Experts often debate about the best approach to vice presidential selection: Try to balance out the presidential candidate’s characteristics, experience, and regional background? Or focus on finding a credible governing partner? But there’s almost implicit agreement on one principle: The vice presidential candidate should not harm the ticket. And it seems a lot easier for a VP pick to bring liability — from lack of proper vetting for scandals to lack of preparation of serve as president or lackluster campaign skills — than to really help the ticket.
Trump seems like he may have failed that test with the selection of Ohio Sen. JD Vance, who’s ratings have reportedly officially dipped to the lowest for any running mate in modern history.
So far, Donald Trump seems like he may have failed that test with the selection of Ohio Sen. JD Vance, whose ratings have reportedly officially dipped to the lowest for any running mate in modern history. Vance was the choice of a confident candidate, looking at strong re-election odds after President Joe Biden’s notoriously poor performance during the June 27 debate and some positive media coverage after a July 13 assassination attempt. The driving factors behind Vance’s selection seem to be his recently honed Trumpist credentials, especially his statement about how he would have acted differently from Mike Pence, Trump’s former vice president, on Jan. 6, 2021.
But the race has changed since then. Biden is no longer at the top of the Democratic ticket, for one. And Vance looks especially troubling compared to Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, whom more Americans view favorably than unfavorably. Vance hasn’t been able — or hasn’t appeared to try very hard — to distance himself from controversial past statements about gender, abortion and people without children. As a result, there’s been some speculation about Trump replacing him.
It feels important to say that the odds of that happening are very slim. But if it were to happen, how would this work exactly? From the standpoint of the formal rules of the Republican Party, it’s fairly straightforward. The rules lay out a similar process for replacing the presidential and vice presidential candidates after the convention; the most likely process would be a special meeting of the standing party committee members. (This is what happened when George McGovern replaced Sen. Thomas Eagleton with Sargent Shriver in 1972.)
More complicated is the issue of ballot access — some state deadlines have already passed, and early voting starts in just a few weeks in some states. These are practical issues, and could be resolvable with some effort. Nevertheless, it’s important to get the ballots right. Even though we learned in 2016 that voters really cast their ballots for their states’ slate of electors, the wrong candidate for vice president would be a bad look at best and a potential constitutional confrontation at worst. (If no vice presidential candidate wins a majority of electors, the Senate chooses the vice president.)
The informal element of the process would be similar in some ways to replacing the top spot, yet different in crucial aspects. As with replacing the presidential candidate, there would be some serious party coordination needs. Parties, as my co-author William Adler and I find in our work on running mates, play a role in shaping VP choices. Nevertheless, the presidential candidate plays a huge role in narrowing down the selection and making the final choice. This leaves room for all kinds of possibilities as we speculate about what could happen next. Importantly, Trump (or someone) would need to convince Vance to step down before the formal efforts to replace him would even be a realistic possibility.
Then comes the question of who would replace Vance on the ticket. Here’s where things get interesting, with possible party jockeying in public and behind the scenes, as well as possible tensions within the campaign and between campaign and party. Some might theorize that Trump should look to politicians from the crucial swing states where the campaign has lost ground — start thumbing through the roster of GOP politicians from Wisconsin, Michigan and Georgia, for example. He could go back to his original short list and select Doug Burgum or Marco Rubio, both who have sought the presidential nomination and been through some national vetting.
Dumping Vance would almost certainly generate a news cycle that would be negative for the former president, casting doubt on his judgment and drawing further attention to his running mate’s missteps and flaws.
He could emphasize bringing someone from an underrepresented group to the ticket — Nikki Haley, Tim Scott or Vivek Ramaswamy (or Rubio) come to mind as possibilities. Ramaswamy, whose energetic RNC speech addressed some of the party’s outreach problems to minority communities, might especially be seen as a natural replacement for Vance. He’s also young and a loyal, dedicated Trump acolyte. But he has never held political office. Or Trump might look at some of the women whose names were floated earlier this year — like Sen. Katie Britt, R-Ala., to try to match the energy among women in light of Harris’ historic candidacy.
These are approaches that Trump could try, if he chose to go the risky route of replacing the vice presidential candidate — which, again, is quite unlikely. And that doesn’t mean that they would even work. Politicians who were passed over on the first round may not want to join a ticket that’s since suffered some setbacks, and no longer seems like such a safe bet for victory. A choice aimed at “targeting” women, Midwesterners or minority voters also might not work. Social science research suggests that these efforts rarely succeed.
A main purpose of the vice presidential candidate, beyond avoiding harm or generating negative news cycles, is to highlight the presidential candidate’s judgment and values. Because Trump has already served as president, most people have already made up their minds about how they feel about these factors. Dumping Vance would almost certainly generate a news cycle that would be negative for the former president, casting doubt on his judgment and drawing further attention to his running mate’s missteps and flaws. It’s likely simply too late for Trump to pick someone else. And VP candidate replacements happen so rarely, and are so closely connected to campaign disasters like McGovern’s in 1972, that it would be hard to achieve the quiet, under-the-radar rollout that might have been the wiser strategy in the first place.
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