We would have to go back to the 1960 presidential elections to find a vice-presidential candidate who would have been decisive in the final result of the elections. Indeed, Texan Lyndon Johnson not only managed to win the Democratic ticket headed by John Kennedy in his home state, the one with the lone star, but also possibly helped make the young, Catholic and liberal senator from Massachusetts competitive in other states of the conservative and protestant south of the country.
Since then, the criteria for choosing number two on the ticket has remained halfway between what is commendable -a person capable of leading the country in the event of the sudden disappearance of the president for political, natural or criminal reasons- and what is pragmatic, that the candidate to the vice presidency at least not be a drag. The most flagrant breach of this second rule was in all probability the selection of the obviously insolvent Governor of Alaska, Sarah Palin, in the 2008 Republican ticket, which could have cost Senator John McCain victory over fellow Senator Barack Obama.
However, and facing next year’s presidential elections, the geographic origin of the candidate and even his ideology, if they add up or subtract, pale before the biological factor that affects those who will foreseeably 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 count in the event of being re-elected at 83 years and two months of age. The one who is now emerging as the most likely alternative, former President Trump, would be 79 years and seven months old. The sum of their ages, 162 years and nine months, is without historical precedent, adds an inevitable actuarial perspective to the issue and brings to the fore the importance of the respective ticket partners.
In the case of the Democratic Party, there seems to be no room for doubt. Despite not having made a significant mark in the exercise of his position for unexplained reasons – he may not have been given enough room, he may have been assigned impossible missions, such as immigration policy, he may have been a victim of misogyny and racism-, Vice President Kamala Harris -58 years old- seems untouchable and history and tradition endorse her. Indeed, you have to go back to 1940 to find a president, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, who decided to change his ticket partner 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 ticket mate should he 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 dogged loyalty throughout his term, but who refused, risking his life – hang Pence! – to endorse the coup attempt that his employer, assisted by a heavily armed mob, perpetrated at the Capitol on January 6, 2021, the designation is a real unknown.
And it is that the former president has already shown over and over again that the only thing that matters to him is him, only him and nothing else but him. If he were an ideologue, it’s possible he’d lean towards some far-right extremist, the enlightened variant like Sen. Josh Hawley or the lunatic variant like Congresswoman Marjorie Greene.
But the two characteristics that Trump’s eventual ticket partner must inevitably have is, number one, absolute loyalty to the boss, and number two, that he does not cast the slightest shadow on him.
