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Karine Premont and Christopher J. Devine eds., "Second in Command: Reevaluating the Role of Vice Presidents and Running Mates in Modern American Politics" (U Michigan Press, 2026)
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Hello, this is Lily Gorn with the New Books Network. Today I'm joined by Christopher Devine who is one of the two co editors of Second in Command re evaluating the role of vice presidents and running mates in modern American politics. Chris edited this volume with Karine Premont who is not able to join us today. And this was published in 2026 by the University of Michigan Press. And it's a really nice contemporary exploration of our understanding of American vice presidents, their historical place, what they're doing these days, what we expect from them, how we think about them. But I'm going to let Chris talk to us all about that. I'd like to welcome Chris to the New Books in Political Science podcast and ask him to tell us a little bit about this project and how he and Karine came to it. Hi Chris.
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B
Hi Lily. Thank you so much for having me on. Pleased to talk about the book.
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A
My pleasure.
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B
Yeah, so, so let me introduce the book a bit. This actually kind of grew out of a American Political Science association conference in in Montreal in 2022. Karine Premon, my co editor, it's kind of her idea and she is from Montreal area, teaches in the Montreal area at the University of Sherbrooke. And she brought together some people who were working in the space on VPs who often don't, you know, find a lot of respect I guess for that line of inquiry, line of research because it's not the presidency itself. This is just a supporting actor or actress in the presidential show. And you know, as anyone who really studies the presidency can appreciate or more broadly American politics supporting cast matters. It, it's not just about the single individual who sits in the big chair in the Oval Office that matters. It's, it's, it's the staff, it's the bureaucracy. It, it's the, the cabinet secretaries, but also in a very prominent role of course we have the Vice President who really over the last 50 years, roughly since Walter Mon Mondale's vice presidency under Jimmy Carter, they've assumed a lot more informal power. This something that's be uh been covered by wonderfully in some other texts. Some listeners might know Joel Goldstein's book really most important one on the vice presidency, the White House Vice Presidency, that came out about 10 years ago from the University Press of Kansas. He's of course written plenty of other great things on the vice presidency. There's a lot of great literature out there especially focusing on that era of empowerment over the last half century and we want to pick up on that. But really to bring together those people who have been working on this, some who haven't actually been doing adjacent work that we wanted to bring in as well, which is one of the joys of this but in many ways to take some of those folks who were working in this space and put us in conversation with each other as we cover different related aspects of the Vice presidency. And I should point out too just as a, I guess last word introduction here, this is a book that's separated into two parts. It is very much about vice presidents and running mates. And one of you know, the observations that, that you know, I made a bit in some previous research with Kyle Kopko, our book to running mates matter. We talked about this some that I think too often those, those two things are wrapped together that the study of the Vice presidency is to study the running mates as well. While we're talking about a governing role versus an election related campaign based role. Of course you have people who campaign for office. Thank you. Sarah Palin, high profile candidate who never made it to the vice presidency. You have other people who are known for what they've done or maybe not done in that role. Dick Cheney for example is much better known for what he did as vice president than I mean who remembers what he did as a, as a running mate in 2000 or 2004 for that matter. So we wanted to bring those, those two pieces of the role, that second in command role on the campaign trail and then in the White House together in one place. Talk about them separately. Part one on vice presidents Part two on running mates, but again, in the same space so we can more holistically appreciate the role that these folks play in American politics and American government.
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A
And when I talk to my students about the vice presidency, because they're always sort of curious about it too, when we sort of start diving into studying, say, the executive, and I'm like, yeah, it's, you know, it's. It's because of the way the electoral college is structured that we got one of these, which isn't like, helping them take it seriously. So can you talk to us a little bit about, you know, where this role actually came from? And to some degree, we had this long period of time where if a president died, and this is the other thing my students are fixated on, how many presidents die or become incapacitated in office, that there wasn't a way to replace the vice president who had then become president. So you had long stretches of time with no vice president in office. I know you're a bit of an expert on all of this, so can you take us through some of that? Because people always find that interesting.
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B
Yeah, the vice presidency kind of starts as the appendix of American government. You know, why is this there? You know, how did it get here? It's kind of a holdover in some ways. You know, to solve a couple problems that came up as the Constitution was, Was. Was. Was being drafted. For one thing, we need someone to break the tie in the Senate to preside over it, to be the person in charge. Of course, in the House, we have the speaker of the House elected by its members. We don't have a mechanism for, for organizing the. The Senate presiding over it, breaking ties in, in, in. In the Senate, we got the vice president instead, who, by the way, among significant curiosities of the vp, we have someone who officially serves in. In the legislative and the executive branch. There's no parallel to that. And, and, you know, until, I guess, Alvin Barkley was the last vice president under Harry Truman. So the, you know, 40s into the 50s, last vice president to regularly preside over the Senate. Now, of course, we see the vice president coming to do so when the vote looks like it could be close and, and that person's vote might be needed. Kamala Harris broke more ties than any vice president in history. For example, we see JD Vance occasionally doing this. So it can be a very important role. But the constitutional duties are pretty meager. You know, again, initially, we get the vice president to break these ties and preside over the Senate. We also get. We also have in the Constitution that the President, Vice President or really the President of the Senate officially doesn't have to be the VP if he or she is out of town or if it's vacated. But they open the these, the certified electoral votes that are sent to Washington D.C. as prescribed by the Constitution. They open them up and then passive voice Constitution tells us then they shall be counted. That's not important, right? Well if you remember 1-6-2021 suddenly became important. Suddenly became important, yes. And some imagined powers that were attached to that that are not actually in the Constitution and are are quite dubious claims but nonetheless VP does very little. Of course VP gets into that role initially until the 12th amendment in 1804 by being the runner up by getting the second most electoral votes. Originally electors cast votes for two presidents. Essentially two. Two cast two votes for president without distinguishing between president VP of course you get the debacle of 1800 where Jefferson, Thomas Jefferson as the understood presidential candidate and, and the understood Vice presidential candidate Aaron Burr, nobody throws their vote away for on Jefferson's behalf. And so they tie. And so we get the 12th amendment 1804 to require that electors separately cast votes for President and vp. So that's our modern system. But there's never been a change to the power of the Vice President. It's such limited power. And some know famous quotes that deal with this. Some serious like John Adams saying when he was Vice President that it was the most insignificant office man could contrive. I believe he says famously in this office I am nothing, yet I could be everything. William Adler and Julia Zari have a wonderful new book coming out. I think before too long here on picking up on that very title and talking about the selection process. And so this is something that know political scientists, historians have been studying for some time here to understand their role in American government. But I think probably just by overview here, an important point to make is one that was really made quite effectively by Joel Goldstein, the book I mentioned earlier, the White House Vice Presidency, that we have seen tremendous change in the power of the Vice President over time or actually influence by the way, Richard Yan has another wonderful book Emerging from the Shadows that that that makes this point is is they don't have very few levers of power but they have influence on those who actually exercise power like the, the President for example. And so that influence you might say over time has, has increased dramatically over let's say the last hundred years, but especially the last 50 or so. But informally there's been no change in the formal Power of the vice presidency. The Constitution has been amended to deal with things relating to the vice presidency, one of which I just mentioned. Also replacements for incapacity, temporary or permanent, but no changes to what they can do as vice president. And so what we've had over time, last half century or so, really, since Walter Mondale, is a change in how presidents typically, they don't have to, but how they typically look at what role a vice president could play in the government. And what they've generally seen is that, you know, when you free up a vice president from having to serve as head of some, you know, not very important commission, you know, not. Not giving them some piece of bureaucratic turf, as Goldstein puts it, but instead you make them this kind of general advisor to the present, this last person in the room, as it's often called as, as, you know, term Joe Biden has used that, that this is someone who's just expected to be involved in everything. This has been, again, a trend for, for about 50 years. This, that they are. They have an office in the West Wing, close to the President, close to the Oval Office. They have complete access to the paper flow within the. The White House. They're getting all the intelligence briefings. They are generally understood to be welcome to any meeting they wish to attend and again, potentially be that last person that talks to the. The president. Not because the Constitution says so, not because a federal law requires this, but just because presidents have generally found this advantageous to empower the vice president in this way. That's the modern vice presidency that we have. I should stipulate that because this is not, you know, legally enforceable, it could be changed at any time. And so this power can fluctuate, as some scholars, including those in our volume, have, have observed. So if, be careful in saying what the influence is, it's rather tentative, but that is generally a state of affairs that we've had for a while here is that they're very important players in the White House because the President wants them to be.
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Yeah. And this is, you know, having had the great honor of actually having a conversation with Walter Mondale directly about this when I was teaching and living in Minnesota. Can you talk a little bit about what happened, why the Carter Mondale deal was kind of this watershed moment that kind of switched the way presidents really kind of approached and thought about the vice presidency.
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B
Yeah. So, you know, some of this is specific to Mondale and what he wanted in order to be part of the ticket and what Jimmy Carter, you know, who also has a major Role we need to acknowledge in this. He was open to this. He was open to the idea that he could use help in the White House, which some other occupants had been resistant to. They were almost threatened by a vice president who could, who could wield more. More influence in the White House. But first, I'll step back from that, actually, just to think institutionally about this. We had an important change early in the 1970s in the selection process that is critical to factor in here. So, you know, for the longest time, vice presidents were chosen for the ticket. Again, post 12th amendment, post 1804, we actually have a designated president, VP candidate. Those are chosen at the convention at the same time as the presidential candidate is chosen. That. That's the long tradition we have heading into the mid 20th century. So while sometimes it was understood, especially if there was an incumbent president, that that person was going to get the nomination, sometimes it was pretty clear they could have those conversations beforehand about who their running mate might be. Okay, we got a different process. You know, really after 1968 convention, which many listeners will be familiar with, we have this incredibly messy Democratic convention. We have a situation where, you know, Lyndon Johnson had declared, although he could have run for another term, 1968, he was unpopular and chose not to. There's a. A vigorous primary, very complicated one in many ways, including the assassination of Robert F. Kennedy Jr. Robert F. Kennedy Senior, in. In that process. Okay. And so you end up with this convention in Chicago where Hubert Humphrey, the vice president, which, by the way, is not typical then for. For this to actually be the heir apparent, but he gets it in 68 without having, you know, really run for the nomination. And there's backlash against this for a variety of reasons, just like, I think, a general interest in democratizing the process that much more. And so we actually get a commitment from the Democratic Party, then later followed by the Republican Party to have binding primaries, not just these beauty contests, as they were often called, to demonstrate popularity. If you're familiar with JFK versus Humphrey in the 1960 primaries, for example, and in Wisconsin and in West Virginia and other places. Okay. But those, you know, still we had party leaders at the convention choosing who presidential nominee would be. We get these reforms from the government Fraser Commission in 1972, which recommends that. That the party create these binding primaries. And so we have the system that we're familiar with now where months in advance of the convention, we know who the presidential candidate will be. Well, sort of. We do. Right. 2024, we thought we did. And some things can intervene if the Presidential candidate releases delegates, as Joe Biden chose to do, that made it possible to switch to someone else. But generally speaking, we know months in advance who the presidential candidate's going to be. And so that's created an opportunity starting really in 76, because 72 was messy. McGovern himself becomes Democratic nominee and he's like, within 24 hours, he has to go through the whole process. He gets rejected by various people, Ted Kennedy and others, eventually lands Thomas Eagleton and then switches him out anyway. Some know that story 76 is really the first time where we know months in advance pretty clearly that Carter is going to be the nominee. I think it wasn't quite months, but it was weeks, at least in advance. And so he's able to hold this audition essentially and invite people famously to his home in Plains, Georgia. Pretty transparent process. Kind of his idea about opening up, having more open administration kind of got his message across. And so he invites people like Walter Mondale and others who he's considering for the vice presidency to interview publicly essentially for, for that, that role. And, and that's, you know, that's, that's the difference that we get is that you could have this selection process that, where there was time to have these conversations between the presidential candidate and the would be vice president about what would this look like, what kind of, you know, relationship would we have? And this is something that continues even after Carter is elected with Mondale in November of 76. They continue these conversations more formally, draft documents about what would this vice presidency look like. Mondale famously, you know, puts this down in a memo and essentially works with Carter. Mostly gets what he wants to say, things, you know, about what his role will be in the administration and largely what he's asking for. There are very particular things, but the, the broad theme is that, you know, I'll be kind of a general advisor and a troubleshooter for the administration. Not going to get bogged down on some particular project. But generally I will be this, this person that, that is one of your top advisors. Kind of like I was describing before, he doesn't use this language, but essentially be the last person in the room in this administration. So I can fight for your interests on everything that might come up, use my expertise for this, be a liaison where it's needed. That's the evolution of the vice presidency that we, we really see in the 1970s and for the most part continue into today.
