History shows the choice of vice president matters

Donald Trump has said that his pick of JD Vance as his running mate will have “no impact on the election.” He said the vice presidential candidate does not make a difference. Trump may be correct; however, history tells us that running mates can bring victory when defeat seems inevitable. The opposite is also true.

When then-President Donald Trump addressed the National Republican Congressional Committee in 2017, he referred to Abraham Lincoln as a “Great president. Most people don’t even know he was a Republican. Does anyone know? Lot of people don’t know that.” It must be assumed that most of those Republicans did “know that” — after all, their party had long been referred to as the “Party of Lincoln.”

However, what “most people don’t even know” is that when Lincoln ran for reelection in 1864, he did not run as a Republican. When Lincoln first ran, many who were opposed to slavery were reluctant to support the newly formed Republican Party. Although its platform provided that slavery should not be allowed to spread to other states, it also provided that slavery should be allowed to continue in the states where it existed.

In order to garner the support of Frederick Douglass and other abolitionists who wanted an immediate end to slavery, the Republicans chose Sen. Hannibal Hamlin, a strong abolitionist from Maine, as Lincoln’s running mate. Although the GOP only received 39% of the vote, it was a winner. The Republican base was held together by having Hamlin on the ticket.

It was through the efforts of Hamlin that the Emancipation Proclamation was signed in 1862. However, the abolitionists and Republicans remained unhappy with Lincoln’s overriding concern of keeping the Union together instead of equality for enslaved black Americans. After three years of Civil War, with the morale of the Union army in decline, the Republicans abandoned Lincoln and along with the abolitionists, formed the new Radical Democracy Party.

Lincoln, determined to be reelected to keep the Union together, created the National Union Party. Lincoln dropped Hamlin from the ticket and replaced him with Andrew Johnson, a slave-owning Southerner from Tennessee.

Lincoln’s opponents were the “War Democrats” who want to continue fighting to keep the Union together and the “Peace Democrats” who wanted to stop the war with the Confederate States and allow them to continue slavery. The Republicans branded the “Peace Democrats” as venomous snakes — “Copperheads” who wanted a return to the “Know Nothing” bigoted politics of the 1850s.

The “War Democrats” nominated General George McClellan, a West Point graduate who had led the Union army to several victories. McClellan wanted someone who was young and would help him win the large and populous border state of Ohio and chose a 39-year-old senator from Ohio named George H. Pendleton.

JD Vance, Trump’s vice presidential running mate, is also a 39-year-old senator from Ohio. It is too early to predict whether Vance’s newfound conservatism will help or hurt Trump’s candidacy, but the choice of Pendleton by McClellan turned out to be a fatal political error. Pendleton, as one of the leaders of the “Copperhead” movement, had voted against the 13th Amendment which ended slavery.

McClellan must have known all that but still thought that Pendleton’s presence on the ticket would help him win Ohio and thus the presidency. Instead, Pendleton became an easy target for the Lincoln campaign. The Democratic ticket lost in a landslide to Lincoln and Johnson. McClellan didn’t even carry Ohio.

Former President Trump has said that he could beat Abraham Lincoln in a hypothetical election. Perhaps that is true; however, I would be curious to know whom he would have chosen as his hypothetical running mate. It would make a difference.

This guest essay reflects the views of Sol Wachtler, former chief judge of the New York State Court of Appeals and distinguished adjunct professor at Touro Law School.