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50 free Vice President trivia questions with answers — history quiz, new questions added Aug 2026.
44 free vice president trivia questions with answers. The vice presidency was called "the most insignificant office that ever the invention of man contrived" by the first man to hold it, and it has produced some of the strangest stories in American politics. This quiz covers the whole run from 1789 to today: how the job was invented at the Constitutional Convention, why the Twelfth Amendment exists, the tie-breaking-vote record, the Tyler Precedent, the two men who resigned, the one sworn in on foreign soil, the duel, the potato and the hunting accident. Easy questions ask who was the first vice president and who broke the glass ceiling in 2021; the hard ones want the only vice president chosen by the Senate, the veep who won a Nobel Peace Prize and wrote a hit song, and how long Truman held the job before it fell on him. Good for civics classes, presidents-day parties and anyone who likes the footnotes of history. Every answer was checked against Wikipedia's articles on the office and on the individual vice presidents, and each question carries the sentence that backs it up.
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Q 01Who was the first vice president of the United States?
John Adams
John Adams served as the first vice president, under George Washington from 1789 to 1797, and complained to his wife Abigail that it was 'the most insignificant office that ever the invention of man contrived'.
Q 02Which vice president broke the Senate tie-breaking vote record in December 2023?
Kamala Harris
Kamala Harris cast her 32nd Senate tie-breaking vote on 5 December 2023, passing a 31-vote record from the 1820s and 1830s, and finished her term with 33.
Q 03Which vice president quipped 'What this country needs is a really good five-cent cigar'?
Thomas R. Marshall
Thomas R. Marshall, Woodrow Wilson's vice president from 1913 to 1921, is credited with the quip 'What this country needs is a really good five-cent cigar.'
Q 04Before the Twelfth Amendment, how did someone become vice president?
They were the runner-up in the presidential vote
That is how the 1796 election produced a president and vice president from opposing parties, and the runner-up spent four years frustrating the winner's policies.
Q 05The Twelfth Amendment, separating president and vice president ballots, was first used in which election?
1804
Ratified in June 1804, the amendment was first used in that November's election, after the 1800 deadlock in which Jefferson tied with his own running mate and the House needed 36 ballots.
Q 06Which sitting vice president killed Alexander Hamilton in an 1804 duel?
Aaron Burr
Aaron Burr, then Jefferson's vice president, shot Hamilton at Weehawken, New Jersey, on 11 July; he was later tried for treason over a western scheme and acquitted in 1807.
Q 07Which vice president signed, as Massachusetts governor, the contorted 1812 district map lampooned as a salamander?
Elbridge Gerry
Elbridge Gerry signed the map in 1812 and a Boston Gazette cartoon dubbed it the 'Gerry-mander'; he became Madison's vice president in 1813 and died in office in 1814.
Q 08Which vice president served under the sixth and seventh presidents, then became the first to resign the office?
John C. Calhoun
John C. Calhoun resigned on 28 December 1832, weeks after South Carolina's nullification ordinance, to take a Senate seat and fight the federal tariff from there.
Q 09Which vice president was chosen by the Senate in 1837 after no candidate won an electoral majority?
Richard M. Johnson
Richard M. Johnson fell one electoral vote short after Virginia's electors abstained, so the Senate chose him over Francis Granger, 33 to 16, on 8 February 1837, the only such contingent election.
Q 10Which vice president set the precedent that a veep becomes full president when the president dies?
John Tyler
John Tyler, sworn in after William Henry Harrison's death in April 1841, insisted he was fully president and returned letters addressed to the 'Acting President' unopened; Congress accepted his claim.
Q 11Which vice president became president in September 1901 after McKinley was shot by an anarchist?
Theodore Roosevelt
Theodore Roosevelt, vice president for barely six months, took the oath in Buffalo on 14 September 1901 after McKinley died of wounds from Leon Czolgosz's shooting eight days earlier; he was 42.
Q 12Which vice president took the oath of office in Cuba in 1853 and died without serving?
William R. King
William R. King, Franklin Pierce's running mate, took the oath near Matanzas, Cuba, on 24 March 1853, hoping the climate would ease his tuberculosis; he died in Alabama on 18 April 1853.
Q 13Which Maine politician was Abraham Lincoln's first-term vice president?
Hannibal Hamlin
Q 21Which Truman vice president, inaugurated at age 71, got the nickname 'Veep' from his grandson?
Alben Barkley
Alben Barkley, Truman's vice president, was 71 at his inauguration; his grandson coined 'Veep', and his courtship of widow Jane Hadley, 38, while in office made national news.
Q 22Which vice president took temporary charge after Eisenhower's 1955 heart attack?