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A
Yeah, and we've seen, you know, we've seen certainly different forms of it with Bush and Cheney, particularly after 9 11. Because Cheney had so much inside Washington and national security experience and we also saw it with the famous two bubbas of, of Clinton and Gore in 92. So it, it's become also about the, the working relationship that the, the person that is being selected as vice president is also a way of gauging the President, the presidential nominee. Can you talk a little bit about how, you know, that switched? Because we, we know historically that presidents haven't always really liked their vice presidents or respected them. And I talked to my students about Roosevelt and Truman, but now it's much more of a kind of like this watershed kind of decision making which is something that some of the authors also talk about. In terms of the running mates in your book, can you explain a little bit about that?
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B
This vice president selection process has evolved so much over time. I was just speaking to some of that. But one thing that's also shifted is that because the, the, the vice presidency used to be so unimportant because they pretty much were just presiding over the Senate, but they weren't taking this general adviser role that, that, you know, Mondale on, we, we've more or less had, there wasn't a lot of consequence in terms of governing, you know, in, in terms of whe. Whether you had, you know, this person or that person for, for, for vice president. So when you, when you switch from, you know, John Calhoun being Vice president and now it's Martin Van Buren, you know, there tends not to be much of a difference in the actual outputs of government. Right. So what it was 10. What it tend to be used for more was electoral appeals. It was more for this ticket balancing that we're all familiar with. So you might want to balance the ticket since you know, again, the VP is not going to matter much in office anyway. Well, at least we could get someone who might help bring in that other region of the country not represented by the Vice President. So maybe you have, you know, north, south, dynamic, east, west, something like that. Maybe you target a, a swing state, pick someone from, from there in hopes that you'll get a little boost in that state. And who knows, maybe that's the difference in Electoral College. Expect to be a close vote. Could be other balancing. Especially Moving into the 20th and 21st century, we see balancing based on religion or gender eventually and so forth. So that was kind of the dominant, you know, context for VP selection for a long time. That's shifted in the last, you know, it's hard to pin it down. Exactly. But in Jody Baumgartner one of our contributors here has some wonderful work on VP selection. Whitney Corr addresses this in her chapter as well, that we've seen more of a shift towards governing experience mattering. I mean, it makes sense, right? If you're going to have a VP in office who is, is actually going to be more consequential in the administration, be a key advisor. You would want someone who has a certain expertise. Maybe you mentioned, you know, about Dick Cheney. What did he bring to the ticker? What did Joe Biden bring? Well, probably not that much electorally, but in office it sure paid off. Because when it came to government in general or especially foreign policy decisions for these, you know, not totally inexperienced but relatively less experienced presidential candidates in George W. Bush first and then Barack Obama, there was some benefit in being someone who could provide that expertise in office, advise them accordingly. So there's been this shift towards governing matter mattering more. Now one thing related to the electoral appeal though, and this is something that Kyle Kopko and I have addressed in our work, our book the Running Mates Matter. But also my chapter with Kyle in this book is really updating that to the most recent election at the time we wrote this in the 2020 election. You know, our take on the role of, of running mates is that they don't tend to bring in those home states or, you know, have a big influence with a certain social group that's associated with the running mate. We call targeted effects, what they tend to have is more of an indirect effect that they do tell voters something about the presidential candidate. And so for voters who might have been worried about George W. Bush, you know, one and a half term governor of Texas in 2000, or Barack Obama, who is still in his first term as a US Senator, although he previously served as a state senator as well. If people were concerned about their ability to handle the toughest job in the world, and especially to be commander in chief for that matter, it did seem to provide some reassurance. In both cases, they picked a qualified, a very clear, clearly qualified running mate to sit beside them, you know, in those big meetings where they're making important decisions that seems to have an influence on voters. And conversely, when you choose someone who's not clearly qualified for office and everybody can pick their favorite here, you know, Sarah Palin gets a lot of the flack. Actually, John Edwards doesn't get enough flack on that count in 2004, if you want. Yeah, yeah, he gets a lot of as well. Although he was surprisingly effectively effective in office. That's one of These cool things you pick up in reading these chapters from people who study this in detail. You know, there are some things that could be said for some of these folks who, you know, aren't regarded as strong vice presidents and might have been a little better. But, yeah, at least according to voters, when they're impressed by that choice, it says something to them about, you know, hey, this person's going to take the job seriously. They know their weaknesses and they're willing to address them. That can be a good sign. Conversely, if they're making some kind of cheap electoral pick, people might say, well, hey, when you're in office, what else are you going to do just to score political points so the VP candidate can help or hurt, probably not dramatically, but mostly in terms of what they tell you about the person who's running for president.
