Conflict with Trump is the least of Pence’s worries

02 August 2023

Mike Pence has the slimmest of chances of winning the Republican Party’s 2024 presidential nomination, but that slimmest of chances is the only one that the former vice president has. He doesn’t have a choice. If he’s going to run, he must do it now. After this cycle, everyone will stick a fork in him.

Pence is not going to win, however, and not only because he must go through the threshing machine that is Donald Trump. Former vice presidents, as well as sitting vice presidents, usually lose. Indeed, of the 15 vice presidents who became president, eight did so by succession, not election. Of all vice presidents to become president, four were elected.

Yes, four.

Pence’s campaign has lately taken a more aggressive posture. His allies have called Trump “an apologist for thugs and dictators.” That inspired the Post to run a piece on the most famous moment in history when a vice president (in this case, Thomas Jefferson) went to war with a president (John Adams).

After Trump’s third indictment last night, on charges related to his leading of a paramilitary takeover of the US government, Pence said: "Today's indictment serves as an important reminder: Anyone who puts himself over the Constitution should never be president of the United States.”

Even so, Pence “has not said exactly how far he will go to prevent a second Trump turn in the White House,” the Timesreported today, “and whether those efforts would include testifying in court as a key witness for the prosecution. So far, he has stopped short of a broad-based condemnation.”

But I think conflict with Trump is the least of Pence’s worries.

The last time a sitting vice president ran for and won the White House was George HW Bush in 1988. He secured the Republican Party’s nomination immediately after serving under Ronald Reagan for eight years. Success was fleeting, though. Four years later, he lost a three-way race to Bill Clinton.

There is no equivalent in living memory, yet George HW Bush’s “success” seems to represent the conventional wisdom such that everyone seems to believe that being vice president is the step toward being president. Bush’s “success,” however, was probably a fluke in our history. That everyone believes the conventional wisdom about it doesn’t make it any less fluky.

If we go back a century, we can see that the best chance of a vice president becoming president was the death of the president in office. Theodore Roosevelt, Calvin Coolidge, Harry Truman and Lyndon Johnson ascended, respectively, after William McKinley, Warren Harding, Franklin Roosevelt and John Kennedy died. Only Roosevelt ran for and won two full terms. Coolidge, Truman and Johnson decided against running for second terms.

Also going back a century, we can see that vice presidents who did not benefit from being first in the line of succession were doomed. Sitting Vice President Richard Nixon lost to John Kennedy in 1960. Sitting Vice President Hubert Humphrey lost to (by then former Vice President) Richard Nixon in 1968. Former Vice President Walter Mondale lost to Reagan in 1984. Sitting Vice President Al Gore lost to George W. Bush in 2000.

Richard Nixon is, as he is with so many things, the exception to this. But even then, not that exceptional. Nixon faced doom in 1960, then defied it in 1968, then faced it again later. (He resigned in 1974 in the knowledge that his party was ready to help remove him from office.) His vice president, President Gerald Ford, lost his bid for a full term to Jimmy Carter in 1976.

You could say, and I have said, that Al Gore was robbed of his chance at being president. (The Supreme Court decided that election, not the people.) But if we take a broad look at history, we can see that Gore’s fate was in at least keeping with the fates of most of the last century’s vice presidents.

Which brings me back to Pence.

He must do far more than defeat a criminal former president, which itself is already looking impossible. Pence must do what only Nixon and Joe Biden have done. In the last 100 years, they were the only former presidents to win the presidency after a gap (Biden, after Trump’s one term, Nixon, after Johnson’s one and a half terms). (Remember that George HW Bush is the only sitting vice president to win the presidency during the last century.)

Nixon and Biden are the only former vice presidents to make themselves relevant again after the opposing party collapsed in crisis (the Democratic Party cracked up under Johnson, the Republican Party cracked up under Trump). Pence is a lot of things, but the beneficiary of the opposing party’s crackup isn’t one of them. Neither is “relevant,” for the same reasons.

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