Former President Donald Trump has raised speculation he could try to swap out Sen. J.D. Vance (R-OH), plagued as he is by controversy for his comments about childless women, for conspiracy theorist and former independent presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. as his running mate — even though ...
At this point there’s no way to do it legally. Ballots are already being printed. But legality’s not an issue for Trump and his personal fan club.
I think Vance could step down, then Trump would have no running mate, I think? And a VP would be appointed by Congress if he wins? Idk.
Technically,
The president and vice president are chosen by the electoral college in separate votes.
Though, for some time, it’s always been the winning candidate’s selected running mate… there is no requirement there. The electors could pick Mittens the back flipping poodle for VP if they wanted.
Fun fact, the VP was originally supposed to be whoever got second place in the presidential election…until they figured out that the candidates might hate each other and that relationship isn’t so great for a president and their VP.
It’s not so much that as that the coalitions and eventual parties wanted to hold both seats, so they ran multiple candidates with the assumption that one would be president and the other vice president. The electors would then structure their votes to ensure that the correct person was elected to each position. However, with the difficulties in long-distance communication at the time, this was prone to error. In 1800, this almost led to the candidate for vice president being elected as president.
After that, they realized that it didn’t make sense to use one slate of candidates for both positions, so they separated out the ballot into president and vice president. That’s essentially how the elections had been running up to that point (particularly because they always had two votes to cast), but it was to easy to make a mistake. Both before and after the amendment, there was a presidential candidate with a running mate vying for the vice presidency.