Richard Nixon
Richard Nixon chaired cabinet and National Security Council meetings during Eisenhower's recovery in 1955, and again after the 1956 ileitis surgery and 1957 stroke; the episodes fed the push for a disability amendment.
Q 23Who was the first vice president given an office in the White House complex?
Lyndon Johnson
Hannibal Hamlin, a former Maine senator and governor, was vice president from 1861 to 1865, then dropped from the 1864 ticket in favour of Southern Unionist Andrew Johnson.
Q 14Which of Ulysses Grant's vice presidents was implicated in the Crédit Mobilier railroad bribery scandal?
Schuyler Colfax
Schuyler Colfax, Grant's first-term vice president (1869-1873), was accused of taking discounted Union Pacific shares from Congressman Oakes Ames while Speaker of the House.
Q 15Which vice president complained a fire marshal failed to recognise him during an evacuation?
Calvin Coolidge
Calvin Coolidge, vice president from 1921 to 1923, was stopped by a fire marshal during a Willard Hotel evacuation who took 'the vice president' to mean a hotel officer; Harding's death in August 1923 made him president.
Q 16Which vice president shared the 1925 Nobel Peace Prize and composed the melody of 'It's All in the Game'?
Charles Dawes
Charles Dawes shared the 1925 Nobel Peace Prize for the Dawes Plan on German reparations; his 1911 composition 'Melody in A Major' became 'It's All in the Game', a 1958 number one for Tommy Edwards.
Q 17Which Hoover vice president was the first Native American to hold the office?
Charles Curtis
Charles Curtis, an enrolled member of the Kaw Nation who spent part of his childhood on its reservation, served as Senate Majority Leader before becoming Hoover's vice president in 1929.
Q 18Which of FDR's vice presidents dismissed the job as not worth 'a pitcher of warm' spit (politely put)?
John Nance Garner
John Nance Garner, Speaker of the House before becoming FDR's vice president in 1933, broke with Roosevelt over the 1937 court-packing plan and challenged him for the 1940 nomination.
Q 19Which FDR vice president was denied renomination in 1944, opening the door for Truman?
Henry Wallace
Henry Wallace, vice president from 1941 to 1945, was pushed off the ticket at the 1944 Democratic convention by party bosses who distrusted him, and Truman took the slot; Wallace became Commerce Secretary.
Q 20How many days was Harry Truman vice president before Franklin Roosevelt's death made him president?
82
Truman served 82 days, from 20 January to 12 April 1945, was never briefed on the Manhattan Project, and said he felt as if 'the moon, the stars and all the planets' had fallen on him.
Lyndon Johnson was given a suite in the Executive Office Building in 1961; earlier vice presidents worked from the Capitol, and the room later became the Vice President's Ceremonial Office.
Q 24Which vice president, at a funeral in Norway in January 1969, missed having to announce his own 1968 defeat?
Hubert Humphrey
He was attending the funeral of Trygve Lie, the first elected UN Secretary-General, so president pro tempore Richard Russell presided instead.
Q 25Which vice president resigned in October 1973 after pleading no contest to a tax evasion charge?
Spiro Agnew
Spiro Agnew resigned on 10 October 1973, the same day he pleaded no contest to one count of tax evasion in a Baltimore federal court; he was the second vice president to resign.
Q 26Which amendment, ratified in 1967, lets a president fill a vice presidential vacancy by nomination?
Twenty-fifth
The Twenty-fifth Amendment, ratified in February 1967, lets the president nominate a new vice president subject to confirmation by both houses; before it the office sat empty, cumulatively about 37 years.
Q 27Who is the only person to serve as president without ever being elected president or vice president?
Gerald Ford
Gerald Ford was confirmed as vice president in December 1973 to fill a vacancy, and became president eight months later, on 9 August 1974, after the Watergate resignation.
Q 28Which former four-term New York governor was appointed vice president in 1974?
Nelson Rockefeller
Nelson Rockefeller, New York's governor from 1959 to 1973, was nominated in August 1974 and confirmed by Congress on 19 December 1974, the second vice president installed under the 1967 vacancy clause.
Q 29Which 1893 Washington house has been the vice president's official residence since the 1970s?
Number One Observatory Circle
Number One Observatory Circle, built in 1893 for the Naval Observatory's superintendent, was taken over by the Chief of Naval Operations in 1923 and designated the vice president's residence by Congress in 1974.
Q 30Which vice president first lived full-time in the official residence, moving in during January 1977?
Walter Mondale
Walter Mondale moved into the official residence in January 1977; his predecessor kept his own Foxhall Road home in Washington and used the house only for entertaining.