What History Says About Mike Pence's Presidential Chances

Vice President Mike Pence (R-IN)

This past week, former Vice President Mike Pence filed paperwork and officially launched his long-expected run for the White House in 2024.  Pence's run gives us an opportunity on this blog to talk about the vice presidency as a path to the White House.  Being Vice President is obviously a position of immense power, and if you want to be president, it's a decent spot to be in as you'll find out in this article.  But it's also a position that has struggled when it comes to winning the White House directly (or indirectly) from that office, becoming something of a stepping stone that never connects with the final step.

Kamala Harris is the 49th Vice President, and so before her have been 48 men.  Of those 48, fifteen have become president at some point after their time as VP, which honestly gives Pence nearly one-in-three odds.  But Pence lost out on the best and simplest path to the presidency: succeeding the president through death or resignation.  Of the fifteen men who have become vice president, the majority (nine) of them did so by succeeding the president after he left the office prematurely.  Only six of the remaining former vice presidents have done so through an election.

With those men, the odds get even more dire for Pence when you keep in mind that Pence is not immediately succeeding Trump as president.  Four of the six former vice presidents to successfully become president did so through immediately running after they served their term as VP (John Adams, Thomas Jefferson, Martin van Buren, & George HW Bush).  But Pence is not the sitting vice president, Kamala Harris is, and therefore he does not come armed with the power, stature, and institutional connections that office provides him.

Instead, Pence has just two men to look toward if he wants to become the next President of the United States: Richard Nixon and Joe Biden, both of whom got to the White House years after their terms as vice president, though they did so in different ways.  Nixon served as President Eisenhower's VP from 1953-61, and was the Republican nominee in 1960 in a very close election against then-Sen. John F. Kennedy.  In one of the tightest contests in history (to the point where people debate the rightful winner to this day), Nixon lost, and ended up going through something of a wilderness phase where he also lost the governorship of California before, in 1968, staging the greatest political comeback in American history, and taking the White House.

Joe Biden was a different story.  Biden was well-liked as vice president, but his son had recently passed away, and had caused him to struggle with whether he was in an emotional place where he could run for the presidency for a third time.  He also was in a unique position where, even if he ran, he wouldn't be the frontrunner given former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton's huge lead at the time.  So he declined to run in 2016, seemingly shutting the door on his presidential aspirations given his advanced age if Clinton were to win.  But as we all know, Clinton didn't win, and in 2020 Biden became the consensus choice in a fractured Democratic Primary where a huge swath of blue voters couldn't stomach either Bernie Sanders nor Mike Bloomberg.  Biden in 2020 beat Donald Trump...and Mike Pence.

What history tells us, though, is that Pence is far likelier to fall into the losers column.  14 former vice presidents have run for the presidency after their time in the office and lost.  In a few cases (most recently Hubert Humphrey, Walter Mondale, & Al Gore), they were the nominee but couldn't win the office (Mondale is a good aspiration for Pence, at least, given he got the nomination four years after he lost the vice presidency, just like Pence), but in most cases they just ran and lost.  

Dan Quayle, Pence's mentor (and the man who convinced him to not push back when certifying the election) is probably the model of how Pence's campaign will go given the limited traction it has garnered so far.  Quayle ran for president briefly in the 2000 primaries, well after his tenure as VP from 1989-93.  Like Pence, Quayle had been the darling of social conservatives prior to his time in the White House, but had come out of that tenure much less popular & maligned.  Quayle, though, couldn't gain traction and get past his time in the White House, and after a dismal showing in the Ames Straw Poll, he dropped out of the race, not even making it to voting.  One wonders if this is going to be Pence's fate-someone who doesn't even survive until the voting begins.

One note before we go-Quayle notably ran in that contest against George W. Bush, the son of the man Quayle served with as VP.  Pence is in an equally awkward situation, running against the man whom he served with as VP.  The last time something like what is happening to Pence happened was 1940, when John Nance Garner ran for the Democratic nomination for the presidency, and briefly looked like he'd get it...until a stealth candidacy by Franklin D. Roosevelt to get an unprecedented third term led to him winning the nomination, ending Garner's dreams.  Like Garner, Pence currently looks like a run against his former president might end with Trump getting the nomination, rather than his VP trying to get out of his shadow.