We’re No. 21! We’re No. 21!

The 2024 election differs from its 59 predecessors in several ways. Its two front-runners may offer Americans the oldest set of candidates ever. It is being conducted amid civil anger turbocharged by an incendiary media atmosphere. It is setting records for the money the contenders are assembling in their treasuries. For the first time, a former vice president is running against the president who chose him for the position.

And this: It is the first time serious political figures are running as much for vice president as for president.

There once was a time when politicians could run for president and end up as vice president; that’s because the founders created a system where the winner of the election became chief executive, while the person who came in second settled for vice president. The 1796 election produced exactly that result: John Adams captured the most electoral votes and became president. Thomas Jefferson came in second and became vice president.

But the passage of the 12th amendment put an end to the awkwardness that, had this wrinkle in the Constitution not been smoothed out, would have placed Donald J. Trump in the White House in 2017 with Hillary Rodham Clinton as vice president. As much as that would have been a spectacle well worth watching, it would also have created an untenable imbalance in Washington.

Now, some of the candidates for president aren’t really imagining themselves inhabiting the Oval Office. They are instead imagining themselves having a weekly lunch in the Oval Office with a reelected President Trump. (Prepare the cheeseburgers and hope the ketchup doesn’t end up on the wall.)

That separates them, for example, from figures like Sens. John F. Kennedy of Massachusetts and Estes Kefauver of Tennessee. They both ran for vice president in 1956, their campaigns launched at the Democratic National Convention after Gov. Adlai Stevenson won the party’s nomination and threw to the convention the choice of his running mate. It sets them apart from former Gov. Endicott Peabody of Massachusetts, grandson of the founder of the Groton School, alma mater to Franklin Delano Roosevelt; he actually tried to run for vice president in 1972, campaigning in the New Hampshire primary and offering himself as “the number-one man for the number-two job.”

Now, as many as six Republican presidential candidates are very likely really running for vice president. The party has set out fundraising and public-poll barriers for entry in its Milwaukee debate this August, but it would be more useful if it undertook the difficult, cumbersome and maybe impossible task of separating the plausible presidential candidates from the likely vice-presidential candidates. Because the national party won’t do that; we will.

The bona-fide candidates:

Let’s start by agreeing Trump is not running for vice president. He’s already been president and he’s not possessed of the character to be anyone else’s understudy or deputy. Though Nelson Rockefeller once said, “I never wanted to be vice president of anything,” he swallowed his pride, and his words, and took the position under Gerald Ford. Trump embraces the Rockefeller position and, like everything else, takes it to an extreme.

Let’s also immediately eliminate Gov. Ron DeSantis, who is increasingly public with his criticism of Trump. He’s running for the top office only and besides, he and Trump are both Florida residents. In a close Electoral College outcome, that fact could tank their ticket.

Former New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie might have liked to be vice president to a conventional Republican — say, George W. Bush or John McCain — and Trump considered him to be his 2016 running mate. But with his ardent opposition to Trump, he is ineligible for vice president in 2024. He’s no George H.W. Bush, a legitimate 1980 presidential contender chosen as Ronald Reagan’s vice president despite a few negative critiques of the former California governor (such as his dismissal of supply-side economics as “voodoo economics”). In announcing his candidacy, Christie described Trump as someone “obsessed with the mirror, who never admits a mistake, who never admits a fault and who always finds someone else and something else to blame for whatever goes wrong, but finds every reason to take credit for anything that goes right.”

Former Gov. Asa Hutchinson of Arkansas is similarly running only to be president. This remark alone disqualifies him: “Now’s not the right time for Donald Trump and his leadership in the future. We need somebody that can actually win in November, that can bring in independents and suburban voters, that can appeal to the best of our country and help bring us together.”

So, too, former Vice President Mike Pence. He’s already been vice president. And as vice president, he committed the unpardonable Trumpworld sin of resisting pressure to overturn the 2020 election. He is not taking, or being offered, that position again.

The Palmetto one-way-or-anothers:

These are the two South Carolinians. Sen. Tim Scott has eyes on the White House, and the national media have eyes on him as a possible alternative to Trump. He’d take the vice-presidential nomination. His reluctance to criticize the former president might make him palatable. Former Gov. Nikki Haley hasn’t broken with Trump, and he apparently hasn’t broken from her. “Nikki has to follow her heart, not her honor,” he said on his TruthSocial platform. “She should definitely run!”

Those with eyes on the (second) prize:

In this category are Larry Elder, the conservative political commentator who is a longshot even for the vice presidency; Gov. Doug Burgum of North Dakota, who entered the presidential race earlier this month even though hardly anyone noticed; and Mayor Francis Suarez of Miami, who heads the bipartisan U.S. Conference of Mayors and already has visited the early political states of Iowa, New Hampshire, South Carolina and Nevada. “I think I could grow the tent — not for an election but for a generation,” he said in an interview with Politico. He could appeal to Trump, who had a 10-percentage-point jump among Hispanic voters from 2016 to 2020.

One other candidate is hard to categorize. He is the entrepreneur Vivek Ramaswamy, possessed of enormous financial resources and, perhaps, of enormous support. He, like the one-way-or-anothers and the eyes-on-the-(second)-prizers, imagines himself as the classic potential vice president who won the top job. Jimmy Carter may be in hospice, but his out-of-nowhere dreams are alive and well.

David M. Shribman is the former executive editor of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette.