Kamala Harris may or may not run for president in 2028. To hear her tell it, Harris has already won an important victory, and her place in history is secure.
“I understand the focus on ‘28 and all that,” the former vice president who came short in her 2024 bid for the White House said in an interview published in December.
“But there will be a marble bust of me in Congress,” she told the New York Times. “I am a historic figure like any vice president of the United States ever was.”
All U.S. vice presidents are indeed historic figures, albeit minor ones. Yet a surprising number of them go on to become president. Forty-five men have been or are the president of the United States. Fifteen of those men — one-third — were vice president first.
Vice presidential legacies?
Those vice presidents who became president then ran administrations whose legacies are ranked and debated throughout U.S. history. The victors received Secret Service protection for life and a dedicated presidential library to house their papers, which helps make the case for their place in history.
As for vice presidents who do not become president, they can receive a government pension, provided they have at least five years of total employment with the federal government. Former President Joe Biden, for instance, received a pension that paid $166,374 a year to start, after he served as vice president in Barack Obama’s administration, according to the National Taxpayers Union Foundation.
Biden’s payout was sweetened by his 36 years in the Senate before the vice presidency. President Donald Trump’s first vice president, Mike Pence, started receiving his pension with much less money, only $57,265 annually, according to NTUF. Pence’s time on the federal government payroll, and now his pension, stem from his four years as vice president, plus 12 years as a House member from Indiana.
Former vice presidents are also able to parlay their experience and connections into book deals, paid speaking engagements, and other opportunities. Harris is currently hawking her book 107 Days, a campaign memoir about how she tried, and failed, to keep Trump from retaking the Oval Office after Biden dropped out and endorsed her as the Democratic Party’s standard-bearer.
Yesterday’s presidential understudies are also frequently mentioned on the quiz show Jeopardy! And, as Harris said, their 3D likenesses eventually join the Senate’s vice presidential bust collection.
Sculpting those busts can take quite some time, however. The queue is backed up at the moment, with marble busts for Biden, Pence, and Harris still in production.
The Senate hosts the marble collection because of the vice president’s historic, constitutional role as president of the upper chamber. Vice presidents preside over the Senate, although by tradition they do not take part in speechifying and debates. Instead, their chief power is to cast tiebreaking votes in closely divided Senates.
The number of tiebreaking votes that happen varies wildly by administration. Biden did not have the opportunity to cast a single tiebreaking vote in his eight-year vice presidency.
In contrast, Harris cast a record-breaking 33 votes in four years. The 50-50 Senate tie during the Biden administration’s first two years helps explain this. Pence cast 13 Senate tie-breakers over his four years as vice president, all with a Republican majority. Trump’s second vice president, JD Vance, formerly a freshman senator from Ohio, has thus far cast seven deciding votes, according to the Senate website.
Vance and the midterm elections
Vance, like Harris, will eventually have his own bust in the Senate. In 2024, he attacked Harris with gusto on the campaign trail, took a dig at her on social media over allegations that sections of an earlier book of hers had been cribbed from Wikipedia entries, and still contrasts her role in the Biden administration’s lax border policies with the Trump administration’s more enforcement-minded approach.
But to her comments that she is “a historic figure?” So far, crickets.
What that likely means is that Vance doesn’t view her as a credible threat to his own White House ambitions. Instead, Vance, like Harris before him, has hitched his near-term political career to the success of the administration that he serves.
The 2026 midterm elections stand in his way. Current polling is not favorable to Republicans. A significant loss in November would hobble his party and hurt his chances of succeeding Trump, so he’s doing what he can to avert that disaster.
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“Do you want rents to keep dropping and wages to keep rising, as they have over the last few months?” he asked a stadium full of Turning Point USA conservative activists at their December convention. In response to cheers, he urged them, “Then mobilize with us. Don’t hand power back to the people who tanked the economy in the first place. Join the America First movement, and you will always have a place on our great team.”
The vice president noted that late January would mark the first anniversary of the second Trump administration, adding, “I am damn proud of our record so far.”
Jeremy Lott (@jeremylottidiary) is the author of The Warm Bucket Brigade: The Story of the American Vice Presidency.