What Are Paul Ryan’s Chances of Becoming President?

On Saturday when introducing his new running mate, Mitt Romney initially referred to Paul D. Ryan as the “next president of the United States.”

Mr. Romney quickly apologized for the slip-up, saying that he hoped that Mr. Ryan would become the next vice president instead. (Apparently, the stress of a vice presidential rollout can take its toll even on relatively unflappable candidates like Mr. Romney; Barack Obama made a similar slip when introducing Joe Biden four years ago.)

Of course, it’s not literally impossible that Mr. Ryan could turn out to be the 45th American president precisely (Mr. Obama is the 44th). It just couldn’t be through a sequence of events that Mr. Romney would be rooting for. Either the Republican ticket would have to win this year’s election — but with Mr. Ryan, not Mr. Romney, at the top of the ticket. Or, the more likely case: Mr. Obama would need to win the election and serve out his remaining four years, and Mr. Ryan would have to run for and win the presidency in 2016.

What, exactly, are the odds of one of these scenarios transpiring?

For that matter, what are Mr. Ryan’s odds of someday becoming president — whether he’s the 45th, 46th, 47th, or some later number in the sequence of people to hold the office?

Even more broadly, what does the future hold for running mates on winning tickets? And what about those on losing ones?

There are too many variables to compute these chances exactly, but we can make some reasonable guesses based on the historical record.

First, let’s consider the case that Mr. Romney would be most pleased with: that he and Mr. Ryan are the winning ticket in November, and Republicans re-capture the White House.

Twenty-eight men have been elected vice president since 1900, double-counting those (like George Herbert Walker Bush in 1980 and 1984) who were elected twice. Let’s give Mr. Biden a mulligan, since he hasn’t yet had a chance to seek an open nomination. That leaves us with 27 cases.

In the chart that follows, I’ve sorted the 27 winning vice presidents by the margin by which their ticket won the popular vote. Then I documented whether they sought the presidency in some subsequent election, whether they won a party nomination, and whether they were actually elected to the Oval Office.

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