Vice President Kamala Harris was set to appear at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago to accept her party’s nomination in late August. But first, she completed a seven-state swing with her own pick for veep, Gov. Tim Walz (D-MN), trying to drum up votes and donations.
Harris was free to do that because while President Joe Biden has relinquished his party’s nomination over concerns about his age and competitiveness with GOP nominee former President Donald Trump, Biden has not yet relinquished the presidency. He appears unlikely to do so until the presidential inauguration on Jan. 20 next year.
The presidency is a famously demanding job. The president lives in the White House so that the government can call upon him (or her) at any hour if the need arises. And the vice presidency is a famously less demanding job.
Vice presidents break tie votes in the Senate, but the occasions for those votes have become relatively rare. In the three-plus years of her vice presidency, Harris has broken 33 ties, though not since Dec. 5, 2023, to confirm Loren L. AliKhan, to be a federal district judge for the District of Columbia. In the eight years that he served as vice president to Barack Obama, Biden didn’t break any. (Trump’s first vice president, Mike Pence, saw more action, with 13 ties to break.)
Veeps can also preside over the Senate, but they have little power there for a specific historical reason. As George Washington was traveling to the temporary capital, New York, for his inauguration in 1789, Vice President John Adams started a wholly unwanted fight over how to address the former general.
Adams believed that to address Washington as simply the president would be an embarrassment. Adams proposed calling Washington “his high mightiness” instead. Senators were so mad that they wanted to gag the vice president. Adams agreed to refrain from debate instead, and vice presidents since have followed his lead.
Other than that, historically, vice presidents presided over the Electoral College results, went to many foreign state funerals that didn’t quite merit the presence of the commander in chief, and waited in the wings should the president die or be forced from office.
Vice presidents frequently came and went from the nation’s capital with little fanfare, too often unto their graves. “On sixteen occasions between 1789 and 1967, the vice presidency was vacant,” the Congressional Research Service reported. “In eight instances, the Vice President replaced a President who had died; in seven, the Vice President died in office; and in one case, the incumbent resigned.”
Vice presidents had no official residence and their schedules were not coordinated with the White House. With the ratification of the 25th Amendment in 1967, these things began to change.
An empty vice presidency is now seen as a bad thing and the president and Congress have a mechanism to fill the post, which is how America got vice president and then President Gerald Ford. Vice presidents since Walter Mondale have lived at the Naval Observatory and had offices in the White House in addition to the Senate.
“Beginning with former Vice President Walter Mondale, the vice presidency’s office became more critical,” former Al Gore aide and biographer Troy Gipson told the Washington Examiner in an email about the understudy to President Jimmy Carter.
He added, “When President Carter took office in January 1977, he was likely the first president to look at the office of vice president as something that needed more responsibility. So, I believe President Carter and Vice President Mondale restructured the office to allow more input and responsibility.”
In his book From Carthage to Oslo: A Biography of Al Gore, Gipson documented just how much things had opened up by the early 1990s, with Gore deeply involved in White House initiatives.
A “typical day” for Gore began at 8 a.m. in the White House with a briefing from his chief of staff, often followed by staff meetings “with his direct reports,” Gipson said. Gore met regularly with President Bill Clinton and helped to sell the administration’s priorities, including the North American Free Trade Agreement.
Gipson pointed out that one “enormous” initiative that Gore led, the National Performance Review, took six months to complete the final report. He estimated that 25% of Gore’s time during those six months was devoted to that report.
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Still, Gore’s involvement with the White House agenda appeared to flag considerably in Clinton’s second term. This gave him plenty of time to pursue the Democratic nomination and come a few dangling chads away from the presidency in 2000.
Other vice presidents who used the notoriety and time afforded them by their office to run for the top job in recent memory include Republicans Richard Nixon and George H.W. Bush in 1960 and 1988, respectively, and Democrat Hubert Humphrey in 1968. Only one of them managed to move directly from the understudy role into the spotlight.
Jeremy Lott is the author of The Warm Bucket Brigade: The Story of the American Vice Presidency.
