Opinion: Is the vice presidency a dead-end job?

Vice President Kamala Harris’s loss to Donald Trump in last week’s presidential election may have surprised many people, including more than a few pollsters. But to anyone familiar with vice-presidential history, it was entirely predictable.
When George H. W. Bush became president in 1989, he was the first incumbent vice president to win his own term in 150 years. Richard M. Nixon (in 1960) came close but failed, as did Al Gore afterward. Other vice presidents who moved up typically did so when their presidents died (Theodore Roosevelt and Harry Truman, for example) or resigned (Gerald Ford), or they waited a few years before seeking higher office on their own (as Joe Biden did). Vice President Harris proved unable to escape this history.
Her race, in fact, bears an eerie similarity to the one then-Vice President Hubert Humphrey ran in 1968. In March of that year, beset by criticism of his handling of the Vietnam War, Lyndon B. Johnson announced he would not seek re-election (despite having won a landslide victory four years earlier). Although he had been hesitant about the war as a senator, Humphrey supported it loyally after becoming vice president. When Johnson withdrew, he faced the challenge of unifying his badly divided party and winning over the country while remaining faithful to the president he had served.
Although Humphrey tried to emphasize his differences with the Johnson Administration over the Vietnam War, he did not fully succeed. Efforts to produce an “October surprise” – a peace treaty with the North Vietnamese – came to naught. (Democrats accused Republicans of interfering with the negotiations.) A halt in bombing the weekend before the election helped the Humphrey campaign, but not enough for him to win the election.
When the votes were counted, Humphrey lost to Richard Nixon by less than 1 percentage point, 43.4% to 42.7%. A third-party candidate, Alabama Gov. George Wallace, was also in the race, but seems to have taken votes equally from both major-party candidates. The Republican ticket finished with a comfortable lead in the Electoral College, 301 to 191.
Nixon was as detested in liberal quarters as Donald Trump is in progressive ones today. As a congressman, he had investigated Communist influence in the State Department, eventually producing a perjury charge against a much admired official, Alger Hiss. When he ran for the Senate, his campaign tactics earned him the nickname of “Tricky Dicky,” which he never lost.
As Dwight D. Eisenhower’s running-mate in 1952, he had to defend himself against charges of accepting improper payments. After losing to John F. Kennedy (amid charges that Democrats had stolen votes) and a California gubernatorial race two years later, he told the press “You won’t have Nixon to kick around anymore ….” But like Donald Trump did this year, he returned from the political graveyard to win the presidency.
While her Republican opponent may have had many problems, Vice President Harris had a big one she could not overcome: her unbreakable tie to an administration the public viewed unfavorably. (Nearly 70 percent of Americans told pollsters the country was on the “wrong track.”) To make matters worse, she repeatedly declined to say what she might have done differently if she had been in charge. Such loyalty may be admirable (and a good way of securing a party’s nomination). But as most other vice presidents have discovered, it creates an impossibly heavy burden when the voters want a change in direction.
Since he will become the youngest vice president since Richard Nixon, it is a good bet that J.D. Vance’s ambition does not stop at being a heartbeat away from the presidency. But if he studies the history of his predecessors in that job, he might think twice before dreaming about how he would redecorate the Oval Office.
Leslie Lenkowsky is professor emeritus of public affairs and philanthropic studies at Indiana University.