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 Washington Post 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."
When Reagan left office he had a 63% approval rating. Biden has a 57% disapproval rating.
When Bush ran in 1988, it was still “Morning in America.” The economy was growing and inflation was finally under control. Well, it’s not Morning in America today. Americans are still struggling under the weight of the historic inflation that Biden-Harris unleashed, as well as skyrocketing interest rates. Six in 10 are racking up record credit card debt just to pay for groceries and other necessities.
In 1988, the world was at peace. Russian troops were withdrawing from Afghanistan, the Berlin Wall was soon to fall, and the Soviet Union would peacefully collapse not long after. Today, the world is on fire, with wars raging on two continents and Iranian-backed proxies attacking U.S. troops with impunity in Iraq, Syria and the Red Sea.
All the magic tricks in the world can't hide the dismal state of affairs in the U.S. and the world at large. This is the record that Harris must run on. Falling inflation isn't going to make people forget the 9% inflation in 2022. The Fed cutting interest rates in September isn't going to help homeowners who have been saddled with high mortgage payments after the biggest increases in interest rates in 40 years.
Harris has been running away from the failed border policies of the administration, which only meant an about-face on border security when it became clear that the crisis of 8 million illegal aliens pouring into the United States unchecked would sink the Democrats in 2024.
"Look! Squirrel!" is not going to make people forget that singular failure.
Harris is bending over backward to deny that she was ever the administration’s “border czar” — which is an admission that Biden’s border policy is an unmitigated disaster. If it were a success, she’d be wearing the “border czar” title as a badge of honor. If she wants to distinguish herself from the border failure, she has to explain what she would have done differently. And the truth is, her border policies are in fact more radical than Biden’s. In 2019, she promised to decriminalize illegal border crossings and provide taxpayer-funded health care for illegal migrants, which would have created an even more powerful incentive for illegal entry.
Harris has been trying to flip the script and make voters think that Donald Trump is the incumbent and she's the "new, fresh face" on the political scene. With the media playing the same game, she might pull it off.
Trump is going to have to nail Harris to Biden's policies. It's not that complicated. What Trump needs is message discipline — something he has rarely demonstrated as a candidate.
This time, the free media he's getting is 100% negative, and the press smells blood in the water. Only the candidate can break through the media paywall to reach the people and remind them of the way things were under Joe Biden.
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