J. D. Vance Is Walking a Historically Unusual Path

J . D. Vance will enter the vice presidency in a historically unusual position, although not one entirely without precedent. Since 1972 — at the dawn of the modern primary system — five presidents have been reelected, all five of them with their original vice presidents (although Spiro Agnew resigned just nine months into Richard Nixon’s second term). One has to reach further into the past for precedent for Vance’s situation, with a term-limited president paired with a brand-new vice president.

The Little Magician

The only second-term vice president to actually complete the handoff — serving a full four years and then getting elected in his own right — was Martin Van Buren, who took over as Andrew Jackson’s second vice president after Jackson’s first, John C. Calhoun, quit and was threatened by Jackson with hanging. Van Buren got the job in part as a martyr for the Jacksonians after Calhoun killed his nomination to be ambassador to Britain.

Jackson, like Trump, was a big and divisive personality lampooned as a monarch by his critics and beloved as a tribune of the common man by his supporters. The 50-year-old Van Buren didn’t try to out-Jackson Jackson; instead, he proved a master of party organization and patronage. He was also an ideological enforcer of sorts in Jackson’s populist fight to abolish the Second Bank of the United States, a cause that Van Buren didn’t entirely believe in but saw as a useful partisan wedge. Presiding in the Senate, he made a show of disinterest in speeches denouncing Jackson. When Henry Clay directly addressed Van Buren and urged him to get Jackson to come to his senses, Van Buren calmly walked across the Senate floor, offered Clay a pinch of tobacco, and sat back down. Van Buren toured the country at Jackson’s side, never upstaging him. He earned Jackson’s trust for his loyalty and won over the party — by now wholly Jackson’s — with a pledge “to tread generally in the footsteps of President Jackson, happy if I shall be able to perfect the work he has so gloriously begun.” He was selected unanimously at the party’s convention in 1836 as Jackson’s successor.

Like Vance, Van Buren was less visibly populist than his boss in spite of coming from quite humble origins of his own (raised in a Dutch household, he’s the only American president for whom English was his second language). Nothing in Vance’s background suggests that he has Van Buren’s skill at operating party machinery, for which Van Buren was dubbed “the little magician.” Indeed, Van Buren is often credited as the inventor of party machinery in the United States. Nor will the media environment of 2025–28 much resemble that of 1833–36, in which Van Buren could concentrate on the inside game of party-building. But there are certainly parallels to be found in how Van Buren complemented rather than trying to imitate Jackson, and won the trust of both Jackson and his supporters with unswerving loyalty to a man who had fallen out badly with others under him before.

The Emergency Veeps

More recent parallels are harder to come by. Lyndon Johnson in 1964, Harry Truman in 1948, Calvin Coolidge in 1924, and Theodore Roosevelt in 1904 were all reelected after having succeeded to the presidency. All of them had to pick a new VP during their election campaign because there was, until then, no mechanism for replacing a vice president. In LBJ’s case, however, he had been president for just a year when he was reelected; he was eligible to run again in 1968, was expected to do so, and dropped out of the race only after the New Hampshire primary. Hubert Humphrey therefore did not spend four years as heir apparent awaiting the next election, even though he ended up as the nominee.

Alben Barkley, Truman’s vice president, was 71 when he was sworn in. Barkley actually did build a substantial public profile and aimed to succeed Truman, but his age dissuaded Democrats from nominating him in 1952. He came out of retirement two years later to run for the Senate but died in office a year and a half into his Senate term.

Charles Dawes, Coolidge’s vice president, faced uncertainties about whether Coolidge would run again until well into his term. Dawes was a distinguished financial and military man who served as Warren Harding’s budget director and was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize during his first year as vice president for his prior role in the Dawes Plan to handle German war reparations, but the vice presidency was his first and last elective office. Dawes fell out with Coolidge, in good part due to Dawes’s criticisms of the Senate filibuster. When Coolidge’s secretary of commerce Herbert Hoover, the most popular member of the administration, was nominated to succeed him, Coolidge helped squelch an effort to keep Dawes on the ticket. His consolation prize was to serve as Hoover’s ambassador to Great Britain.

Charles Fairbanks, Teddy Roosevelt’s 53-year-old vice president, faced one situation that would be familiar to Vance: Even more so than Jackson, the president’s personality was big enough for two people and sucked the oxygen out of the rest of the room. Like Dawes, Fairbanks was eclipsed by a cabinet secretary, William Howard Taft — but while the frantically active Hoover capitalized on media attention under the taciturn Coolidge, Taft was a quiet man who didn’t even want to be president and took the job as secretary of war while hoping for a judicial appointment. More to the point, Fairbanks was a conservative under an increasingly progressive administration. He was chosen as the vice-presidential nominee again in 1916, but Charles Evans Hughes went down to a narrow defeat, and Fairbanks died in 1918 two years into the term they had sought.

The Emergency Presidents

Perhaps the most similarly situated vice president to Vance — the last one to join the second term of a president elected to two terms — was Teddy himself, who was 42 years old, energetic, ambitious, and had served just two years in statewide office. But he can’t offer Vance much of a role model, because TR was the vice president for just nine months before William McKinley was assassinated. Likewise, Andrew Johnson in 1865 was in the office just over a month when Abraham Lincoln was assassinated.

The Old-Timers

Grover Cleveland was, until Trump, the only president to win nonconsecutive terms. Unlike Trump, he changed running mates twice, after his first vice president (Thomas Hendricks, also the Democrats’ vice-presidential candidate in 1876) died in office and his 1888 running mate — 74-year-old Allen Thurman — proved too feeble to hold up over the campaign. In 1892, Cleveland was elected with the 57-year-old Adlai Stevenson I, his former postmaster general and a former congressman, as his vice president. Stevenson broke with Cleveland over the gold standard, which kept him viable in a party that turned decisively against Cleveland, but with a depression starting under Cleveland and a populist “Free Silver” rebellion led by William Jennings Bryan, the party wanted a clean break from Cleveland. Stevenson tacked with the winds and backed Bryan when Cleveland would not, and ended up as Bryan’s running mate four years later. His namesake grandson was the Democrats’ losing nominee in 1952 and 1956.

Ulysses S. Grant was forced to switch vice presidents when he was reelected in 1872, although it turned out that the scandal that claimed his charming and ambitious young vice president, Schuyler Colfax, also ensnared his new vice president, Henry Wilson. Wilson, at 60, was an accomplished and experienced senator with a distinguished record as an abolitionist, but even if he’d had more ambitions, he suffered a debilitating stroke two months into his vice-presidential term and later died in office.

Two other second-term replacement veeps met a similar fate. Thomas Jefferson picked New York governor George Clinton to take over for Aaron Burr; in an era when the secretary of state rather than the vice president was seen as the heir apparent, Clinton kept the job when Jefferson was replaced by James Madison. When Clinton died in office at age 72, Madison for his second term picked the 68-year-old Elbridge Gerry, who lasted only two years before he, too, died in office.