Of Course JD Vance Will Run in 2028

T he latest Washington parlor theory making the rounds — in large part because of a Washington Post report by Natalie Allison and John Hudson — is that JD Vance is having second thoughts about running for president in 2028. Don’t bet on him not running.

To start with, the Post implies more than it says. In a report running over 1,200 words, we get only one paragraph on Vance’s thinking about whether to run:

Vance has maintained in recent private conversations that he hasn’t yet decided whether he will seek the presidential nomination for 2028, according to two people who have recently discussed the matter with him. One of those people cited Vance’s fourth child, due this summer, and said the vice president has put a priority on his family life and is unlikely to make a final decision until he and Usha Vance see how another baby affects their lives.

“I haven’t decided whether to run yet” is the oldest lie in Washington, and even when it’s true, it usually just means that somebody who is laying the groundwork still has to see how the midterms go, how the fundraising mood is, and have the final talk with his wife. But if Vance was the sort of guy to not run for president with four small children, he would not have run for vice president with three small children.

Lashed to the Mast

It is surely true that Vance has a hard road ahead. While Donald Trump’s nonconsecutive terms mean that we don’t quite know where we are in the usual political cycle, there is every indication that Republicans are headed to a rough midterm and that Trump is depleting the public’s goodwill toward his party. His tariffs have undercut the cost-of-living promises of the 2024 campaign and his once mighty brand on the economy, and on immigration enforcement and other fronts, his hubris has worn down marginal voters who may have agreed with his general goals but are squeamish about his methods. Trump has also been bleeding support among the weirdos and conspiracy theorists who made up a small but noisy slice of his 2024 coalition (especially in the podcast world), over a variety of boutique grievances ranging from the Epstein files to wild theories about the Charlie Kirk assassination to the simple fact that these are crazy people who are unstable elements of any coalition once it gains power.

Now, the people who are happiest with the tariff war and hard-line immigration enforcement — Vance’s natural base in any primary — are the ones most upset at the hawkish turn that led Trump to bomb Iran last June, send troops into Venezuela to remove its leader, and now open a wider war with Iran that has no obvious end point or visible victory conditions if it is not a war for regime change. Vance’s faction within the party puts him on a collision course with a decision about his closeness to Tucker Carlson, and his harsh, ad hominem rhetoric against anyone who disagrees with his foreign policy views — already a liability in attracting broad support within the party — is now in tension with the absolute loyalty he must project to Trump and his policies. Even if Vance can square that circle, he can’t run in 2028 as a full-throated anti-war candidate without burning his bridges with the commander in chief.

While Vance has the ironclad backing of Don Jr. and others in the Trump inner circle and has the clear pole position to run as the favorite for the nomination in 2028, Trump himself is likely to string out as long as possible the competition for his blessing. Marco Rubio may be saying now that he won’t run against Vance, and he’s probably serious about avoiding a frontal challenge to a Trump-backed Vance, but Rubio is nothing if not a cagey politician (remember when he reversed his pledged retirement from the Senate in 2016 and won reelection anyway?), and I have little doubt that he would run if he got the green light that Trump would prefer him to Vance.

Finally, not only is the road to election in 2028 a hard one, and the road to the nomination a potentially risky one if Vance loses favor with Trump, but the Electoral College will be more favorable to Republicans in 2032, so savvy younger candidates may prefer to take their shot then or in 2036 than in 2028. Vance is young enough to wait a long time: He will turn 56 in 2040, the same age as Trump in 2002, Joe Biden in 1999, and Ronald Reagan in 1967.

Even so: Vance has an opportunity almost nobody passes up or would prudently pass up. So long as he maintains Trump’s favor, he is the heavy favorite for the nomination; that will never be true again if he sits out the race, regardless of whether a different Republican runs and wins or if the Trump years end in a Democratic victory. True, if the war in Iran is still unpopular and a more conventional and more hawkish Republican runs and loses, Vance may try to position himself as the I-told-you-so factional candidate — perhaps with some of the restoration-of-the-party’s-good-times air of George W. Bush in 2000 — but that’s still a far weaker position in a primary than running as the favorite.

