Vice President Trivia
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100 free Vice President trivia questions with answers — history quiz, new questions added Oct 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.
30 of 100 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
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 a record for Senate tie-breaking votes that had stood since the 1830s?
Kamala Harris
Kamala Harris: the Senate was split 50-50 when she took office, and in December 2023 she cast her record-breaking 32nd tie-breaking vote.
Q 03Which vice president is credited with the quip 'What this country needs is a really good five-cent cigar'?
Thomas R. Marshall
Thomas R. Marshall: in the most repeated version, he whispered it to a Senate clerk while a senator droned on about what the country needed.
Q 04Before the Twelfth Amendment, who became vice president?
The presidential runner-up
The presidential runner-up: so the 1796 election left a Federalist president serving with his chief rival, a Republican, as vice president.
Q 05Which body chose the winner after Jefferson's 1800 electoral tie?
The House
The House: members needed 36 ballots to elect Jefferson, and the stalemate led to the Twelfth Amendment.
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: the Federalist press mocked the salamander-shaped district as the 'Gerry-mander', and a year later he became Madison's vice president.
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: he quit late in 1832, weeks after South Carolina's nullification ordinance, to defend nullifying the federal tariff from a Senate seat.
Q 09Which vice president was chosen by the Senate in 1837 after no candidate won an electoral majority?
Richard M. Johnson
Richard M. Johnson: Virginia's electors backed Van Buren for president but voted for William Smith for vice president, leaving Johnson one vote short.
Q 10Which vice president set the precedent that a veep becomes full president when the president dies?
John Tyler
John Tyler: mocked as 'His Accidency', he insisted he was fully president rather than an acting one, and both houses of Congress recognized 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 vice president's grandson came up with the nickname 'Veep'?
Alben Barkley
Alben Barkley: once he told the story at a press conference the name stuck, but his successor refused to use it, saying it was Barkley's.
Q 22Which vice president took temporary charge after Eisenhower's 1955 heart attack?
Richard Nixon
Richard Nixon: he presided over cabinet meetings but took care not to seem to seize power, and his restraint won him glowing reviews.
Q 23Which vice president drafted an order giving himself 'general supervision' over national defense programs?
Lyndon Johnson
Lyndon Johnson: Kennedy never signed it, though he did make Johnson chair of the Space Council.
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 vice president, a former Speaker of the House, was implicated in the Crédit Mobilier railroad bribery scandal?
Schuyler Colfax
Schuyler Colfax: the scandal ruined his political career, and he left office under a cloud in 1873 and never ran again.
Q 15Which vice president, trying to return to his hotel suite during a fire, was challenged by a fire marshal?
Calvin Coolidge
Calvin Coolidge: when he said he was the vice president, the fire marshal asked, 'What are you vice president of?'
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: his plan lent Germany American money to pay its war reparations, and in return France ended its occupation of the Ruhr.
Q 17Which Hoover vice president was the first Native American to hold the office?
Charles Curtis
Charles Curtis: yet as a congressman he wrote the 1898 Curtis Act, which helped strip tribes of their land rights in Indian Territory.
Q 18Which vice president reportedly called the job 'not worth a bucket of warm spit'?
John Nance Garner
John Nance Garner: once Roosevelt's ally, he broke with him over the 1937 court-packing plan and ran against him for the 1940 nomination.
Q 19Which FDR vice president was denied renomination in 1944, opening the door for Truman?
Henry Wallace
Henry Wallace: he was dropped for Truman at the 1944 convention, and within months Roosevelt's death made Truman president instead of Wallace.
Q 20Which secret wartime effort was Harry Truman first briefed on after becoming president?
The Manhattan Project
The Manhattan Project: within months of learning of it, Truman had to decide whether to use the atomic bomb against Japan.
Q 24Which vice president missed presiding over the 1969 electoral count because he was at a funeral in Norway?
Hubert Humphrey
Hubert Humphrey: mourning Trygve Lie, the UN's first secretary-general, he never had to announce his own defeat to Congress.
Q 25Which vice president resigned in October 1973 after pleading no contest to a tax evasion charge?
Spiro Agnew
Spiro Agnew: the plea deal kept him out of prison with a $10,000 fine, and his resignation letter was delivered while he was in a Baltimore courtroom.
Q 26Which amendment, ratified in 1967, lets a president fill a vice presidential vacancy by nomination?
Twenty-fifth
Twenty-fifth: Kennedy's assassination left the vice presidency empty, and the amendment let a president fill such a vacancy instead of waiting for the next term.
Q 27Who is the only person to serve as president without ever being elected president or vice president?
Gerald Ford
Gerald Ford: within a month of taking office, he pardoned his predecessor.
Q 28Which former four-term New York governor was appointed vice president in 1974?
Nelson Rockefeller
Nelson Rockefeller: he had chased the Republican presidential nomination again and again before reaching the vice presidency by appointment instead.
Q 29On the grounds of which Washington institution is the vice president's official residence?
The Naval Observatory
The Naval Observatory: the house there had been home to the Navy's top admiral until Congress made it the vice president's residence in 1974.
Q 30Which vice president was the first to live full-time in the official vice presidential residence?
Walter Mondale
Walter Mondale: his predecessor already owned a Washington home and hardly used the house.