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A
So among these chapters, and they're all really interesting, they take up a whole bunch of different areas. As you, as you note, part of it's about being the candidates and part of it's about governing and, and the sort of changes in the office. There's chapters that look at this role that I always talk to my students about as being the attack dog, which goes back sort of historically. And there are questions about gender, which is also something that I've written about. In terms of vice presidential candidates, were there one or two chapters, as you and Karine were getting them from authors that really kind of surprised you with the data or the information or the conclusions that some of your authors reached?
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B
Yeah, you know, we were talking a little earlier, and you're saying it's hard as an editor to pick among chapters. It's kind of like picking favorite kids. You don't want to, you don't want to do that. I have favorites, so. And I'll just speak for myself here. I don't know how, how Karine would answer this. I'll put it this way. There were some chapters I include the one I was just mentioned that I did with Kyle Stacy, Old Bigs as. As well, who, who also has some wonderful work here on media coverage of, of vice presidential candidates and the effect on elections. There were some cases where people were just extending work they've done before. Maybe there's an update, a needed update on something they'd written in the past or they were just kind of going deeper in something that, that they had previously done. You know, to, to your question, I think at least some arguments I wasn't as familiar with or some different spins on what people had done in the past. I I'll pick out a couple from. From the two parts of the book. So in, in the first part of the book, Reb Brownell, he has, you know, comes to this from a legal background and does some wonderful analysis, as he has done in much of his other published work. But in this case, he's looking at, as he calls the chapter, the Vice Presidency and checks and balances. And this is just an argument that I hadn't really considered before, as deep as I thought I was in the literature. You know, someone pointing out there is an independent role. The vice president has agency essentially, in. In American government. It seems very limited because of the selection process. What I was describing before. Well, of course, they're dependent on the. On the President, because that's who essentially selected them. And there's an interesting debate here. And again, William Adler and Julia Zari make some great points on this that. Well, hold on. There is still a role for parties and coalitions to influence the choice, but it's much more of a personal choice than it used to be. And I think it's fair to say that vice presidents understand that they're basically there, you know, because the president chose him or her, and if they want to return to the ticket next time, they better stay in line. So with that said, we do see examples in the past, and REB frames this very nicely as. As actually context for understanding January 6th. There are instances in the past through American history. I'd say this is our most deeply historical chapter, by the way, covering more of the entire history. Most of these chapters focus on. On the last half century or so. REB goes through some past examples where vice presidents in office have attempted at least to check the power of the president. So one of these I found really, really interesting. I did not know about this Henry Wilson, who was the second vice president for Ulysses Grant in the 1870s, you know, there was talk during Grant's term that he might run for a third term, which of course, was allowed back then. We don't get the 22nd Amendment prohibiting this until 1951. But in the 1870s, Grant was thinking of running for a third term. He did not eventually do this, at least at that time, although he kind of came back four years later in 1880 and more or less tried to. But Henry Wilson publicly, in his role as vice president, spoke against that, spoke against his boss, essentially, although I don't think he quite saw it that way. He's president of the Senate. He's a former senator, and so maybe saw himself in that role. He he spoke against Grant pursuing a third term. And there's some evidence to suggest it at least, although Wilson died before the 1876 election came up some to suggest that this helped to undercut the case for grant seeking a third term. Speaking of third terms, in 1940, of course, this is when Franklin Roosevelt becomes the only president to successfully pursue a third term. His vice president, John Nance Garner, you know, was against that as well. Of course he wasn't effective in, in preventing that, but he did exercise some independence there. And of course, most more famously to get out of the electoral context, think more about actual effect on, on policy. Garner as vice president was an opponent of the, you know, what's often called the court packing plan under fdr. This is midway through their second term together, by the way. It looks like, you know, Garner's hoping that FDR is not going to run for a third term. Garner's interested in doing it himself and in fact had some support for that in 1940, although he ultimately failed in that effort. But we have examples where the vice president, again, in some public ways that might surprise folks, actually attempted to check the power of the president. And when it came to the court packing plan, there were many actors in this, many factors that worked against fdr. But one powerful factor was that the sitting vice president, member of his own administration was against FDR's plan. And again, this is all to set up the, the January 6th