Joe Biden’s decision to abandon his re-election campaign and vacate the White House after one term means he’ll be denied the chance to duplicate a political feat achieved only by Thomas Jefferson over two centuries ago.
Jefferson, who served as the nation’s second vice president between 1797 and 180l, defeated incumbent president John Adams — in effect, his boss — in the 1800 election to become America’s third president. Jefferson then won a second term to the highest office in 1804.
Since then, no former No. 2 has served two full terms in the White House. Richard Nixon, who was Dwight Eisenhower’s understudy from 1953 until 1961, was elected twice as president (in 1968 and 1972). However, he was forced to resign in 1974 after revelations of malfeasance, lumped under the umbrella calamity of “Watergate,” made it impossible for him to continue.
Biden joins a long list of vice presidents who couldn’t, for one reason or another, occupy the chief executive’s office two four-year terms. Some veeps even fail in competing for the nomination to run for the top job. Mike Pence and Dan Quayle, both from Indiana, are recent examples of VPs unable to persuade primary voters they deserved consideration for higher service.
Such historic hurdles now stand before Kamala Harris, the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee after Biden’s withdrawal, as she embarks on a run for the White House as the sitting vice president.
Why have the people a heartbeat away from ultimate power so often found their political ambition stifled when they try to ascend? Is the occupant of the second office viewed differently and less commandingly than, say, a governor, general or senator? Does the shadow of a president tend to obscure the figure next in line?
With the exception of Dick Cheney, the VP from 2001 until 2009, every No. 2 during the past four decades has tried to capture the Oval Office. Of the six who attempted — Walter Mondale, George H.W. Bush, Quayle, Al Gore, Biden and Pence — only two triumphed: Bush and Biden.
Bush then lost his re-election bid in 1992, and Biden has now given up his hope of continuing in power past January 20, 2025.
Considered across the sweep of American history, it’s a striking record of electoral frustration and adversity that’s evident long before 1984, when Mondale lost in a landslide to Ronald Reagan, then running for his second term.
Of the 15 vice presidents who reached the White House, nine later won presidential elections on their own: Jefferson, Martin Van Buren, Theodore Roosevelt, Calvin Coolidge, Harry Truman, Lyndon Johnson, Nixon, Bush and Biden.
Strikingly, the 20th century was particularly difficult for vice presidents who ascended to commander in chief, with Nixon a prime example. But Roosevelt, Coolidge, Truman and Johnson all moved into the White House when presidents with whom they served were either assassinated or died in office. In each case, the four won White House races on their own after assuming the ultimate brass ring. Yet each member of this quartet decided against seeking another term at the end of the four years to which they were elected.
Interestingly, Roosevelt didn’t like the presidential leadership of his hand-picked successor, William Howard Taft, and in 1912 decided to mount a third-party campaign to return to the White House. He finished second to Woodrow Wilson and subsequently entertained dreams of competing again in 1916.
Coolidge, Truman and Johnson were different. They made no further attempts to seek the presidency. Both Truman (in 1952) and Johnson (in 1968) had subterranean approval ratings when they considered prospects of re-election, and the two Democrats decided not to hazard defeat.
In each case, the party’s nominee — Adlai Stevenson in ’52 and Hubert Humphrey in ’68 — went down to defeat to Republican challengers: Eisenhower and Nixon respectively.
Throughout American history, only three vice presidents have won elections that allowed them to move directly from being the executive branch’s second fiddle to serving as conductor of the entire federal orchestra. Jefferson was first, Van Buren second and Bush third. Both Van Buren and Bush followed a pair of highly popular two-term presidents: Andrew Jackson and Reagan. Van Buren, like Bush, suffered a re-election loss.
To state the obvious, veeps don’t seem to get much respect from voters. Some choice statements about the office come even from those who’ve served in it. Adams, George Washington’s understudy and the nation’s first vice president, referred to the post as “the most insignificant office that ever the invention of man contrived or his imagination conceived.”
More recently, John Nance Garner, Franklin D. Roosevelt’s running mate in 1932 and 1936, described being second banana as “not worth a bucket of warm spit.” (Whether “spit” was, indeed, the liquid Garner mentioned remains in dispute.) In 1940, the frustrated former Speaker of the House went so far in trying to stop FDR from seeking a third term that he offered himself as a presidential candidate, a foolhardy effort that ended Garner’s political career.
Truman, who was Roosevelt’s third vice president and spent less than four months in that role before FDR’s death in 1945, commented that occupants of the overshadowed office “were about as useful as a cow’s fifth teat.”
Pungent observations notwithstanding, almost all the figures who’ve toiled as the governmental version of standby equipment have no reluctance about considering themselves worthy of calling the shots in the Oval Office. The dream never seems to die.
Nixon lost to John Kennedy in 1960 but came back eight years later to win — beating Humphrey, LBJ’s sitting vice president. Biden, who’d run for president in the campaigns of 1988 and 2008, sought the White House again in 2020 after eight years as Barack Obama’s vice president and four years out of public office.
By winning four years ago, Biden broke “the Van Buren Curse.” Since 1836, not a single Democrat who served as vice president had been successful in winning the White House without first assuming the presidency upon the death of their predecessor, as was the case with Truman and LBJ.
Jefferson famously called the presidency “a splendid misery.” The splendor of White House torment over two full terms has eluded every former vice president since Jefferson.
Biden’s recent decision means the 2024 election will conform to this enduring yet puzzling historical pattern.
Bob Schmuhl is the Walter H. Annenberg-Edmund P. Joyce Professor Emeritus of American Studies and Journalism at Notre Dame. He’s the author of several books, including The Glory and the Burden: The American Presidency from the New Deal to the Present (Notre Dame Press) and, most recently, Mr. Churchill in the White House: The Untold Story of a Prime Minister and Two Presidents, published this summer by Liveright/W.W. Norton.