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There’s a classic story of running mates on election night in 1960, when VP candidate LBJ allegedly quipped to JFK “We’re winning in Ohio but you’re losing in Indiana.”

There’s a myth out there that claims that vice-presidential picks don’t matter in an election. But increasingly in our history, picking your second-in-command has been a big deal regarding the electoral map, especially in the state where the running mate comes from. The choices of J.D. Vance and Tim Walz will be very important for the candidates of both parties.

To listen to pundits and political scientists, you’d think the vice-presidential selections don’t matter. Have you ever heard the phrase “Vice-presidential picks can’t help you; they can only hurt you?” Or perhaps you’ve read an article (like this one from Al Jazeera) where Elizabethtown College Professor Kyle Kopko is cited.

“It’s very rare that we find that a running mate would deliver a particular home state,” Kyle Kopko, an adjunct professor of political science at Elizabethtown College in Pennsylvania told Al Jazeera. In other work with Christopher Devine, Kopko claims electoral analysis data going back to 1884 and survey data extending as far back as 1952 validate his arguments.

Kopko’s research is extensive, far more than mine, but sometimes when you include different eras, it can minimize the impact of recent elections, cases where the 24-hour news cycle and social media make VPs far better known than time periods that often predate radio and television. We know a lot more about Sarah Palin, Paul Ryan, Mike Pence, and Kamala Harris in 2020 than the public may have known about Garret Hobart, Arthur Sewall, John W. Kern, and Henry G. Davis, all running mates in that 1884-2012 research.

Also, in the vast majority of elections between 1884 and 1972, the ballot results were a blowout. Putting Thomas Edison, Henry Ford, Susan B. Anthony, or MLK on the ticket wouldn’t change a single thing about those lopsided contests.

Kopko contends that survey data show Lyndon B. Johnson wasn’t so popular in Texas in 1960. But that doesn’t explain why Senator Johnson won reelection in 1960 over John Tower. Nor does it explain why Tower won the special election for Johnson’s Senate seat in 1961, a feat that was rare for a Republican after Reconstruction in the South. Besides, Democrats lost Texas in 1952 and 1956, even though their nominee, Stevenson, won other Southern states. And this author, a former Texan, can’t see a Massachusetts Senator teamed up with a Minnesota Senator (Hubert Humphrey) or a former Illinois Governor (Adlai Stevenson II) to outperform the JFK-LBJ ticket in the Lone Star State in 1960, no matter what Texans told the pollsters that year.

Going back to 1960, the winning vice-president delivered his or her home state in every election except 1968, when Spiro Agnew couldn’t encourage his home state of Maryland to go for Nixon a trend reversed in 1972.  That’s 15 out of 16 states in elections, an important finding. Yes, half of all major party vice-presidential picks lost. It’s the same for presidential nominees too.

My own research for Raw Story looks at how a state performs in an election with a “favorite son” or “favorite daughter” on the VP ticket, compared to four years earlier. On average, it’s a 4.4 percentage point swing, a big deal for Republicans in Ohio and Democrats in Minnesota.  In three cases since 1976, a Vice-Presidential pick (Mondale, Bush, Gore) swung a state, and in a fourth case, it put the swing state of Virginia in the Democrats’ column in 2016 by a bigger margin than 2012. So yes, the Vance and Walz picks will be critical for the 2024 election.