We would have to go back to the 1960 presidential election to find a vice-presidential candidate who would have been decisive in the final outcome of the election. Indeed, the Texan Lyndon Johnson not only managed to get the Democratic ticket headed by John Kennedy to prevail in his home state, that of the Lone Star, but possibly contributed to the young, Catholic and liberal senator from Massachusetts being competitive in other states of the conservative and Protestant south of the country.
Since then, the criterion for electing number two on the ticket has been straddling the commendable – a person capable of leading the country in the event of the sudden disappearance of the first president due to political, natural or criminal causes – and the pragmatic, that the vice-presidential candidate at least is not a burden. The most egregious failure of this second rule was in all likelihood the selection of the obviously insolvent Governor of Alaska, Sarah Palin, on the 2008 Republican ticket, which may have cost Senator John McCain his victory over the Senator Barack Obama.
Nevertheless, and in view of next year’s presidential elections, the geographical origin of the candidate and even his ideology, if they add up or if they remain, pale in comparison to the biological factor that affects those who will predictably lead the respective tickets. On January 20, 2025, the date on which the next president-elect will take office, the current occupant of the White House, Joe Biden, would be 83 years and 2 months old if re-elected. What is now emerging as the most likely alternative, ex-president Trump, would be 79 years and 7 months old. The sum of the ages of both, 162 years and 9 months, has no historical precedents, adds an inevitable actuarial perspective to the question and places in the foreground the transcendence of the respective ticket mates.
In the case of the Democratic Party, there does not seem to be any room for doubt. Despite not having made a significant mark in the exercise of his office for unexplained reasons – he may not have been given enough ground to run; he may have been assigned impossible missions, such as immigration policy; could have been a victim of misogyny and racism –, Vice President Kamala Harris – 58 years old – seems untouchable and history and tradition back her up. In fact, you have to go back to 1940 to find a president, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, who decided to change his running mate in the electoral campaign. It was already his third presidential campaign and, of course, those were other times.
Many more questions are raised by the question of who Trump would choose as his running mate if he were to win the Republican nomination for the third time in a row. Excluded for obvious reasons is former Vice President Pence, who served his boss with canine loyalty throughout the term, but who refused, risking his life – hang Pence! – to endorse the coup attempt State that his master, assisted by a heavily armed mob, perpetrated in the Capitol on January 6, 2021, the designation is a true unknown.
And the fact is that the ex-president has already shown to the point of boredom that the only thing that matters to him is him, only him and nothing else. If he were an ideologue, it is possible that he would lean towards some far-right extremist, of the enlightened variety, like Senator Josh Hawley, or of the lunatic variety, like Congresswoman Marjorie Greene.
But the two characteristics that Trump’s eventual running mate will inevitably have to meet are, number one, absolute loyalty to the boss, and number two, that he doesn’t cast any shadow on him.
