If Kamala Harris is elected president in November, she will of course make history as the first woman to reach the Oval Office. She will also be the first American president of Asian descent, and the first whose parents emigrated from two different countries (Harris’s father came from Jamaica and her mother from India). But her election would also be historic in another way: It would add her to the surprisingly tiny club of sitting vice presidents who successfully ran for the White House.
Beginning in 1789, the United States has had 59 presidential elections (the 60th will take place this fall). Only four of those elections have been won by the incumbent vice president.
In 1796, after eight years as the nation’s first vice president, John Adams was elected to the presidency, succeeding George Washington to become the nation’s second chief executive. Four years later, Adams lost his bid for a second term when he was beaten by Vice President Thomas Jefferson. In 1836, with the support of Andrew Jackson, the popular outgoing president, Martin Van Buren became the third sitting veep to win election to the nation’s highest office.
But in the nearly two centuries since then, only once have voters elevated an incumbent vice president to the White House. That was George H.W. Bush, who, after eight years as Ronald Reagan’s No. 2, ran for president in 1988 and won in a landslide. Every other vice president who ran for president failed to pull it off. In 1860, the Democratic candidate for president, Vice President John Breckinridge, lost to Abraham Lincoln. In 1960, Richard Nixon lost to John F. Kennedy. In 1968, Hubert Humphrey lost to Nixon. And in 2000, Al Gore lost to George W. Bush.
Somewhat surprisingly, it has been much more common for vice presidents to accede to the presidency upon the death or resignation of their predecessor. That became the path to the White House for nine men — John Tyler in 1841, Millard Fillmore (1850), Andrew Johnson (1865), Chester A. Arthur (1881), Theodore Roosevelt (1901), Calvin Coolidge (1923), Harry S. Truman (1945), Lyndon Johnson (1963), and Gerald Ford (1974). But in the last 100 years, only three of them (Coolidge, Truman, and Johnson) went on to subsequently win a presidential election in their own right. None of the numerous other vice presidents who sought the presidency — including most recently Walter Mondale, Dan Quayle, Gore, and Mike Pence — achieved their goal.
Politicians who agree to run for vice president typically do so with the expectation that it will increase their chances of eventually reaching the Oval Office. So it is strange that voters have traditionally been so unwilling to elevate them to the top job. Why is that? The likeliest explanation is that by the time a sitting VP is nominated for president, the public has tired of the incumbent administration and wants to give the other party a chance to govern. Only twice in the last 100 years has a president reached the end of his term and been able to hand the job over to a successor from the same party: Calvin Coolidge was succeeded by Herbert Hoover in 1929, and Reagan was followed by the elder Bush in 1989.
Can Harris break the pattern? Before Joe Biden withdrew from the 2024 election under pressure a month ago, his vice president was widely regarded as even more unpopular and unelectable than he was. In a nationwide survey at the end of May, a third of voters thought it likely that Harris could win an election were she to become the Democratic nominee. Several leading Democrats, most notably Barack Obama, were initially reluctant to support the automatic elevation of Harris to be the party’s standard-bearer.
Yet against all odds, Harris has done what few analysts would have predicted — soared in popularity and generated waves of enthusiasm for the Democratic ticket. Heading into the Democratic National Convention in Chicago, she was narrowly ahead of Donald Trump in public opinion polls, and friendly media accounts were widely describing her campaign as one fueled by “joy.”
Between now and Election Day anything can happen — this presidential campaign, especially lately, has been a cascade of unforeseen developments — but at the moment it’s even odds that Harris will become the 47th president of the United States. If she pulls it off, it will be a history-making achievement on many levels. Not least because, for only the fifth time in 235 years, an incumbent vice president will have been elected to the presidency.
This is an excerpt from Arguable, a Globe Opinion newsletter by columnist Jeff Jacoby. Sign up to get Arguable in your inbox each week.
Jeff Jacoby can be reached at jeff.jacoby@globe.com. Follow him on X @jeff_jacoby.