- Trump selects Vance as running mate
- Experts question VP pick’s impact
- VP choice seldom secures home state
Donald Trump chose Ohio Senator JD Vance as his Republican running mate in the United States presidential race on Monday, after weeks of speculation about who the real estate magnate and former President would pick.
Meanwhile, Kamala Harris and Democrat Joe Biden ran on the opposing ticket. Harris is the current vice president who campaigned alongside Biden in 2020 when the California senator became the first Black woman and Asian American to compete on a major party’s presidential ticket.
Since Vance’s announcement, experts have speculated on why Trump chose the former venture capitalist and novelist, who was a harsh opponent of the previous President until a few years ago.
But does the choice of vice president genuinely improve a presidential candidate’s prospects of winning the election?
Do presidents perform better in the vice president’s home state?
Political insiders frequently cite the hope that the VP pick will assist the ticket winning their state as a critical consideration.
However, scholars who have examined election results for decades believe there needs to be more evidence that this approach is genuinely helpful.
It’s very rare that we find that a running mate would deliver a particular home state,” Kyle Kopko, an adjunct professor of political science at Elizabethtown College in Pennsylvania, told.
Kopko has conducted considerable study and written about the electoral impact of running mates, including Christopher Devine, a political science professor at the University of Dayton.
During his research, Kopko discovered that VPs can mobilize more votes for presidential candidates if they are from a small state and have extensive political experience. This doesn’t apply to JD Vance.
According to Kopko, Biden, who served as former President Obama’s vice president in the 2008 and 2012 elections, is an example of such a running mate.
Biden is from Delaware, a small state with just three counties. According to Kopko, he obtained “a tremendous amount of political experience serving in the Senate from Delaware.”
However, Delaware was already a relatively reliable Democratic state in the Electoral College.
How have presidents historically performed in their VP’s state?
While presidential candidates usually win in their running mates’ home states, in recent decades, they have almost always chosen vice presidents from states they were anticipated to win — rather than swing states.
When they choose vice presidential candidates from states in the balance, the outcomes have been uneven, at best.
Consider 1960, when Democrat John F. Kennedy won Texas, his running mate Lyndon B Johnson’s home state, with 50.5% of the vote.
Both Kennedy and Johnson stated that Kennedy would only have made progress in the South with Johnson. According to Kopko, this is where the concept of the vice president’s home-state advantage originated.
The Democrats, who had previously controlled Texas politics, lost in the state in 1952 and 1956 and could use a lift. However, Kopko’s study of poll data from that election reveals that Johnson was unpopular with Texas voters, which may have harmed Kennedy in the state. The race in the state was close; Kennedy defeated Richard Nixon by two percentage points.
In 1992 and 1996, Democrat Bill Clinton won Tennessee, where his running partner Al Gore lives. This was the first time Democrats had won Tennessee since 1964. But was Al Gore responsible? When Gore was his party’s presidential contender in 2000, he was defeated in Tennessee by George W Bush.
If Gore’s 2000 loss in Tennessee shows that presidential candidates are not guaranteed victories in their home state, vice presidential nominees are no exception.
While Republican Richard Nixon easily won the presidency in 1968, Democrat Hubert Humphrey won Maryland, the home state of Nixon’s vice president, Spiro Agnew.
What do previous surveys tell us?
Even if presidential candidates perform significantly better in their running mate’s home state, as some studies suggest, their overall national popularity remains unchanged.
In the previous election, Biden announced Harris as his running mate on August 11, 2020.
According to the voting analysis portal FiveThirtyEight’s average 2020 presidential election polls, Harris had no substantial impact on Biden’s favor with voters.
In late February 2020, Biden and Trump ran close in polls, with Biden leading by 3.8 percentage points. By late June 2020, the deficit had increased to 9.5 percentage points, even before Harris was named Biden’s vice president.
On August 3, 2020, Biden was ahead by 8.2 percentage points, with 50.5 percent to Trump’s 42.3 percent. By August 24, Biden’s poll numbers had only improved slightly; he was 51.4 percent.
On July 15, 2016, Trump announced Mike Pence as his running mate for the 2016 election, while Democratic rival Hillary Clinton chose Kaine as her vice presidential candidate on July 22, 2016.
On June 9, 2016, the FiveThirtyEight national poll average showed Clinton leading Trump by only four percentage points. The margin had narrowed to 3.5 by July 14, 2016.
By July 30, 2016, after both VP nominees had been announced, Clinton and Trump were polling nearly equally. However, the gap widened, with the most significant percentage point discrepancy between Clinton and Trump occurring in August and September, reaching 8.1.
Do vice presidents help presidential candidates reach specific demographics?
When Biden chose Harris as his running mate, pundits believed he would gain Black voters’ support.
A summer 2020 poll by Northwestern University’s Center for the Study of Diversity and Democracy revealed that 57% of African Americans would be more likely to vote for Biden if he nominated an African American woman as his vice president.
A CBS exit survey after the election revealed that 90 percent of Black female voters had backed Biden. However, Black women comprised only 9% of the exit poll sample, including 15,285 respondents.
According to Kopko’s findings, there needs to be more indication that vice presidents improve votes among specific voter categories.
For example, he said there was little statistical evidence that Geraldine Ferraro, Democratic candidate Walter Mondale’s 1984 running mate, or Sarah Palin, John McCain’s 2008 vice presidential nominee, were able to mobilize women voters for their campaigns, despite both being popular among female voters in polls.
In reality, a Pew Research Center analysis of the 2020 election results found that Trump made headway with women voters, winning 44 percent of the vote share, up from 39 percent in 2016. This comes after Harris was on the opposing ticket last year, and Trump ran with Pence.
What additional aspects do presidential candidates consider?
What additional criteria are at play if presidential candidates aren’t selecting running mates based on their ability to swing states or significantly attract demographics who would not otherwise vote for them?
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According to Kopko, some presidents choose a vice president who shares their political views to strengthen their policy agenda with voters. While it is challenging to establish Trump’s ultimate rationale for selecting Vance, he speculates that he chose Vance because their policy interests align, making him more straightforward to deal with if he wins the election.
There could be another cause. In his third presidential campaign, Trump faced several Republicans who opposed him in 2016, 2020, and 2024 before – in most cases – falling in line and kissing the ring.
A former Trump critic, Vance has never run against him in an election.
“JD Vance was not running for President. “He wasn’t attacking Trump on the campaign trail,” Kopko explained.
