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Is it relevant that a sitting vice president has won the presidency only once in 188 years?
Many vice presidents have gone on to win the presidency, but only after they left office. Only George H.W. Bush in 1988 was able to win the presidency running as a vice president. Before Bush, the last sitting vice president to win the presidency was Martin Van Buren in 1836.
Other sitting vice presidents who became president were elevated to office after the death of the president. Recently, Al Gore and Richard Nixon ran for president while serving as vice president. Both men went down to defeat although Nixon won eight years later.
Why can’t vice presidents win in their own right? As columnist Marc Thiessen points out, the answer is relatively simple; most voters don’t want a third term of whichever incumbent is sitting in the White House at the time.
Most voters wanted a third Ronald Reagan term in 1988. When George Bush didn’t deliver it, he was kicked out of office, In 1836, voters wanted more of Andrew Jackson and elected Van Buren as a stand-in. He, too, lost his reelection bid.
For Kamala Harris, all the „joy“ in the world won’t make voters forget who was president while she was vice president. „Bush succeeded“, Thiessen writes, „where other modern vice presidents failed for one simple reason: Americans wanted a third Reagan term. Today, no one wants another Biden term.
