Reality Check is a Bee series holding officials and organizations accountable and shining a light on their decisions. Have a tip? Email realitycheck@sacbee.com.
Donald Trump said during his debate with Kamala Harris that she has been the “worst vice president in the history of our country.” So we asked two scholars who have studied the vice presidency if that was so.
Harris, vice president since 2021, was rated 11th of 18 modern vice presidents in a study by Justin Vaughn, associate professor of political science at Coastal Carolina University, and Brandon Rottinghaus, professor of political science at the University of Houston. they are co-directors of the Presidential Greatness Project, which conducted the study.
The findings involve ratings of vice presidents starting with Franklin D. Roosevelt’s administration in 1933, the year scholars consider the beginning of the powerful American presidency.
Stay Informed On Election News
Sign up here to get our Election 2024 newsletter, with local, state and national political news and analysis sent right to your inbox.
The professors asked scholars and political experts to rate modern vice presidents in different areas. The study was conducted from November 15 to December 31, 2023. Among the areas rated: Balancing the ticket, policy adviser, maintaining relations with Congress and serving as a surrogate for the president.
We asked Vaughn for more details. Below is our interview with him:
Q. Donald Trump says Vice President Harris is the “worst vice president in the history of our country.” Your study has her #11 . Is there any evidence to back up Trump’s claim?
A. I don’t think there is any evidence to back up the idea that Harris is the worst ever, but it is equally hard to make the argument that she has been an impactful vice president.
Prior to this summer, there is little to suggest that she played a major role in the administration or that she had a strong role in President Biden’s decision making, as opposed to the role Biden played in the Obama White House, for example.
Harris’s vice presidency had some mild chaos with turnover and occasional negative media coverage and she didn’t perform with aplomb on the signature issue she was handed (immigration), but at the same time there haven’t been the disastrous performances we associate with other, more infamous vice presidents.
Since Harris replaced Biden at the top of the ticket, there’s been a bit of revisionist history taking place on both sides, but for the most part I think an objective read of the Harris vice presidency was that she wasn’t given a large role and didn’t do much with the role she was given, at least not until this summer.
Q. Could you break down how you arrived at rating Harris #11?
A. The ranking is based on expert ratings. We surveyed over 150 scholar experts in the American presidency in November-December 2023, and one of the things they did was rate each modern vice president on a scale of 0-100 for their overall greatness.
The ranking is based on the average rating for each vice president. Harris’s average was 46.03, which rated her just under Dick Cheney and just over Nelson Rockefeller and Mike Pence. (Cheney served under President George W. Bush, Rockefeller under President Gerald Ford and Pence under President Donald Trump.)
While we don’t have individual explanations from the participating scholars for why they rated each vice president the way they did, the story about Harris is relatively clear.
She generally wasn’t seen as playing a major role in the Biden Administration, the relationship between Harris and Biden specifically didn’t appear to be strong, particularly as she seemed to be the subject of various leaks expressing dissatisfaction with her performance, and the one major issue she was assigned – immigration – was not a whopping success, though there are a range of explanations why.
Q. Where does Harris rate as a policy adviser?
A. Harris didn’t rate terribly well as a policy adviser. In addition to asking our experts to rate the overall greatness of modern vice presidents. We also asked them to rate specific dimensions of a subset of more recent presidents (i.e., contemporary presidents from Walter Mondale through Kamala Harris) on key attributes of the vice presidency, including service as a policy advisor to the president, on a 0-100 scale.
Harris came in sixth out of eight, and is grouped together at the bottom with Mike Pence and Dan Quayle, who also were not regarded as important policy voices in their administrations. (Quayle was President George H.W. Bush’s vice president).
Q. Harris seems to get praise from the experts in your survey as a ticket balancer. Why?
Harris offset Biden in just about every important way: age (essentially Gen X vs Boomer/Silent), race & gender (multi-racial woman of color vs white man), ideology (West Coast somewhat progressive vs traditional liberal), and geography (Bay Area California vs East Coast).
Q. Why do you only rate post-1933 vice presidents?
A. We only asked our participating scholars to rate post-1933 vice presidents, or modern vice presidents as we refer to them, for a couple of reasons. First, the institution of the presidency fundamentally changed in 1933 with FDR; that has become a natural cut-off point when scholars explain the institution today.
Second, and more pragmatically, the further back we ask people to evaluate vice presidents, especially if we were to go back into the 19th Century, you’d have a situation where a lot of scholars just don’t know a lot about individual figures and the opinions would be less meaningful.
Q. This goes beyond the study, but is there anything about a person’s performance or behavior as vice president that tells us what sort of president they could be?
A. In general, the characteristics a person demonstrates throughout their career are the ones they demonstrate as president.
So if a vice president isn’t a good manager or a good communicator, they aren’t going to become one as president when the task is even more significant. On the other hand, if they have good relations with members of Congress or a knack for policy as VP, they probably will further showcase those skills as POTUS.
Q. Why is Spiro Agnew last?
A. Agnew’s lack of contributions to the Nixon Administration were overshadowed by his divisive political style and, especially, his personal scandals and legal troubles, which led to him having to resign from the administration.
(Agnew, President Richard Nixon’s first vice president, resigned in 1973 after pleading no contest to a single charge of federal tax evasion.)
Q. Why is Al Gore first?
We don’t have individual explanations for why our experts rated Gore as highly as they did, but the fact that he was a strong partner with Bill Clinton and that he handled a relatively high-profile policy assignment (reinventing Government/streamlining bureaucracy) well and served as a skillful messenger for the administration without creating any scandals is a major reason why he is looked at as a successful contemporary vice president.
