How Vice-Presidential Nominees Became ‘Attack Dogs’

Vice presidential nominees weren't tasked with flinging mud until the last 40 years.

Now that both Donald Trump and Kamala Harris have made their vice-presidential choices, pundits and armchair analysts alike will be watching to see if J.D. Vance and Tim Walz can be effective fighters on the stump. That reflects the role of modern running mates. As Jonathan Alter recently observed in the New York Times, “Vice-presidential nominees are meant to be attack dogs.”

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That wasn’t always the case, however. The running mate as an “attack dog” is a modern invention — not widely used until the late 1980s and 1990s. Yet, very quickly it became a must for winning campaigns. Even now, as presidential candidates fling plenty of mud themselves, one crucial qualification for a running mate is the ability to throw punches. Anything less would be unilaterally disarming.

Throughout most of the 1900s, the role of the running mate varied depending on the campaign. In 1900, Teddy Roosevelt, to no one’s surprise, campaigned vigorously — relentlessly, even — for Republican William McKinley. By contrast, in 1932, Democratic running mate John Nance Garner told reporters that Franklin Roosevelt was doing just fine on the trail and didn’t need his help. Indeed Garner stayed in Washington, D.C., throughout the campaign and spent part of his victorious election day at home in Texas fishing.

That didn’t mean some vice-presidential candidates couldn’t join the fray. Richard Nixon, running as Dwight Eisenhower’s running mate in 1952, pushed allegations about corruption in the Truman administration and sneered, “let’s call for a hatchet.” But Nixon was an anomaly. His opposite in 1956, Tennessee Senator Estes Kefauver, “pledged never to become ‘the political sharp-shooter for his party….’”

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Nixon’s own running mate in 1960, Massachusetts Senator Henry Cabot Lodge, Jr., projected gravitas and not gutter fighting, which quietly made him a  “hero” to those who wanted a candidate who looked “serious” and whose voice had “a ring of sincerity.” In 1968, Nixon tried a different strategy by picking Maryland Governor Spiro Agnew as his number two. Agnew quickly made a name for himself by going on the offensive against liberals, antiwar protestors, the counterculture, and the press.

Still, no one considered even the most aggressive vice-presidential nominee to be an “attack dog” before the 1970s. The term itself didn’t exist before World War II, and it didn’t become part of the political lexicon until after Agnew’s vice presidency. In an era of urban decay and rising crime — when security companies began to regularly offer attack dogs for hire — the imagery seems to have resonated with some in the media who began to borrow it to describe electoral politics. 

The earliest reference to a vice-presidential running mate as the ticket’s “attack dog” may have come from the legendary columnist Mary McGrory in 1976, who used the phrase to criticize Gerald Ford’s choice of Bob Dole. Dole, McGrory wrote, was a “rabid partisan.” As such, the Democratic nominee Jimmy Carter, she believed, would do well to recognize Dole as “an attack dog who can be ignored.” 

For commentators like McGrory, the corruption of the Nixon-Agnew years seemed to call for a more dignified politics. But she remained concerned that, especially among conservatives, political rhetoric was becoming more consistently aggressive. Dole, she wrote, was “a bone thrown to the smoldering right.” Defeat in 1976, McGrory predicted accurately, wouldn’t stop the inroads an emerging hard right was making into the GOP. “No matter how often you feed right-wingers,” they remained, “ravenous” in McGrory’s words. 

Sure enough, within a matter of years, strategists began to see an attack dog running mate as a potential asset for presidential campaigns. As Jerry Gray of the New York Times wrote, it was a way of “allowing the candidate for President to remain above the gritty fray and safe from potential public backlash.” Newsday concurred with “the theory that a mudslinging presidential candidate risks splattering himself.” 

This was the case with the patricianly George H.W. Bush’s choice of the younger, exuberant Indiana Senator Dan Quayle in 1988. After a rocky start to his vice-presidential campaign, Quayle eventually found his stride in his “designated role as [Bush’s] top attack dog.” While Bush himself threw some rhetorical punches at Democratic nominee Michael Dukakis, Quayle took satisfaction in drawing some of the criticism away from Bush himself. As he recalled later, “from a political point of view, if they wanted to…put all the energy into going after the Vice President, fine, because then they’d be giving more of a free ride to the President.”

Still, it was not yet a given that the running mate would play the attack dog role. In fact, in 1996, Dole selected Jack Kemp as his running mate, and the former quarterback refused to play along. Late in the campaign, Kemp spent precious time defending his political style, repeating when interviewed, “I am not an attack dog.” He preferred to present a positive case for a Dole presidency instead. Four years later, Democrat Joe Lieberman insisted that a presidential campaign “doesn’t have to be nasty” and that he would “not play the traditional role of . . . the attack dog.” 

Yet, both Kemp and Lieberman lost — which couldn’t have been lost on campaign strategists in both parties. In 2008, therefore, both Barack Obama and John McCain chose running mates — Joe Biden and Sarah Palin — in part for their ability to mix it up with the other side. Liz Sidoti of the Associated Press described the untested Obama’s choice of the seasoned Biden as sending the message: “Never fear, the vice-presidential attack dog is here – and he’s itching for a fight.” 

While Palin is most remembered for flaming out spectacularly and possibly damaging McCain’s chances, initially she proved wildly successful at rallying Republican support behind her ticket mate. Her Republican Convention speech included a self-reference to being a new kind of attack dog: “You know, they say the difference between a hockey mom and a pit bull? Lipstick.” The crowd roared and for a few days McCain pulled even with Obama in the polling.

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By 2012, the division of labor between presidential and vice presidential candidates had become such conventional wisdom that the Dallas Morning News had “Be the attack dog” at the top of its list of don’ts for Republican Mitt Romney ahead of his first debate with Obama. That was running mate Paul Ryan’s job. John Dickerson, then writing for Slate, observed that Ryan’s policy chops had seemingly vanished as he was busy “filling the role of the vice presidential attack dog.” Biden, meanwhile, remained “comfortable with the attack-dog role,” the Associated Press noted, ahead of his debate with Ryan.

Perhaps not surprisingly given the way Donald Trump upended American politics, the 2016 campaign ended the idea that the presidential nominee should stay above the fray and leave the dirty work to his vice-presidential nominee. As Trump’s campaign was faltering in mid-October, Maggie Haberman of the New York Times observed that he had started “lobbing attacks himself instead of leaving it to aides or surrogates.” The Times headlined Haberman’s piece, “Donald Trump Recalls His Attack Dog From the Primaries: Donald Trump,” signaling this last shift in campaign expectations. And it wasn’t just Trump. On the other side, Hillary Clinton was, in the words of Fred Kaplan in Slate, “fit to be her own attack dog.”

That didn’t mean that vice presidential nominees would revert to the role envisioned by Kemp and Lieberman. Instead, it meant that both halves of a ticket would now get down the mud. 

Today, it’s attack dogs up and down the ticket. Kamala Harris’s first two weeks as the presumptive Democratic nominee have shown that she has no intention of letting her new running mate do the heavy lifting when it comes to attacking Trump. Nor should she. To do so would be to unilaterally disarm, and the stakes today are simply too high.

Charles J. Holden is a professor of history at St. Mary’s College of Maryland. His books include Republican Populist: Spiro Agnew and the Origins of Donald Trump’s America (University of Virginia Press, 2019), co-authored with Zach Messitte and Jerald Podair.

Made by History takes readers beyond the headlines with articles written and edited by professional historians. Learn more about Made by History at TIME here. Opinions expressed do not necessarily reflect the views of TIME editors.