Political pundit and historian Victor Davis Hanson wrote on February 9 about buzz over a potential 2028 presidential primary battle between Vice President J. D. Vance and Secretary of State Marco Rubio. In it, he posed a historical question whose answer he didn’t know. I could have answered his query on the spot because for some ungodly reason, I’ve accumulated a semi-encyclopedic knowledge about one of earth’s least compelling topics—the history of U.S. vice presidents and vice presidential candidates. [NB: This essay focuses ONLY on historical trivia, and not on the relative merits of Vance, Rubio, other potential candidates (of either party), or Hanson’s political conjectures.]
WOULD TRUMP-VANCE TO RUBIO-VANCE BE UNPRECENDENTED?
No. Not at all.
Hanson wondered aloud whether a Rubio-Vance or Vance-Rubio ticket might arise. He perceives some “subtext” in Trump’s praise for both men and (by my reading) also imagines that the president would favor Vance-Rubio because one vice president serving two successive presidents would be novel and odd:
HANSON: “I’ll have to look at my history, but I don’t know of a case offhand where a sitting vice president, under one president, has come back to have another term under another president. So, when Trump says, as vice president, yeah, we’ve got two great people, Vance and Rubio. He never says it, but the subtext is that Vance would be the top of the ticket and Rubio would be the bottom.”
Contrary to the putative “subtext” that Mr. Hanson divines in President Trump’s words, I have profound doubts that President Trump has pored intensely over the minutiae of vice-presidential history and agonized over whether a Rubio-Vance ticket would violate historical norms. But for anyone else pondering this question, such a ticket would not be unprecedented. Two U.S. vice presidents did, indeed, served under two successive presidents apiece. In addition, two other ex-veeps were nominated to serve under second presidents, but the later tickets were defeated in the November polls. And in the most bizarre case, one former vice president considered a return to the vice presidency after having served as president.
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