Second to One: How important is a VP pick?

American Experience presents a virtual PAST FORWARD conversation exploring how the choice of a vice presidential candidate can shape a presidential campaign and a presidency itself. The discussion is inspired in part by the new film THE AMERICAN VICE PRESIDENT, streaming now on the American Experience YouTube channel and on the PBS app.

In this conversation, panelists will discuss how and why a campaign picks a certain candidate for the bottom slot on a presidential ticket. They will examine how the media and the general public can interpret these selections differently, asking whether a VP pick can be a decisive factor in an election. Finally, the panelists will take a closer look at how the campaign role of a vice presidential candidate can reveal their role in a potential administration.

Panelists:

Michael Kazin is the author of seven books about US politics and social movements and the editor of The Princeton Encyclopedia of American Political History. He writes often for The New York Times, The Nation, The New Republic, and other periodicals and newspapers and is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. His most recent book is What It Took to Win: A History of the Democratic Party.

Christopher J. Devine is an associate professor of political science at the University of Dayton. His books include Do Running Mates Matter? The Influence of Vice Presidential Candidates in Presidential Elections (with Kyle C. Kopko) and News Media Coverage of the Vice-Presidential Selection Process: What’s Wrong with the Veepstakes? He is also co-editor of the forthcoming book, Second in Command: Reevaluating the Role of Vice Presidents and Running Mates in Modern American Politics (with Karine Prémont).

The discussion will be moderated by Adriane Lentz-Smith. Adriane is an Associate Professor of History at Duke University, where she teaches courses on the Civil Rights Movement, Black Lives, Modern America, and History in Fact and Fiction. A scholar of African American history as well as the histories of the twentieth-century United States and the US & the World, Lentz Smith is the author of Freedom Struggles: African Americans and World War I (Harvard University Press, 2009), as well as numerous other scholarly articles and reviews.

This event will be livestreamed on our YouTube and Facebook pages.

Composite art source images from the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Wikimedia Commons.

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Major funding for American Experience provided by Liberty Mutual Insurance, Carlisle Companies and by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation. Funding for The American Vice President provided by members of The Better Angels Society including The Fullerton Family Charitable Fund. Additional funding for American Experience provided by the Robert David Lion Gardiner Foundation, The American Experience Trust, the Corporation for Public Broadcasting and public television viewers. American Experience is produced for PBS by GBH Boston.