OK, consider this the second in a series of threads by me explaining how people here tend to erroneously extrapolate the results of the handful of presidential elections we've had over the last few decades into some ironclad law of politics. The first one was this thread:
https://uselectionatlas.org/FORUM/index.php?topic=71757.0in which I argued that the "parties can't win more than two terms in a row except under extraordinary circumstances" rule that people seem to invoke isn't really based on anything.
The fallacy that I'm going to tackle today is the "it's hard for a failed VP nominee to later win the presidential nomination" argument. This keeps coming up in the 2012 forum, so I figured I'd tackle it here. The argument goes like this:
"We haven't had any recent cases in which VP nominees went on to win the presidential nomination of their party in a subsequent election. Or we have, but they were all special cases, like Dole getting the presidential nomination 20 years after running on the ticket with Ford. Or Mondale in 1984, which shows that you can do it if you were actually elected vice president, but not if you were just the VP nominee and lost."
Folks, there's a serious problem with these kinds of arguments. In the last, say, 40 years, we've only had 10 presidential elections, and that's not enough to draw such ironclad conclusions from. You also have to distinguish between "not having a special advantage" and "having a distinct disadvantage". If failed VP nominees have tended not to win their party's presidential nomination much recently, then OK, you can conclude that they don't have any particular *advantage* in getting the nomination. But that's different from arguing that being a failed VP nominee puts you at a *disadvantage* in terms of getting the presidential nomination.
What I mean is this: Suppose you have a hypothetical GOP primary between Mitt Romney and Sarah Palin. Is Palin automatically at a disadvantage because governors and former governors tend to win presidential nominations, while "failed VP nominees don't"? I don't think so. Look at it this way: In the last 40 years, we've had 5 governors win their party's nomination for president. How many state governors have we had over that same time period? 200? 300? That's an awfully small percentage of governors that ever make it as a major party presidential nominee. If even one of the last 10 failed VP nominees later won the presidential nomination, then unsuccessful VP candidates would have a better batting average at getting to the top than governors do.
And of course, you can stack the deck to invent any rule you like. Mondale's nomination in 1984 is inconvenient for you? Make up a new rule! You only count VP nominees who were never elected to the office. Folks, trying to derive "rules" like this is stupid. Please don't try to invent stupid historical laws like this, as they don't make any sense.
