From Southwest Ledger
Our political world erupted July 21 when President Joe Biden finally admitted his chance of winning seemed bleak and decided to step down.
The eruption came from political pundits trying to decide who would replace Biden and how any replacement would work. In their rush to inform viewers, several TV personalities reported how “historic” and“unprecedented” this was.
Historically speaking, while this is historic, as it has never happened quite this way before, but a sitting president not running for a second term is far from unprecedented. In fact, this will be the 12th time in our nation’s 248-year history.
Of the previous 11, five on their own chose not to run again. Three—Rutherford B. Hayes, James K. Polk and James Buchanan—promised from the beginning to only serve one term.
Harry S. Truman was the sitting president when the 25thAmendment was ratified. The amendment sets term limits on the president. Truman had already decided two terms was enough for him.
But the one who now resembles Biden is some ways, Calvin Coolidge, inherited the presidency after Harding’s death, but he was elected in 1924. Coolidge’s issue was he decided he did not like being president. So, in 1928, he announced that he would not run even though he was expected to. Obviously, Coolidge’s predicament is a bit different than Biden’s as Biden wanted run but was convinced otherwise.
Four others—John Tyler, Millard Filmore, Andrew Johnson and Chester Arthur—were denied a chance for a second term. All were vice presidents who took over after the death or resignation of their president. None of whom had been seen as presidential contenders, which is how I saw Kamala Harris.
Peaking at 15% in national polls after debating Biden in June 2019, Harris, a single-term U.S. senator from California, did not run well last in her first bid for the presidency. Citing funding difficulties, she suspended her campaign in early December 2019. Harris was added tothe Biden ticket mostly to fulfill Biden’s campaign pledge to run a woman of color. To me, Harris being chosen for the 2024 presidential nominee seems more like a Democratic timing issue than an intentional plan to run her all along.
It should be noted that vice presidents are not put on tickets to become successors to the presidency, but currently are added to help presidential candidates win elections. Other than the presidents who became president because of death or resignation of a sitting president, there are only six sitting VPs who ran for president and won: John Adams, Thomas Jefferson, Martin Van Buren, Richard Nixon, George H.W. Bush and Joe Biden.
The VP position has never been—and never was intended to be—a real launching pad to the presidency.
The two presidents who won their term as president but did not gain their party’s nomination for reelection even though they sought it were Lyndon B. Johnson in 1968 andFranklin Pierce in 1856. Biden does not exactly fit into this category as he backed out because of party pressure.
Johnson was John F. Kennedy’s VP and became president with Kennedy’s death. He rode the JFK popularity trainfor his own win in 1964. His economic and social programs made him the first modern Democrat to hold the office and his far-left positions made him champion with the “New Left” but his continued support of the war in Vietnam destroyed his approval rating and lost him the youth movement.
Fully expecting the nomination, Johnson came into the primary season with his only real competition coming from economics professor-turned-Senator from Minnesota,Eugene McCarthy. What hurt Johnson was that January 1968 was also the beginning of the Tet Offensive in Vietnam, one of the bloodiest engagements of that war. When anti-war McCarthy began to win states in the primary, other candidates saw blood in the water, most notably Robert Kennedy, the brother of slain president and Johnson’s predecessor, John F. Kennedy.
With two anti-war, popular candidates now winning the majority of the primaries, Johnson saw the writing on the wall and dropped out. Picking up where Johnson left off with support of the war, his VP, Hubert Humphrey, then joined the race. It looked like a tall task for Humphrey, but after Robert Kennedy’s assassination, McCarthy also suspended his campaign allowing Humphrey to win at the convention.
There are some similarities here if Harris does get the nod. Humphrey picked up the baton after Johnson’s fall, however, a new face with a different message was not able to beat Richard Nixon in the general election. Its going to be hard to nominate anyone but Harris as the voters have already spoken—which may be fine for Democrats as Biden did not drop out for his message as much as for his age.
Franklin Pierce was in a similar boat as Biden is now.Going into the 1856 presidential election, Pierce expected to win his party’s nomination, but events during his tenure made him too toxic to voters, so he was replaced.
1856 was an interesting election because it was the first with new party affiliations based on slavery. DuringPierce’s presidency, Kansas had broken out into a war called “Bleeding Kansas” to decide whether Kansas would enter the Union as a free or slave state. Both sides had organized themselves into governments with militias, with the anti-slavery side at Topeka and the pro-slavery side at Lecompton. As the two militias killed each other for control over the territory the two governments drew up constitutions and submitted them to Congress.
Even though Pierce was from New Hampshire, he was what is known as a “dough-faced Democrat,” meaning he tended to side with the South. As such, he supported the Lecompton Constitution. By doing so, he made the Democratic Party the party of slavery and killed the Whig Party who now looked soft on slavery forcing all Southern Whigs to abandon their party. With the national Whig Party dead, Northern Whigs began looking for a new home and they found the newly created Republican Party. The party had been formed in 1854 and their principalcause was to stop the expansion of slavery into new territories like Kansas and Nebraska.
In 1856 the Republicans ran John C. Frémont as their candidate. The other party that picked up some old Whig support was the Know-Nothing Party that ran ex-President Millard Fillmore. With primaries not a thing yet, nominees were chosen at conventions. When the Democrats met, it was decided that Pierce’s connection to Bleeding Kansas was too divisive and they chose James Buchanan instead. Buchanan had been in England serving as ambassador and so could not be connected to any of the controversy.
Today’s Democrats have not met yet for their conventionand they could choose someone other than Harris. They are holding a virtual election on Aug. 7 to choose their nominee. It would be hard to reject the primaries that voted in Harris as the backup; it seems undemocratic, but not unheard of.
In the aforementioned 1968 convention, Humphrey did not win the primaries. He did not even run in most of them, entering the race after most were done. However, it was at the convention that he picked up delegates on his side who chose him for their nomination.
Remember primaries are not in our Constitution. In fact,primaries were not even introduced until the last century. Before that, delegates chose candidates at the conventions for all parties. Parties can make their own rules. Harris has taken an early lead in popularity, but with the craziness of this election, the convention can be a tricky place.
James Finck is a professor of American history at the University of Science and Arts of Oklahoma. He can be reached at HistoricallySpeaking1776@gmail.com.
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