TICKET BALANCING
With the announcement of the Republican and Democratic Vice Presidential nominees, much attention has been given to the practice of ticket balancing. George Bush did something very rare in American politics. He selected a running mate without taking advantage of the benfits of ticket balancing.
Ticket balancing is the practice of picking a running mate according to what strength he can add to the presidential candidate in the election. Rarely is a person picked solely because he would make a talented, or even competent, substitute president.
For our purposes, we will define a ticket as the presidential and vice-presidential candidates of a given party. The presidential candidate is usually referred to as the head or upper half or the ticket. The vice-presidential candidate is usually referred to as the bottom or lower half of the ticket. (The term "ticket" also refers to all the candidates of a given party for all offices, national, state and local, but we are only looking at the national ticket in this article.)
Ticket balancing goes back to the very beginning of our republic. The second place on the ticket is filled based on how much the choice can help the ticket get elected, regardless of how incompetent the person may be. It has led to some stunningly poor vice presidents and potential vice presidents.
In the very beginning, it was a simple matter of balancing north and south geographically. In 1796, John Adams of Massachusetts ran with Thomas Pinckney of South Carolina. Thomas Jefferson of Virginia ran with Aaron Burr of New York. In the next election in 1800, Jefferson again ran with Burr, and Adams ran with Charles Cotesworth Pinckney, also of South Carolina. In succeeding elections, James Madison of Virginia ran with George Clinton of New York and Elbridge Gerry of Massachusetts (after Clinton died during his first term). James Monroe of Virginia ran with Daniel Tompkins of New York in two elections.
In the years before the Civil War, all parties except the Republicans, balanced north and south on their national tickets. For example, slave owners James Polk and Zachary Taylor ran with Pennsylvanian Dallas and New Yorker Fillmore, respectively. The tickets they defeated had similarly balanced tickets.
The Republican Party in the two elections before the Civil War (the Party was formed in 1854) balanced east and west, since they were an anti-slavery party with no hopes of winning in the south. In 1856, the presidential candidate was John Fremont of California. His running mate was William Dayton of New Jersey. You can't get much more of an east-west spread than that. In 1860, Abraham Lincoln of Illinois (which was considered the west at the time) ran with Hannibal Hamlin of Maine.
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