JD VANCE’S HARD ROAD TO 2028. Vice President JD Vance faced an impossible task trying to negotiate an end to the U.S.-Israeli war against Iran. That Vance failed is no surprise, given Iran’s so-far implacable resistance to the demand that it abandon its nuclear weapons program. That, Vance said, is President Donald Trump’s “core goal” of the war.
“We’ve made very clear what our red lines are,” Vance told reporters after 21 hours of negotiations. “We just could not get to a situation where the Iranians were willing to accept our terms.”
Vance’s leading role in the talks attracted a lot of comment, since he was well known to have been skeptical about starting the war in the first place. And that fact — a vice president having to go along with an action he himself would never have initiated — highlights Vance’s fundamental problem as he hopes to succeed Trump as president: As long as he is in his current job, Vance is stuck doing what Trump wants him to do.
Way back in 1997, when Vice President Al Gore was preparing to run for president after serving two terms under President Bill Clinton, a perceptive Washington observer put the problem this way: “Al Gore is locked in the trunk of Bill Clinton’s car.”
“If Bill Clinton’s presidency is troubled, then Al Gore is going to be troubled,” the Wall Street Journal’s Paul Gigot continued. “And if Bill Clinton has a wonderful second term, then it’s going to help Al Gore.”
As it turned out, Clinton did not have a wonderful second term — the Monica Lewinsky scandal took care of that — and Gore was not helped by it. Unable to escape the president’s car, Gore failed to win the 2000 election in his own right despite a record of economic prosperity that under other circumstances would likely have prevailed.
Today, JD Vance is locked in the trunk of Donald Trump’s car. Where Trump goes, Vance will go, too. Right now, the president’s job approval rating is 41.4%, according to the RealClearPolitics average of polls. Vance’s favorable rating is similar, 40.9%. Perhaps those ratings will change dramatically for the better in the coming months and years, but for Trump at least, the experience of the first Trump administration suggests they will not.
Vance the presidential candidate also faces a tremendous burden of history. Fifteen vice presidents have become presidents. Most ascended to the job when the president died. Since the 1830s, just one — George H.W. Bush, who served under two-term President Ronald Reagan — has won the White House while serving as vice president. At the time of Bush’s victory, Reagan’s job approval was over 50%, according to the Gallup Presidential Job Approval Center.
Two other vice presidents — Richard Nixon and Joe Biden — were also elected president, but both served after leaving the office (Nixon for eight years and Biden for four years).
Other sitting vice presidents have run and lost — Nixon, when he ran as a sitting vice president to succeed Dwight D. Eisenhower in 1960; Hubert Humphrey in 1968; Gore in 2000; and Kamala Harris in 2024.
The bottom line is that it is incredibly hard for a vice president to follow the president they serve directly into the top job. It’s not complicated. Americans often want to make changes, and a sitting vice president running for president is asking them to keep things the same. Voters usually choose another path.
But Trump is unique, some will argue, and that might allow the Trump-Vance ticket to escape historical determinism. Maybe. It is true that there has never been a president like Trump, and there is no other person on the political scene today who has anything like the singular characteristics that brought about Trump’s incredible political career. But that also includes Vance, who does not have Trump’s magic. And remember, even Trump could not win two elections in a row.
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One more thing: Looking at Vance’s chances today, it’s always possible Democrats will do something absolutely crazy, such as starting to nominate a senile Biden and then running a bait-and-switch to change the candidate to the highly unimpressive Harris, who became the most recent sitting vice president not to win the top job.
There’s no way to predict if Democrats will mess up again, at least to that degree. It’s more likely that, if Vance becomes the Republican nominee in 2028 — which itself is not anywhere near a done deal — he will be in a very difficult race against history.