To Make History, Kamala Harris Will First Have To Defy It

Vice President Kamala Harris will have to defy history in more ways than one to win the White House this fall.

Harris could make history as the first woman—and woman of color—to occupy the Oval Office; she’d also join the short list of sitting U.S. vice presidents who’ve mounted winning campaigns for the White House.

Just four sitting vice presidents have won presidential elections: John Adams in 1797, Thomas Jefferson and Martin Van Buren in the first half of the 1800s, and George H.W. Bush in 1988. Richard Nixon and President Joe Biden are the only two former vice presidents who ran successful campaigns for the White House after the end of their terms as vice president.

Despite being first in line for the position,13 of the 19 men who served as vice president and then ran for the presidency lost their bids. “Vice presidents inherit all the baggage the president accumulates,” said Thomas Patterson, a political scientist at the Harvard Kennedy School. “We’ll see what happens with Harris.”

Biden’s decision Sunday to drop out of the 2024 race put Harris in uncharted territory, making any comparison to past elections imperfect. Assuming Harris secures the Democratic Party’s presidential nomination, she will have less than four months to lead the ticket—and she’ll be running against a former president in Donald Trump who is leading in the polls. Harris’ shortened timeline, her opponent and the attempt to break several historical barriers at once all combine to make for an unprecedented situation, historians and political analysts said.

The closest parallel for Harris’ position is back in March 1968, when then-President Lyndon Johnson, facing a party rebellion, cultural upheaval and growing public opposition to his conduct of the Vietnam War, decided to suspend his campaign five months before the Democratic convention. Johnson’s vice president, Hubert Humphrey, secured the nomination after a messy floor fight at the convention but went on to lose to Nixon in the general election.

Biden’s 2020 victory took place amid a global pandemic. Bush, who ran on the record of his enormously popular predecessor, achieved his 1988 win in a period of relative stability at home and abroad. An economic downturn helped lead to his reelection defeat four years later.

Nine vice presidents have also assumed the role of president when the sitting president died in office—or, in Gerald Ford’s case, when Nixon resigned. Of those, only Theodore Roosevelt, Calvin Coolidge and Harry Truman ran successful campaigns in the next election.

In Harris’ case, she’ll face some unique obstacles as well as others that have plagued past vice presidents who ran for the White House.

“Kamala Harris is somebody who signifies some degree of change just by the nature of who she is,” said Rick Ridder, a Democratic strategist. “The greatest challenge for her is how to define a future that also references the accomplishments of the Biden-Harris administration.”

The challenge will be especially daunting with just over 100 days before Election Day.

Typically vice presidents who run for the White House spend months crafting their own message and strategy. Harris will have to make decisions on the fly about when to embrace Biden and the administration’s record, and when to distance herself from the president. As vice president, Harris has at times taken different positions than Biden. She raised concerns about Palestinian civilian casualties in Israel’s war with Hamas early on in the conflict, at a time when Biden was drawing heavy criticism for his full-throated support for Israel.

But Harris has largely stuck with Biden on most major issues at the center of the 2024 election. Trump and Republicans were already running campaign advertisements linking Harris to Biden before the president dropped out of the race, and the attacks have increased in the days since Harris emerged as Biden’s likely replacement.

Harris on Sunday pushed back against Trump in her statement announcing her plan to seek the party’s nomination. But as she secures the nomination, Harris will also face growing pressure to spell out a clear policy agenda.

“She’s going to have to answer questions about what she would do about immigration and other things,” said Danielle Vinson, a political science professor at Furman University.

Whatever her approach, Vinson added, Harris is up against a bleak history for vice presidents seeking the world’s most important job.

“For much of our history, vice presidents were in the background. Even with Kamala Harris and Joe Biden, she’s pretty much been in the background the entire time until the last few months,” Vinson said. Now, all of a sudden, “Harris needs to provide a rationale for herself.”