At the beginning of 2022, President Biden affirmed in a news conference that he would retain Kamala Harris as his running mate when he runs for reelection in 2024. This came on the heels of an op-ed by Thomas Friedman  titled “Biden-Cheney 2024?” It was clickbait for politicos, the sort of thing that appeals almost entirely to Beltway students on their Acela ride back to New Jersey. It was fun to talk about (we at The Postrider are not above going down fun rabbit holes on alternate electoral histories… especially around vice presidents) but it was ultimately pointless. It was never going to happen.

However, there have been murmurs of tension between the president and vice president. The White House has pushed back against reports of a rift between the two, but there has been consistent reports of dysfunction and missteps in the vice president’s office that has left the West Wing exasperated. But no, it seems Biden will, in a characteristically unexciting fashion, retain his elected running mate just like every incumbent president over the last 70 years. 

Speculation on an incumbent president dropping their running mate is as old as Americans caring about the vice presidential pick – which is to say it’s a relatively recent phenomena. HuffPost was particularly fond of the notion that Barack Obama should drop Biden for Hillary Clinton in his 2012 reelect. Several outlets (ours included, though that was more of a “what if” than a serious recommendation) speculated about Donald Trump replacing Vice President Mike Pence with former UN Ambassador Nikki Haley for his 2020 campaign. In 2010 – six years removed from the 2004 election – it came out that George W. Bush thought about dropping Dick Cheney for his reelect too. 

But while these pieces make for exciting headlines and speculative candy, none of them came to fruition. Bush kept the controversial Cheney despite disagreements over the increasingly untenable Iraq War. Obama kept the gaffe-prone and staid Biden. And Trump kept the more disciplined Pence, despite long-standing tensions. What gives? Why has every president in the last 70 years, despite having a number of reasons to opt for a more exciting or complementary running mate, opted to keep the same ticket?

Because It Shows You Made a Mistake

This was a line we hit on constantly in our exploration of modern vice presidential picks on Running Mates. If you change the ticket for your reelection it acknowledges that you made the wrong choice, that you want or need to change direction. This is not a great starting point for an incumbent president’s campaign. 

There is only one instance of a running mate being replaced after their selection in the postwar period. In 1972 when Democratic nominee George McGovern selected Missouri Senator Thomas Eagleton who was (after some contention) nominated by the DNC. 18 days after his nomination (and at McGovern’s request, despite the fact that just days before he said he stood behind Eagleton “1000 percent”), Eagleton withdrew from the ticket after revelations that he had been treated for mental illness via shock therapy. McGovern struggled to find a replacement, and everyone he asked to take Eagleton’s spot declined. Eventually, former Ambassador to France Sargent Shriver accepted and was nominated by a special session of the DNC. The McGovern-Shriver ticket would go on to lose the 1972 election to the Nixon-Agnew ticket in one of the largest landslides in American history, only carrying one state and the District of Columbia.

Of course, the VP calamity was not the reason McGovern lost that election, but it didn’t help, and the memory of the turmoil seems to have stuck. Despite a swath of problematic vice presidential candidates over the years, they were never again abandoned by the candidate at the top of the ticket. After all, if you cannot choose a good running mate among a legion of qualified and relatively inoffensive politicians, how can you be trusted to make good decisions in the White House?

Why Did They Choose Them In the First Place?

A second factor is inertia. What brought a campaign to select the running mate to begin with? We’ve unpacked in great detail what goes into running mate selection. There’s little evidence to show that selecting a running mate to win a specific state matters in turning out significantly more votes for that ticket – it appears to be around 2% more in a given state, which is not nothing in a key swing state, but it bears noting that this advantage is larger in smaller states. There’s also little evidence that a running mate representing a particular demographic or voting bloc makes much difference either. Geographic diversity is important, as campaigns often prioritize different regions of the country. Based on our preferred regional metric, 90% of non-incumbent campaigns since 1968 have had candidates from different regions of the country. 

What tends to matter is a balance of experience – years of insider (federal) experience versus outsider (non-federal) experience and types of roles held. There has never been a ticket featuring two people without experience in the federal government. This also tends to account for a difference in age – as more years of government service correlates, literally, with age.

The vice president’s strengths among voting groups, in their home state or region, and in both their lived and political experience do not change from one cycle to the next. Vice President Harris is still from the West, she is much more of a DC “outsider” than the 79-year-old Biden who has spent more than half his life as a federal politician, and this will be as true in 2024 as it was in 2020

Not to Mention All Those T-Shirts You’d Have to Reprint

The last major factor is the incumbency advantage. Only ten presidents have ever lost reelection – a remarkably skewed ratio given the furore each election cycle. An incumbent president running for reelection holds a number of advantages over a challenger: subsidized housing and transportation (and you get to use Air Force One as a backdrop), universal name recognition (they don’t usually have to introduce or reintroduce themselves to voters), a campaign infrastructure they already built four years ago (along with lists of voters and a large war chest of money), and access to other “soft” government resources that aren’t necessarily campaign-related but can’t hurt (franking, television airtime, getting to issue official statements, and being called “the president.”).

Critically, incumbent presidents also usually don’t have to go through a primary fight. In the postwar era, only one out of the four incumbent presidents who lost reelection did not suffer from a bitter primary fight. Ford faced a stiff challenge from primary challenger Ronald Reagan in 1976, then lost to Jimmy Carter in the general. Carter himself was challenged by Ted Kennedy in the Democratic primary in 1980, then lost to Reagan that November. George H.W. Bush had to face down Pat Buchanan in the 1992 Republican primary and went on to lose to Bill Clinton. Only Donald Trump in 2020 managed to lose reelection without any kind of serious primary challenge.

Primaries typically drive candidates away from the moderate center (where they more broadly appeal to the American general electorate) in order to appeal to the less moderate primary electorate. Having to go through a primary is often so bruising that it makes challenging an incumbent president a daunting prospect. As we described in this piece using game theory to analyze this phenomena from 2019, candidates have to make adjustments when they become the presumptive nominee in order to triangulate towards the national electorate. They are often forced to contradict what they said in a primary to appeal solely to their party’s voters. So long as the non-incumbent party’s candidate must face its own party’s voters and then a general election against an incumbent who only must face the general electorate, there will be dual incentives that do not often align.

The ability of an incumbent to – more often than not – simply avoid a primary, combined with the natural advantages of an incumbent president, logically carry through to the second name on the ticket. An incumbent vice president, with the glitz of Air Force Two, a national spotlight, and the varying official resources of their office in carrying out “non-campaign” events can’t hurt a reelection effort. Swapping a vice presidential nominee is more expensive, forgoes this key incumbent advantage, and leaves the nation wondering about the sitting vice president fuming their days away in Washington as the president actively campaigns with someone else.

That’s why you should not be surprised at Biden’s insistence that Harris will be his running mate once more in 2024. It’d be incredibly wasteful, foolish, and unprecedented for him not to. Not because Harris is particularly strong or weak, not because of anything she’s done or not done, nor even if he personally gets along with her or not. It’s because leaving your vice president high and dry for the reelect is an indication that you made a mistake – that you do not have faith in or stand by your own choices. Once you choose a running mate, the benefits to keeping them on the ticket will always outweigh any potential rewards in dropping them. You gotta dance with the one that brung ya.