Recently, there has been some discussion of a “fusion” ticket as the way to stop Donald Trump.
One such scenario is to have Hillary Clinton run with John Kasich as her running mate.
That is totally preposterous, and history tells us that when the Vice President is of a different party than the President, it does not work out well.
The first contested Presidential election led to Thomas Jefferson as Vice President under his opponent, John Adams from 1797-1801, and that did not work out well, and in fact, helped to promote the 12th Amendment in 1804.
Then we had John C. Calhoun as Vice President under John Quincy Adams in the years 1825-1829, and that did not work out well.
William Henry Harrison was elected in 1840 with this Whig candidate having a Democrat, John Tyler, as his Vice President. Within a month, Harrison was dead, and Tyler had constant battles with the Whig Congress, because he did not wish to follow Whig platform ideas.
Abraham Lincoln chose Andrew Johnson as his second term Vice President, despite the fact that Johnson was a Democrat in a Republican Presidency, and when Lincoln was assassinated six weeks later, we had one of the worst struggles in American history, as Johnson fought and resisted the Republican Party which had put him into the Vice Presidency, albeit briefly.
With these four examples, none of them working out well, we have never had such a situation arise again since, but we have had suggestions of doing what has never worked out well.
There were suggestions that Hubert Humphrey select Nelson Rockefeller in 1968, and that John McCain choose Joe Lieberman in 2008.
It simply will not work, and it undermines party loyalty and commitment to a President and his administration, if the next in line, in case of tragedy, transforms the power base in the Presidency.
As it is, we have had top cabinet members who are of the other party, particularly in the War Department as it was known before 1947, and the Defense Department, as it has been known since then., including:
Henry Stimson under Franklin D. Roosevelt from 1940-1945
Robert McNamara under John F. Kennedy, beginning in 1961, and continuing under Lyndon B. Johnson until 1968.
William Cohen under Bill Clinton from 1997-2001
Robert Gates under Barack Obama from 2009-2011
But the Vice President needs to be “on the team”, not a rival of the President in office!