Vice President of the United States

The vice president of the United States is a member of the executive branch of the US government and is next in line to the presidency should the president die, resign, or otherwise be unable to perform his duties. The vice president also acts as the president of the Senate, although their primary duty is to cast a deciding vote in the event of a tie. The office of vice president has been much maligned since it was first instituted by the Founding Fathers. Originally considered an “insignificant” office, the role has evolved into one with more governmental responsibilities. Since 1789, forty-nine people have served as vice president. Of those, fifteen later became president themselves—eight as a result of the death of the sitting president. Among the former US vice presidents was a political opponent of the president he served under; another who led an army in an invasion of Washington, DC; and one who was charged with murder. In 2020, the first female vice president, Kamala Harris, was elected.

Origins

Under British rule prior to the Revolutionary War (1775-1783), the individual American colonies were ruled by governors. The position of lieutenant governor was created to act as a successor to the colonial governor in the case of his death. These lieutenant governors often served as president of the upper houses of the colonial legislatures. When the Founding Fathers debated the new Constitution of the United States in 1787, they did not originally have a provision creating a separate office to act as a presidential successor. They were considering having the leader of the Senate be next in line to the presidency.

The idea of a vice president grew from the debate over the method of electing a president. The Founding Fathers did not want tyrannical elements in government to have too much influence over the voting public. They also wanted to ensure that the votes of smaller states were not overshadowed by states with large urban populations. As a solution, they came up with the Electoral College system. Instead of the popular vote determining the winner of the election, representatives from each state would vote for president. The number of representatives was determined by the number of seats each state had in Congress.

Under the rules set forth in 1787, each Electoral College representative was to cast two votes for president. At least one of those votes had to be for a candidate who was not from the representative’s home state. This was done to prevent the representatives from only voting for their political allies. The candidate who received the most electoral votes was elected president; the candidate with the second most votes was elected vice president. If no candidate received a majority of the votes, the House of Representatives would determine the winner.

The Constitution stated that the powers of the presidency would pass to the vice president in the event the president died, was disabled, or resigned. What the Constitution did not stipulate was whether the vice president would act as interim president until a new president was selected or whether he would become president himself. The Constitution also did not lay out any plans for vice-presidential succession. If the vice president died or could not continue in the position, the office would remain vacant until the next presidential election. The leader of the Senate and the Speaker of the House would be next in line to the presidency.

Aside from being the direct successor to the president, the vice president was given only two formal duties by the Constitution. Their main duty was to act as president of the Senate; however, they were not allowed to vote unless a Senate measure ended in a tie. Between 1789 and 2023, the vice president has acted to break a Senate 301 times. Kamala Harris, who was elected in 2021, cast the most tie-breaking votes with thirty-two. John Calhoun, who was vice president from 1825 to 1832, had cast the second most tie-breaking votes with thirty-one. Joe Biden, who served from 2009 to 2017, was one of several vice presidents who did not cast any tie-breaking votes. The vice president’s other main duty was to preside over the official count of the electoral vote and announce the winner of the presidential election.

Overview

George Washington won the first US presidential election in 1789. Washington technically ran unopposed and was named on all sixty-nine electoral ballots cast. Because election rules stated two votes must be cast, John Adams received thirty-four votes for president and was elected vice president. Washington and Adams were re-elected in 1792. Adams was a political ally of Washington and cast twenty-nine tie-breaking votes to advance the president’s policies. Despite his support of Washington, Adams was rarely consulted by the president in matters of governing. His perceived lack of responsibility prompted Adams to comment that the vice presidency was “the most insignificant office” ever created.

Washington declined to run for a third term in 1796, and opened the door for Adams to seek the office. Adams won the election with seventy-one electoral votes. His main opponent, Thomas Jefferson, finished second and became vice president. Adams was a Federalist, a political party that believed in a strong central government. Jefferson ran as a Democratic-Republican, a party that believed in state’s rights and a less powerful national government. Adams asked Jefferson to work with his administration, but Jefferson refused. He did not want to support policies he did not agree with and spent his four years as vice president preparing to run against Adams in 1800.

The election of 1800 was a bitterly fought and chaotic contest that exposed the flaws of the system as set forth in the Constitution. It was presumably a race between Adams and Jefferson, but Jefferson and his Democratic-Republican running mate Aaron Burr ended up tied for the lead with seventy-three electoral votes. Adams finished third with sixty-five. By rule, the House of Representatives would decide the election; however, the House was controlled by members of the Federalist Party, many of whom hated Jefferson and did not want to vote for him. It took thirty-six ballots before Jefferson finally received the required votes to be elected president. Burr became vice president. The fallout from the election of 1800 prompted Congress to propose a change in the Constitution. In 1804, the Twelfth Amendment was passed mandating that electors cast separate votes for president and vice president.

Burr’s refusal to relinquish his claim to the presidency and give his support to Jefferson angered some members of his party. One of his main political opponents, Federalist Alexander Hamilton, argued vehemently against him in the House debate of 1800 and was one of the reasons Jefferson eventually got enough votes to win the election. In July 1804, Burr and Hamilton engaged in a duel in northern New Jersey. Hamilton was killed, and Burr was charged with murder. The charges were later dropped, but Burr was not included in Jefferson’s re-election campaign in 1804.

