points less popular today than LBJ was in 1968, when voters rejected Humphrey as his successor.
This is just objectively moronic. In 1968, America was at the height of an unpopular war that was killing hundreds of American draftees a month. We lost 16,899 KIA in that year alone. There were also multiple prominent political assassinations and race riots throughout the country. In 2024, food prices are somewhat higher than they were four years earlier. Those are not remotely equivalent.
To be sure, Biden’s poll numbers are worse than LBJ’s. But we live in a radically different political and media landscape than we did then. We don’t have a Walter Cronkite equivalent who people trust to tell “that’s the way it is” anymore and haven’t in decades. And, granting that Barry Goldwater was an unusually polarizing candidate, Johnson had won the previous election by a whopping 486 Electoral Votes to 52.
Democrats are hoping that voters were concerned with Biden’s mental fitness rather than his unpopular policies, and that forcing him off the ballot will have solved their problems. The catch: Harris was the co-architect of those policies.
The vice president was clearly hoping that the anti-Israel movement on the left would not hold the Biden policies they dislike against her. Those hopes were dashed by the protesters in Chicago, who transitioned seamlessly from chants of “Genocide Joe” to “Killer Kamala.” For better or worse, Harris owns the administration’s national security policies.
Whether the voters will see it that way remains to be seen. But it’s odd not to note that almost all this criticism comes from the left. Trump would be much more pro-Israel and radically less concerned about the plight of the Palestinians than Harris. Indeed, his main criticism of Netanyahu has been that he hasn’t been aggressive enough, thus letting the war drag on and thus lose the sympathy gained from the October 7 attacks.
The same is true for the border. Harris is bending over backward to deny that she was ever the administration’s “border czar” — which is an admission that Biden’s border policy is an unmitigated disaster. If it were a success, she’d be wearing the “border czar” title as a badge of honor. If she wants to distinguish herself from the border failure, she has to explain what she would have done differently. And the truth is, her border policies are in fact more radical than Biden’s. In 2019, she promised to decriminalize illegal border crossings and provide taxpayer-funded health care for illegal migrants, which would have created an even more powerful incentive for illegal entry.
The border is an unwinnable portfolio but, to the extent she’s the incumbent, she owns the results. But I suspect those for whom “the border” is a primary voting issue are already in Trump’s camp.
On the economy, 60 percent of Americans say Harris should make major changes or take a different approach from Biden’s. But, as president of the Senate, she cast the deciding vote for all the profligate spending bills that unleashed the worst inflation in four decades. And in her first economic policy speech, she proposed $2 trillion in new spending, along with socialist price controls that would lead to scarcity and cause prices to skyrocket even further.
I’m not going to fact-check the last sentence of this. Indeed, I tend to agree that the Inflation Reduction Act was a massive boondoggle and that Harris is proposing more of the same. But most spending programs are popular with the voters, especially when someone else (or no one!) is going to have to pay more taxes to pay for them. So, it may well be a winning strategy from an electoral standpoint.
So, Harris is trying something no sitting vice president has ever attempted: running as an insurgent and treating Donald Trump as the incumbent. In her telling, she is the fresh new face on the political scene, while Trump is the one running for reelection.
Voters seem to be buying it thus far. Trump has been center stage in American politics for nine years now while Harris has been an afterthought. Objectively, whatever role she played in crafting Biden administration policy (I tend to think very little), she wasn’t the face of it. Sure, she voted to break ties on major, controversial bills. But it’s not like she was a free agent; her votes were, quite rightly, seen as doing Biden’s bidding.
She is asking voters to forget that she co-presided over an unprecedented panoply of disasters over the last four years and is now campaigning on a message of denying Trump another term.
The Veep isn’t co-President but a spare tire. There have been times, notably the first Bush-Cheney term, when an inexperienced President relied heavily on a Washington-savvy Veep for policy advice. But Biden was elected to the Senate when Harris was in 1st grade and has advisors whom he’s trusted for decades.
And, uniquely in the modern era, Trump was indeed President for four years and running to reclaim a lost seat. He can run on “Were you better off four years ago?” But so can Harris.
This is absurd. Democrats have been in power for the past 3 1/2 years and have held the White House for 12 of the past 16 years. But, so far, that strategy is working. A new Post-ABC News-Ipsos poll finds that 64 percent say Harris had only some or very little influence on Biden’s economic policies, while 57 percent say she had only some or very little influence on his border policies.
Given that I follow politics rather closely and believe the same thing, I don’t dismiss it as “absurd.”
Trump needs to make clear that Harris not only helped craft those Biden catastrophes, but also she plans to double down on the administration’s failures — and that a Harris presidency would be a second Biden term. Because history shows that when a sitting vice president runs to succeed a sitting president, the election is a referendum on the current commander in chief.
Trump has been trying to do just that. It hasn’t worked. But he’s welcome to spend the next ten weeks doubling down on that message.
*At least since the passage of the 12th Amendment in 1804. Technically, John Adams ran against George Washington while his Vice President and Thomas Jefferson not only actually ran against but defeated John Adams in the days when the VP was the second-place finisher in the Electoral College.
