Too early, you say? Never. While not obvious at the time, in retrospect, Donald Trump’s 2011 promotion of the baseless conspiracy theory that Barack Obama was not born in America laid the groundwork for his 2016 run. In more traditional fashion, Obama’s 2004 Democratic National Convention keynote address was the effective beginning of his successful 2008 campaign.

So which prospective candidates are winning the race for 2024 in 2019?

THE REPUBLICANS

Vice President Mike Pence is not the most captivating politician. He was the subject of two books this year that portrayed him as willing to sacrifice principle for ambition (in “American Carnage,” POLITICO’s Tim Alberta noted Pence’s “talent for bootlicking”). He endured speculation that Trump would dump him from the ticket.

But he won a public commitment from Trump, who said last month that Pence “is our man, 100 percent.” Assuming Trump keeps his word (which, granted, should never be assumed), Pence will have something no other Republican candidate in 2024 will have: the title of vice president. That’s no small thing.

Since 1960, nearly every sitting or former vice president who sought his party’s presidential nomination got it. The lone exception was Dan Quayle, an unusually unpopular vice president who dropped out of the 2000 campaign almost as soon as he jumped in. In 1972, Hubert Humphrey ran for the Democratic nomination and lost, but he had previously won it four years earlier, then lost the general election. Joe Biden isn’t a lock in 2020, but his VP status is the biggest reason why he has held the frontrunner position since he entered the race.

There’s plenty of speculation that Mike Pompeo wants to inherit the Trump mantle, but it’s hard to imagine a secretary of state (current or former, depending on how long Pompeo stays in his current job, and whether he runs for an open Senate seat in Kansas) boxing out a vice president in a presidential primary. The only time that’s happened was when Hillary Clinton kept Joe Biden out of the 2016 race, and she was both a former first lady and the 2008 presidential primary runner-up.

Trump has a flair for the dramatic and a distaste for playing by old rules. If anyone is capable of making a capricious decision to replace a vice president, it is Trump. But he didn’t in 2019, and that was a win for Pence.

What to watch for in 2020: No president has booted a VP before a re-election campaign since Franklin D. Roosevelt did it, by dumping John Nance Garner in 1940 and then Henry Wallace in 1944, both at the Democratic National Convention. Might Trump, in the interest of producing his finest reality TV show drama, wait until August’s Republican convention to introduce a new character?

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