For much of the nineteenth century, the political parties, not the presidential candidates, chose the nominees for vice president. Many of the vice-presidential candidates were from Northern states to add geographical balance to a ticket with Southern presidential candidates. In 1824, John Calhoun of South Carolina ran for president, but he switched to running for vice president when his presidential bid failed. He won the vice presidency, but the candidate he supported, Andrew Jackson, eventually lost the election in a controversial vote in the House. John Quincy Adams of Massachusetts became president. Despite being Adams’s vice president, Calhoun actively campaigned against him in 1828. Jackson was elected president, and Calhoun became his vice president. The two had a falling out in 1832, and Calhoun became the first vice president to resign from the office.

In 1840, William Henry Harrison was elected president and John Tyler won the vice presidency. However, just thirty-one days after he was sworn in, Harrison died of pneumonia. Tyler assumed the presidency, interpreting the vague wording of the Constitution as transferring the office directly to him rather than on an interim basis. No one in Congress or his administration mounted a serious challenge to his claim, and from that point on, direct succession was considered precedent. The office of vice president remained vacant until the election of 1844.

Very few of the vice presidents of the mid- to late-nineteenth century involved themselves with their procedural duties of presiding over the Senate. Richard M. Johnson, vice president under Martin Van Buren from 1837 to 1841, spent most of his time taking care of his tavern in Kentucky. He was known for proposing a drilling expedition to the North Pole to determine if the Earth was hollow. Henry Wilson, vice president under Ulysses Grant from 1873 to 1875, worked on a three-volume history of slavery before dying in office. At thirty-six, John Breckinridge was the youngest vice president in history. He served under James Buchanan from 1857 to 1861. Breckinridge, who was from Kentucky, joined the Confederate army at the outbreak of the Civil War (1861–65). He rose to the rank of general and led an unsuccessful attack on Washington, DC, in 1864.

In 1900, the Republican Party was looking for a vice-presidential candidate to run with President William McKinley for his second term. His previous vice president had died in 1899. The party chose Theodore Roosevelt, a charismatic figure who had won national fame in the Spanish-American War in 1898. Roosevelt was a rising political star and broke with tradition to actively campaign for the vice presidency. He raised the profile of the office and wanted to expand the role of the vice president in McKinley’s second term. However, just months after McKinley was sworn in, he was assassinated and Roosevelt became president.

As the twentieth century progressed, the vice president slowly began to gain more political power. Because the political parties still chose the vice-presidential candidate, several presidents were openly critical of the men chosen to be their running mates. In 1932, the Democrats chose powerful congressman John “Cactus Jack” Garner of Texas to run with Franklin D. Roosevelt. Garner served two terms as vice president, but Roosevelt did not trust the congressman. When Garner began exploring his own presidential bid in 1940, Roosevelt made it clear he wanted his own candidate, Henry Wallace, to be his vice president. Wallace was replaced with Harry Truman for Roosevelt’s fourth term in 1944; this selection began the tradition of presidential candidates choosing their own running mates.

Following the assassination of John F. Kennedy in 1963, Lyndon Johnson assumed the presidency and the vice-presidential position remained vacant. At the time, both the leaders of the Senate and the House were near eighty years old, prompting concern in Congress that a new plan of succession was needed. This led to the passage of the Twenty-Fifth Amendment in 1967. The amendment mandated that the president nominate a new candidate for vice president if the office was vacant. The House and Senate would then vote to approve the prospective candidate. Less than a decade after the amendment became law, it was used twice in just over a year’s time. President Richard Nixon appointed Gerald Ford as vice president in 1973 when sitting vice president Spiro Agnew resigned. Ford became president in 1974 when Nixon resigned in the wake of the Watergate scandal. Ford appointed Nelson Rockefeller as his vice president.

In an attempt to avoid the scandals that plagued previous administrations, Jimmy Carter put his potential vice-presidential candidates through an extensive interview process in 1976. He eventually chose Senator Walter Mondale of Minnesota as his vice president. Mondale fundamentally changed the role of the office. He used his legislative experience to become more of a presidential advisor and partner in shaping governmental policy. In 1984, Mondale ran for president himself and nominated the first female vice-presidential candidate. His selection of Geraldine Ferraro was also the first time a candidate announced his vice-presidential selection before the party’s convention.

Modern vice presidents often attend cabinet meetings, represent their administration during congressional hearings, serve on the National Security Council, and represent the United States at foreign functions. Some presidents such as Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, and Barack Obama relied more heavily on their vice presidents as advisors. Dick Cheney, vice president under Bush from 2001 to 2009, was given the day-to-day tasks of implementing the policy decisions made by the president. He was also involved in decisions related to the early twenty-first century wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. Presidential experts often cite Mondale and Cheney as two of the most influential vice presidents in history.

Democrat Kamala Harris made history when she became the first woman to be elected vice president after former vice president Joe Biden won the 2020 presidential election. In addition, Harris was the first Black American and first Asian American to hold the office. When Biden ended his bid to run for a second term in July 2024, he endorsed Harris to replace him as the Democratic presidential nominee in that year's general election. The Democratic Party officially nominated Harris as its presidential candidate the following month.

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