By John A. Tures, Professor of Political Science, LaGrange College
In 1976, Congressman Morris K. (“Mo”) Udall ran an impressive presidential campaign for a member of the House from Arizona, but kept on narrowly losing to Georgia Governor Jimmy Carter. When asked by the press about whether he would accept the number two spot on the ticket, Udall quipped “I’m against all forms of vice, including the vice-presidency.”
To listen to the pundits and political scientists, you’d think the running mate position was some sort of vice. They’ve concluded that vice-presidential pick just doesn’t matter. But I’ve got results that show that the picks of J. D. Vance for the Republicans and Tim Walz for the Democrats could become important in the 2024 election, especially in their home state.
For other political scientists, VPs don’t matter much. Writing in the Los Angeles Times, Professor Christopher J. Devine of the University of Dayton and Elizabethtown College Professor Kyle C. Kopko contend “Another common misconception is that a running mate will “deliver” his or her state’s electoral votes for the presidential candidate. It is probably no coincidence that many of the finalists for Harris’ ticket came from electorally competitive states — including Walz. But our research found there is very little evidence of a “home state advantage” for running mates. On average, the effect is close to zero. This makes us skeptical that adding Walz to the ticket somehow guarantees that Democrats will win Minnesota or other competitive Midwestern states.”
In earlier research the authors tout studies that go back to 1884, as well as a book called the VP Advantage where they use “evidence from over 200 statistical models spanning the 1952 to 2016 presidential elections,” Kopko and Devine find almost zero impact for the vice-presidential candidate.
I look at the data from 1976 to 2020 in perhaps a different way. I compare how the state from the VP voted for years earlier in comparison to how the state voted with a “favorite son” or “favorite daughter” on the ballot. So in other words, how did Minnesota vote in 1976 with Walter Mondale on the ticket, in comparison to 1972 when he wasn’t on the ballot?
My research in Raw Story shows that vice-presidential candidates boost a ticket by 4.4 percentage points on average. In several cases, like 1976, 1980 and 1992, the VP candidate flipped their state to the president. And in 2016, VP candidate Tim Kaine boosted his home state of Virginia to the Clinton ticket by a bigger margin than Obama-Biden won the state in 2012.
I thought that perhaps Devine and Kopko had a number of cases from an era where running mates didn’t matter as much. Looking at cases from 1948 to 1972 revealed that a VP candidate actually performed 1.5 percentage points worse in their home state. Kopko and Devine claim that Texas Senator Lyndon B. Johnson didn’t add much to the ticket, but I dispute this in a column for Valley Times-News. Democrats lost Texas in 1952 and 1956 but won it in 1960. They went from losing the state by 11.28 percentage points to winning it in 1960 by two percentage points, a huge swing for the Dems that year. And while Kopko and Devine claim LBJ wasn’t so popular in 1960, Johnson won reelection against John Tower by several percentage points, a man who would win the same Senate seat in 1961.
It’s not that researchers like Kopko and Devine are wrong, but they have a lot of VP candidates from long ago, like John S. Sherman, Nicholas Murray Butler, Hiram Johnson, and Thomas R. Marshall (all from Kopko and Devine’s analysis) who weren’t as well known as the Sarah Palins, the Joe Liebermans, the Mike Pences or even the Kamala Harrises.
John A. Tures is a professor of political science at LaGrange College in LaGrange, Georgia. His views are his own. He can be reached at jtures@lagrange.edu. His “X” account is JohnTures2.
