What to watch for in 2020: No president has booted a VP before a reelection campaign since Franklin D. But he didn’t in 2019, and that was a win for Pence. If anyone is capable of making a capricious decision to replace a vice president, it is Trump. Trump has a flair for the dramatic and a distaste for playing by old rules.

The only time that’s happened was when Hillary Clinton kept Biden out of the 2016 race, and she was both a former first lady and the 2008 presidential primary runner-up. There’s plenty of speculation that Mike Pompeo wants to inherit the Trump mantle, but it’s hard to imagine a secretary of State (current or former, depending on how long Pompeo stays in his current job, and whether he runs for an open Senate seat in Kansas) boxing out a vice president in a presidential primary. Joe Biden isn’t a lock in 2020, but his VP status is the biggest reason why he has held the frontrunner position since he entered the race. In 1972, Hubert Humphrey ran for the Democratic nomination and lost, but he had previously won it four years earlier, then lost the general election. The lone exception was Dan Quayle, an unusually unpopular vice president who dropped out of the 2000 campaign almost as soon as he jumped in. Since 1960, nearly every sitting or former vice president who sought his party’s presidential nomination got it. He endured speculation that Trump would dump him from the ticket.īut he won a public commitment from Trump, who said last month that Pence “is our man, 100 percent.” Assuming Trump keeps his word (which, granted, should never be assumed), Pence will have something no other Republican candidate in 2024 will have: the title of vice president. He was the subject of two books this year that portrayed him as willing to sacrifice principle for ambition (in “American Carnage,” POLITICO’s Tim Alberta noted Pence’s “talent for bootlicking”). Vice President Mike Pence is not the most captivating politician.

Sacrifice by Stacey Rourke