Hiii besties~

I'm the guy that made the effortposts on the 2024 race and debates! With talk about Biden dropping out, Vice-President talk has skyrocketed. How will Harris do? Who will she pick as her running mate? Wouldn't it be hilarious if Hillary Clinton lived to watch someone else be the first female president?

With all this Vice-President talk around, I've been thinking about vice-presidents. The office, described by first Vice-President John Adams as "the most insignificant office ever devised", only really matters in helping people get elected. Be it a moderate to offset a radical , a figure from another region , or just a guy with a lot of money who can pay for campaign stuff, actually being the Vice-President is a distant second to being involved in the campaign. So what about the radicals that derailed the ticket? The unbalanced region tickets? Or just the brokies? Here's a ranking of the shittest running mates in history!

PREAMBLE

1. Vice-Presidents were originally whoever came second in the election, before the two party system established itself. 1804 would be the first time Presidents and Vice-Presidents were elected on the same ticket, so I'm counting Vice-Presidents that ran from 1804 to 2024.

2. In the words of our current Vice-President, "you think you fell out of a coconut tree? You exist in the context of all in which you live and what came before you." Source. Before roughly 1908, Presidents never "ran" for office. They "stood" for office, and their supporters campaigned for them. To actually campaign yourself, as Whig Winfield Scott in 1852 or Democrat William Jennings Bryan in 1896 and 1900 did, was unseemly at best and outright embarrassing at worst. So you have to cut them some slack back in the olden days.

5. Tim Kaine (Democrat) 2016

The Hillary Campaign is studied today as one of the worst campaigns of all time . Complacency was it's biggest sin, as she campaigned in safe states to win more votes rather than bother to defend the Blue Wall - which would ultimately cost her the election. Nothing showcases this complacency more then her selection of Tim Kaine, Virginian Senator, as her running mate. Tim added absolutely nothing to ticket.

On paper, this shouldn't be the case. On most Democrat tickets, the Southern Moderate is a perfect Democrat counter balance to the Urban Liberal. But Hillary was already a Southern Moderate! She had basically selected herself! That wouldn't in itself have been so bad, but Hillary wasn't universally popular. She had a long, drawn out primary battle against the far-left Bernie Sanders. Can you imagine, if Bernie had won in 2016, if he picked a white man who was far left instead of literally any woman? There would be bloody murder. Rather than show any kind of basic respect to her opponent, she picked herself again, except less well-known.

Kaine is only number 5 because there was nothing wrong with him. He didn't actually do anything wrong - he was just the wrong man at the wrong time. The only reason he was chosen was because of Hillary's backroom dealing - in any sane convention, she would have picked a more committed liberal to keep Berniebros happy. The arrogance, to assume that the leftists would fall back in line and vote for her anyway, is what would doom her efforts against the deeply unpopular political outsider. Kaine isn't the cause of the loss, merely the symptom.

4. Francis Preston Blair Jr. (Democrat) 1868

From a modern Southern Democrat to a old school Southern Democrat. The first presidential election since the end of the American civil war, the Democrats were left reeling. A majority of Democrats had supported the Confederacy , and with the South under military rule, this left the Democrats crippled as they prepared to run against the victorious in war Republicans. They would nominate Horatio Seymour of New York, a Northern Urban Democrat that had stayed loyalish during the Civil War.

Similar to Kaine, Blair is on paper an amazing choice. How can you call the Democrats traitors when Blair, a Union General, was on the ticket? Ehh, ehhh? Certainly, he seemed amazing. He flew through the nomination, and campaigned on Seymour's behalf (as was the style out of time).

They ran an insanely racist campaign - the official slogan was "This is a White Man's country, let the White Man rule." Seymour would win the West by threatening that Republican's dedication to equality meant they would grant civil rights to the chinese, he defended the Klu Klux Klan as just a social club, and fiercely opposed the idea of black people voting.

Francis Blair still managed to be too racist.

Blair ranted furiously that beloved war hero Ulysses Grant would transform the nation into a military dictatorship because he was obsessed with black people. The republicans were, in his eyes, a "semi-barbarous race of blacks who are worshipers of fetishes and poligamists" that wanted to "subject the white women to their unbridled lust." That's right, Chuds have always been obsessed with . Seymour would be forced to break tradition and campaign to try and mitigate what Blair was spouting - he didn't think all black people were male feminists or evil, he just thought they were inferior!

The ticket was destroyed, for a lot of reasons, Blair being cited as a key reason. He made white supremacy a dirty word - for shame! What makes Blair so bad is that he managed to turn one of the ticket's strengths, being racist, into a weakness. Seymour had tapped into something very powerful, and he knew it. He represented a party of literal actual traitors, but still pulled off 47% of the popular vote. Could they have won? With so many Southern states under reconstruction, no. But they could have done far better - Blair disgraced this key strength.

3. Curtis LeMay (American Independence) 1968

A hundred years on from the days of "White Man's Country" and it had been thanks to Texas Democrat Lyndon Johnson the Civil Rights Act of 1964 signed . The Democrats began the shift, very firmly, to the Urban North, while the Republicans continued their final shift to the Rural South. During this wacky period, the "Dixiecrats" found themselves adrift. Some, like William Fulbright of Arkansas, just complained while being forced to stick with the party. Others, like Strom Thurmond, joined the Republican party. But as far as Alabama Governor George Wallace was concerned, there was no difference between the parties.