example with Mike Pence to say that this is not entirely unprecedented, even though it's a different version of that. To give one more here from the running mates part of the book, Lindsay Meeks, who's a wonderful communication scholar, done some excellent work on, on, on ticket balancing and even reflecting back on Kamala Harris joining the ticket in 2020 and how communication strategies merged over time. You know, we reached out to her about this because we want to see her, you know, do some extension of her work. And we had this conversation. She wanted to pursue something about gender dynamics on the ticket. And not just for those tickets like Biden Harris or, or Clinton Kaine, for example, Hillary Clinton, Tim Kaine, where it was one man and one woman on the ticket. But even for those tickets where there are two men, of course we haven't had two women on the ticket at the presidential level, but even in cases where there are two men on the ticket to talk about how gender dynamics are present there as well. And she just does a wonderful job going through some of these recent elections, not over the entire time span here, but, you know, looking at 2008, for example, and 2016 and so forth. And talking about those gender dynamics, again, whether it was a man or woman on the ticket or even two men. And I think just as a political scientist who doesn't typically study things in that area, I just found that so enlightening and really a fresh take. Although obviously gender has been studied and tickets before. I know you've done work on this as well, but I think in total, her take on this was, was quite a fresh one. And it's the kind of one where if someone wants to take one chapter from this book, maybe they're, maybe they're talking about gender in the presidency or gender in campaigns, that might be one that they look to for really fresh and different perspective.
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A
Yeah. I mean, because the question of masculinity and how that's presented in, in the executive and in the presidency, I think is so important to understand because we just kind of gloss over it. But it's, it's a really key part of our thinking about this office. So, you know, having having gender analyzed both in those who are challenging it, if it's a woman in Sarah Palin or, or Geraldine Ferraro or if it's somebody presenting like Barack Obama, who is a black man. And so some of those dynamics, of course. So in the second half of the book, is there a chapter or two that kind of surprised you or taught you something?
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B
Well, in that one, Lindsay Meek's chapter is in the second half, so that'd be a good pick for there. But I'll, I'll take the opportunity, though, to say one, one more thing on the second half. So I mentioned Stacey El's chapter and, and she looks at media coverage of the vice presidential candidates, but also their influence on, on the vote, which, you know, kind of overlapped with what, what Kyle and I have often done as well on, on their electoral impact. But it's funny. Stacy and I, we, we've, we've laughed about this. We talked about at conferences. We were both kind of nervous when we did our analysis and thought we'd done something wrong until we found out the other was finding the same thing. And, and here's what it is. And there more to it. But there's just one overall conclusion. When you study the attitude toward these candidates, and Stacy also does some breakdown by, by partisan views and so forth. When you study the popularity of running mates. So this is in the running mate section of the book, part two. Their popularity over time, it is going down. It, it's not one single candidate who did it. Our take, I think broadly be, if I can try to speak for her as well here, is that it, it's, it's part of our more polarized political environment that, you know, not only do we have politicians broadly becoming less popular, we see lower presidential approval ratings and so forth, but we see this on the camp in the campaign where they're becoming less popular. And in fact, the, and this is a NES feeling thermometers for anyone familiar with that kind of just a 0 to 100 scale. You know, how much do you what are your feelings toward this person from coldest to warmest, essentially? And not only do we see a general trend of their popularity going down, but they're among their within their own party, they're actually more popular than ever. So if you look at the most recent elections, when we have data for we, we were too late for the 2024 election, at least in 2020, Kamala Harris was the most popular vice presidential candidate among Democrats in the NES time series here. So, so back to the 1960s and Mike Pence in 2020, ironically, given what happened in the next few months, but he was the most popular Republican running mate in that whole time frame. Okay. And you know, this won't shock you on the other side when you ask people of the other party, actually, these were the least popular running mates in this whole time series. So Mike Pence, most popular among Republicans of any running mate, Republican running mate since 1968, least popular among Democrats, and vice versa for Kamala Harris, most popular among Democrats, least popular among Republicans. So one point that we make there is that when we think of the electoral appeal of running mates, if you take note of that trend, I think part of what it says, there's less opportunity to really peel people away who are thinking of voting for the other side. And by the way, these folks generally are not popular among independents either. So it's harder to attract people to your electoral coalition based on who the running mate is, which I think is. Is that much more of a reason to focus more on what they can deliver in office and not just as a candidate.