And what will he do in the interim? That’s always the trouble for candidates who are out of office too long. Unless Jon Husted loses this fall, Ohio will still have two Republican senators. Vance could run for governor in 2030 if Vivek Ramaswamy (who is running weaker than Husted in the polls) loses, but that’s still a bank shot, plus the Ohio governorship is not a great launching pad. Finally, the whole rustpolitik theory of Vance’s politics is the centrality of the Rust Belt to presidential politics — but after the 2030 census, that center of gravity shifts to the Sun Belt battlegrounds of Georgia, Arizona, and North Carolina, for which he is less naturally suited. 2028 is still the logical time for him to run.

History Says Run

Consider the history. Only one sitting vice president — Joe Biden in 2016 — has declined to run when the president wasn’t running, then returned later to claim the presidency, or even to win the nomination. Indeed, the only other sitting vice president who had the chance to run and later won the presidency or even the nomination was Richard Nixon, and Nixon didn’t do it by sitting out 1960; he ran, was nominated, lost the general election narrowly (some of his supporters felt it had been stolen), and came back to win eight years later.

We can divide presidential nomination contests roughly into the pre-party convention era (roughly, 1789–1828), the convention era (1832–1964), and the primary era (1968–), with of course the caveat that there were transitions along the way. In the first era, three vice presidents had an opening when the president declined to seek a third term; John Adams in 1800 ran and won, George Clinton in 1808 stayed on as vice president while Secretary of State James Madison ran and won (Clinton died in office in 1812), and Daniel Tompkins, a hopeless alcoholic by 1824, didn’t run and died 99 days after leaving office while Secretary of State John Quincy Adams ran and won. In that era, the secretary of state rather than the vice president was typically the natural heir.

In the convention era, nine sitting vice presidents had an opening to run. One, Martin Van Buren, pulled off what Vance would like to do: run and win after joining up as a second-term VP. Besides Nixon and Biden, Van Buren is the only ex-VP on this list to win another nomination after leaving office, albeit as a third-party candidate in 1848 four years after losing reelection to the presidency. Seven of the other eight sought the presidential nomination at the convention. The one exception, Rutherford B. Hayes’s vice president William Wheeler, joined Hayes in not seeking to run again in 1880 after the corrupt deal that won them the 1876 election. Two, Nixon in 1960 and John Breckinridge in 1860, won their party’s nomination (in Breckinridge’s case, half of it during a party schism) and lost the general election. The other five failed to win enough support at their conventions: George Dallas in 1848, Charles Fairbanks in 1908, Thomas Marshall in 1920, Charles Dawes in 1928, and Alben Barkley in 1952. In several of those cases, the decisive factor was that the outgoing president had picked a different successor or fallen out with his veep. None of them were ever serious presidential contenders again.

In the primary era, four of the six sitting vice presidents have run, and all four became their party’s nominee. Two of them (Hubert Humphrey in 1968 and Kamala Harris in 2024) were drafted at the last minute when their bosses dropped out of the race, and lost in the fall. Humphrey ran again in 1972 and flirted for a time with being drafted as a compromise candidate in 1976, but was never his party’s standard-bearer again. George H. W. Bush won the general election; Al Gore lost it and never came back. Dick Cheney retired.

That leaves Biden. But Biden’s path is quite different from Vance’s. Biden has several reasons for not running in 2016, including grief from his son Beau’s death in 2015 and questions already arising about his age (he was then 73). But the two big ones were that he faced an uphill battle generating enthusiasm after having previously run two badly failed campaigns (in 1988 and 2008) and that Hillary Clinton, not Biden, was widely recognized as the next in line by 2016 due to having been two-term first lady, the narrow runner-up for the nomination in 2008, secretary of state, and bearer of the banner of the expected first woman president. Vance faces no intraparty foe who so badly overshadows him.

So long as that remains true, expect him to run.