George Wallace ran third party with the goal of winning enough states to prevent Humphrey or Nixon from getting 270 Electoral Votes, to force the election to the House and work with Nixon to repeal the Civil Rights Act. To do this, Wallace collected a series of single issue voters - he wanted to escalate the Vietnam war, supported worker's unions (like Humphrey) while opposing welfare (like Nixon), and was of course a massive

His running mate, Curtis "Bombs Away" LeMay, was a pretty cunning choice. LeMay, a self-declared war criminal, didn't have a record of racism but was utterly blood thirsty enough to appeal right wing nutjobs while legitimising the ticket as more than a racist riot, at least a little. So why was he bad?

Well, during the press conference announcing LeMay being on ticket, LeMay talked about how much he loved nuclear weapons, musing that America had a phobia of Nuclear Weapons. George Wallace jumps in to say that LeMay hadn't promised to use nukes, he just discussed them. LeMay would then say he could see himself nuking Vietnam. Seriously, just minutes after Wallace jumped in. It was like a fricking sitcom.

The response to this press conference was immediate. George Wallace went from polling 20% down to fricking 14% - a position Wallace would never recover from, winning an admittedly still impressive 13.5% of the popular vote, and narrowly failing in his goal of a deadlock. The lesson from LeMay is pretty esoteric but I think we can perhaps agree that talking about how cool nukes are generally backfires because the American people are cowards.

2. Geraldine Ferraro (Democrat) 1984

Walter Mondale had an uphill battle. Firstly, he was running against Ronald Reagan , the economy was booming and there was generally peace in the world . So he decided to think out of the box - he picked a woman with Jewish heritage, the first ever woman or ethnic Jew on a presidential ticket. It was a pretty good idea to supercharge women voters - shame it just flopped massively. 20% of women thought she was good for ticket, so she was already a pretty awful choice.

She did manage to turn some heads however, as the press investigated her scumbag husband! Tony Zaccaro, her husband, had ties to the mafia, the porn industry and cheated on his taxes, being investigated during the campaign by the police and ultimately pleading guilty to fraud in 1985 . These connections turned a failed gambit into an outright detriment, solidly slotting Ferraro as one of the worst candidates of all time.

Not everything is complicated!

Honourable mention

Not Sarah Palin. I'm a Sarah Palin shooter. She was a fricking r-slur make no mistake - but unlike Ferraro, she successfully supercharged female voters (until the fact she was an r-slur became common knowledge) and helped convince conservatives that didn't trust the moderate Komrade McShame that he would be suitably conservative. The polling tells the story - McCain went from 3% behind Obama to 5% ahead of him. Palin should have been kept on a tighter leash, but Bush was in the White House when the Recession hit. McCain was going to be slaughtered no matter what.

Dan Qauyle (Republican) 1988 and 1992

Herbert Walker Bush was in the same boat as McCain. Conservatives didn't entirely trust Bush, with him facing primary challenges from the far right in both his elections. There was some reason to mistrust him, as he had ran as a moderate against Reagan in 1980 and had a generally moderate voting record when he was a representative, nearly being forced out when he voted for a civil rights bill. Qauyle was a solid conservative culture warrior that helped Bush keep this base loyal - he was also a fricking idiot that couldn't even spell potato. While not awful, he created a lot of noise when there were a lot of better options that would have kept the base loyal. Like the 1996 ticket, Bob Dole and Jack Kemp, who were both free at the time!

Qauylee committede noe grande crimee, bute hee createdede ane imagee ofe uttere stupiditye thate cloudede thee campaigne ine ae mannere thate wase utterlye avoidablee.

Fricking POTATOE!

The worst running mate of all time, Thomas Eagleton (Democrat) 1972

How can you be worse than arrogance , turning strength to weakness, blab about nuclear weapons or having ties to criminal pornographers? You can be such an awful running mate, you get fired from the ticket during the campaign! While Blair was de-facto fired, sent to rant about how Darwin proves White Supremacy in Missouri, no other running mate was such an active detriment they had to leave.

When McGovern won the primary as 1970s Bernie Sanders, except more radical in some areas, he found himself deeply unpopular. Thomas Eagleton was his 5th choice for running mate, after Ted Kennedy, Hubert Humphrey, Edmund Muskie and Abe Ribicoff turned him down. He spoke to Thomas Eagleton and asked him if he had any skeletons in closet, and Eagleton said no. Being a Catholic moderate, it was hoped that he could trigger some nostalgia for Kennedy while being blandly inoffensive. That was what they wanted - him to no negatively impact the campaign. He would fail this - the Nixon campaign researched him, and found out he had a skeleton in the closest.

Eagleton had clinical depression, and had actually spent time in a mental asylum getting electro-shock therapy to treat it. This was immediately leaked to the press, and McGovern faced pressure to drop Eagleton. He declared that he stood behind Eagleton 1000% - then dropped him a few days later.

McGovern not doing a basic background check, insisting he was going to stand by Eagleton then dropping him - the whole affair was utterly idiotic. While McGovern ran a generally incompetent campaign, the shadow of the fact he had to fire his own planned vice-president loomed over everything he said and did. His selection was so grossly incompetent, did so much damage to the ticket, there is literally no point of comparison. Kaine didn't make any mistakes. Blair and LeMay were war heroes. Even Ferraro was a gamble that Mondale needed to make, just with a different woman. Eagleton was a moderate from a state McGovern couldn't have won to begin with. A bad idea executed horendously, there can be no comparison for sheer r-sluration.

Thanks for reading Rdrama! Can you think of any running mates worse? No you can't so keep yourself safe for even thinking of disagreeing with me. Top 5 best running mates coming when I can be assed!