The New Official Trump VP Tier List: The Bad Ones

Re-evaluating the former president's shortlist as the general election begins.

As the 2024 general election campaign begins, Donald Trump has found himself in a very unfamiliar position: winning. Before the fall of 2023, Trump had held a national lead in polling averages for a grand total of four days across eight years, all immediately after the 2016 RNC. But for the past six months, he has had an advantage both nationally and in the key swing states near-continuously. If the election were held today, he would almost certainly win it, likely with more than 300 electoral votes. It is a very new position for the former president and his team, who are reportedly very happy about it. If their messaging choices are any indication, they hardly see losing as a possibility.

Still, many pitfalls lie ahead. Trump himself remains deeply unpopular and is, to put it delicately, flat broke by the standards of a presidential campaign. His acolytes continue to poll and perform horribly against essentially every Democrat in the country, as they have almost without exception since 2016. To the extent that he has increased his support since 2020, it has been almost exclusively among those who are following the election the least, raising the possibility that his lead may not survive something as simple as voters paying more attention to the race. With victory far from assured, how Trump himself approaches the upcoming race will be nothing less than crucial.

And in this, no choice will be more pivotal than who he selects as his running mate.

This is the way to think about the upcoming Republican veepstakes. It is the last remaining major question of the 2024 election. It has an endlessly wide range of potential outcomes. And it could near-singlehandedly determine whether Trump spends the next four years in the White House or in a jail cell. I went over his options last summer, but with the political environment in a very different place and the former president’s list reportedly far more solidified, I think it’s worth giving it a second look. In this list, I have ranked all of Trump’s reported potential picks, starting with the ones that could set his campaign on a death spiral and ending with the ones that may be worth taking seriously.

F Tier

Gov. Sarah Huckabee Sanders (R-AR)

Donald Trump is not a strong presidential candidate. He is still deeply unpopular, broadly distrusted, and generally regarded as a lying, corrupt criminal. However, he is not entirely without his strengths, at least relative to his opponent. For as much as they dislike him personally, voters have become increasingly willing to give Trump credit where they believe it is due regarding his record as president. Compared to 2020, they look back more positively towards his time in office across the board, especially as it pertains to the economy. While he will always be known, and will always style himself, as the ultimate outsider, his greatest appeal this year seems to be coming from something quite different: a perception of him as an effective, experienced leader who gets results.

This isn’t necessarily a powerful image. As previously stated, Trump is still disliked, and if he wasn’t fortunate enough to be running against an 81-year-old, he would likely have no path to victory regardless of how he presents himself. But it’s a lot better than his even more unelectable personas of elections past, and it’s substantially better than the agenda being pushed by his party’s right. This is what would make the selection of Sarah Huckabee Sanders and others like her an atrocious decision for Trump. While she may be far from the only person on this list to carry the baggage of an extremist policy record, she brings absolutely nothing to the table except for putting Trump on the wrong side of debates settled 100 years ago.

The first big problem with Huckabee Sanders is this: the vast majority of Americans who know about her have no clue that she was elected Governor of Arkansas in an extremely low-profile race in 2022. Most if not all will look at her selection as Trump picking an unqualified nepobaby press flack to be a heartbeat away from the presidency, making his ticket appear even more risky than it did before. Once they become aware of her tenure as head of the Natural State, things will only get worse. Her brief time in office is crammed with liabilities and embarrassments, including but far from limited to:

• Comically extreme anti-abortion policies and virtue-signaling

• Rollbacks of child labor laws

• A scandal involving a $19,000 custom-made lectern

• Relentless online culture-warring

• A viral incident where she declared a statewide state of emergency due to the impending solar eclipse. While the action itself was actually reasonable, many assumed from the headlines that she was frightened of the cosmic event à la a medieval peasant. This is not the kind of thing you want anyone assuming about someone on a national ticket.

There’s just nothing to be gained here. With Huckabee Sanders, Trump would get the worst of both worlds, associating himself tightly with both the least popular aspects of his presidency and all of the right’s most unpopular Biden-era moral crusades. She may not be a runaway favorite for worst of the list like Marjorie Taylor Greene was last year, but don’t sleep on her capacity to tank things if Trump chooses her.

Summary:

Roevember Risk: Extremely High

Insanity: High

Seriousness: Low

Moderacy: Nonexistent

Former Rep. Tulsi Gabbard (I-HI)