- [34:53]
A
So given the sort of scope of the book and your own work on the vice presidency, are you and Karine looking to do another edited volume or what are you working on now?
- [35:05]
B
Chris, that's a great question. So I mentioned that Karine kind of initially brought this group together. We were at APSA and we've done some things since then. We had a wonderful roundtable at, at Midwest MPSA in April, kind of right after this book had officially been published and we've done some other things, we had a symposium that Mina Bose, who does our preface for this book, our wonderful introduction, she invited many of us to Hofstra University to present on some of these chapters. And just every time we're together in what we call this community of VP scholars, which we invite others to join as well, we're just generating more and more ideas. So I don't want to let the cat out of the bag on some of these projects. I'm thinking, especially what some others are doing. But I can tell you there's going to be, I think, some more edited volumes. Whether, you know, it's. It's whoever's editing them, some of them won't be us on. On things like what about vice presidents who later run for the presidency in their own right. So I think there's gonna be some projects on. On that, in some other articles and things that. That spin off of this. I know I have some interest in doing some further work on this. Something that we talked about recently. We were together for a presentation thinking about the role of VPs in representation. As I like to point out, this didn't hit me until recently, actually. We often hear, we regularly see in print people saying that the President is the only person who is elected by the American people as a whole. It's actually not true. There's one other person. This is one other distinct fact about VPs. Remember, they serve in the executive and legislative branch. Well, here's one other thing. They're also elected by the American people as a whole. We assume it doesn't really matter because the President's their boss. Right. Because the selection process we were just discussing. But as Rebs chapter points out, actually there are some levers that a VP can pull sometimes, or at a minimum, they at least have a high profile that they can use. You know, theoretically, I don't see this happening. But let's say JD Vance really, really couldn't take it anymore. You know, his dissatisfaction with the Iran war. He could check the President's power in some way if he sees that as a way of speaking for the American people who elected him. We just don't expect him to do that. But could he could do something like that. So, you know, these are some things I'm interested in pursuing. Most immediate answer to your question, though. What am I working on? Working on a book on the 1924 presidential election. This is for the University Press of Kansas's American Presidential Election series. Anybody who's read these knows it's a wonderful series. I said I'm all sitting on a shelf behind me here and I've read
- [37:41]
A
quite a few of them.
- [37:42]
B
Yes, they're wonderful. So I'll be writing about how Calvin Coolidge got elected in 1924. Not the most famous election, but bring together some political science research with some historical perspectives here. Part of what I'll be trying to argue is that you don't get elected just because the economy is strong. As a presidential candidate, you have to convince people that that's their reality and that you deserve credit for it. And so I'm working through some evidence there to show that Coolidge Silent Cal, believe it or not, actually played a really important behind the scenes role, mostly in engineering his own victory. And we should give him some credit for having won rather than just assume the Roaring Twenties delivered it to him.
- [38:19]
A
Well, I look forward to reading the book and hopefully talking to you about it on the podcast.
- [38:24]
B
That'd be great. I'd love to talk about that.
- [38:26]
A
I'd like to thank Chris Devine for talking to me today about his co edited book with Karine Premont, second in re Evaluating the Role of Vice Presidents and Running Mates in Modern American Politics. This is available at the University of Michigan Press. And as we were talking about before, this is completely open access via the University of Michigan Press. I will put the link to that in the show notes so listeners and scholars and academics can get a chapter or the whole book open access. Thanks for joining me today, Chris.
- [39:05]
B
Thank you so much for having me, Lily. It's a pleasure to discuss the book.
- [39:07]
A
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