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.
30 of 50 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Who was the first vice president of the United States?
John Adams
He complained to his wife Abigail that the job was 'the most insignificant office that ever the invention of man contrived'.
Q 02Which vice president holds the record for the most tie-breaking votes in the Senate, with 33?
Kamala Harris
She presided over a 50-50 Senate, which is how she passed the 31-vote mark that had stood since the 1830s.
Q 03How many vice presidents have never cast a single tie-breaking vote?
Twelve
Ties are rare, and many veeps served in Senates with lopsided majorities where their vote was never needed.
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
It was rushed through after the 1800 fiasco, when Jefferson tied with his own running mate and the House needed 36 ballots to sort it out.
Q 06Which sitting vice president killed Alexander Hamilton in an 1804 duel?
Aaron Burr
He was later tried for treason over a scheme to carve an independent country out of the West, and acquitted.
Q 07The word 'gerrymander' is named after which vice president, who signed a contorted map as Massachusetts governor?
Elbridge Gerry
He served under James Madison and died in office in 1814, one of seven vice presidents to die in the job.
Q 08Which vice president served under the sixth and seventh presidents, then became the first to resign the office?
John C. Calhoun
He quit in 1832 to take a Senate seat and fight for South Carolina's right to nullify federal tariffs.
Q 09Which vice president was chosen by the Senate in 1837 after no candidate won an electoral majority?
Richard M. Johnson
Van Buren's running mate beat Francis Granger 33-17 in the only such contingent election in history.
Q 10Which vice president set the precedent that a veep becomes full president when the president dies?
John Tyler
He refused to open mail addressed to the 'Acting President', and Congress eventually agreed with him.
Q 11How many vice presidents have succeeded to the presidency mid-term after a president died or resigned?
Nine
Four of them, Theodore Roosevelt, Coolidge, Truman and Lyndon Johnson, then won full terms of their own.
Q 12Which vice president was sworn in in Cuba and died 45 days later, never serving?
William R. King
Franklin Pierce's running mate had gone to Cuba hoping the climate would ease his tuberculosis.
Q 13Which Maine politician was Abraham Lincoln's first-term vice president?
Hannibal Hamlin
He was dropped from the 1864 ticket in favour of a Southern Unionist, a swap that put Andrew Johnson in the White House.
Q 21Which vice president, the oldest ever elected at 71, got the nickname 'Veep' from his grandson?
Alben Barkley
Truman's running mate married a widow half his age while in office, and the courtship made national news.
Q 22Which vice president took temporary charge after Eisenhower's 1955 heart attack?
Richard Nixon
He did it again after Eisenhower's ileitis in 1956 and stroke in 1957, which helped inspire the constitutional fix for presidential disability a decade later.
Q 23Who was the first vice president given an office in the White House complex?
Lyndon Johnson
Before 1961 the veep worked entirely from Capitol Hill; that room is now the 'Ceremonial Office of the Vice President'.
Q 14Which of Ulysses Grant's vice presidents was implicated in the Crédit Mobilier railroad bribery scandal?
Schuyler Colfax
He 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
Major League Baseball also sent him free passes with his name misspelled, shortly before Harding's death 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
His Melody in A Major from 1912 got lyrics from Carl Sigman in 1951 and topped the charts for Tommy Edwards.
Q 17Herbert Hoover's vice president was the first Native American to hold the office. Who was he?
Charles Curtis
An enrolled citizen of the Kaw Nation, he had already been the first Native American in Congress and Senate Majority Leader.
Q 18Which of FDR's vice presidents dismissed the job as not worth 'a pitcher of warm' spit (politely put)?
John Nance Garner
He had been Speaker of the House and broke with FDR over court-packing, becoming his leading critic.
Q 19Which FDR vice president was denied renomination in 1944, opening the door for Truman?
Henry Wallace
Roosevelt had handpicked him in 1940, the first time a president chose his own running mate rather than leaving it to the convention.
Q 20How many days was Harry Truman vice president before Franklin Roosevelt's death made him president?
82
He was never told about the Manhattan Project, and later said he felt like 'the moon, the stars and all the planets fell on me'.
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
He was the second veep to resign, and the man Nixon picked to replace him was in the Oval Office within a year.
Q 26Which amendment, ratified in 1967, lets a president fill a vice presidential vacancy by nomination?
Twenty-fifth
Before it, the office simply sat empty until the next election, for a cumulative 37 years of American history.
Q 27Who is the only person to serve as president without ever being elected president or vice president?
Gerald Ford
He was appointed vice president under the Twenty-fifth Amendment, then inherited the presidency ten months later when Nixon resigned.
Q 28Which former four-term New York governor was appointed vice president in 1974?
Nelson Rockefeller
He was the second and last vice president installed under the vacancy clause added to the Constitution in 1967.
Q 29Which 1893 Washington house has been the vice president's official residence since the 1970s?
Number One Observatory Circle
Built for the Naval Observatory's superintendent, it was commandeered by the Chief of Naval Operations in 1923 before Congress handed it to the veep in 1974.
Q 30Which vice president first lived full-time in the official residence, moving in during January 1977?
Walter Mondale
His predecessor had his own well-guarded Washington home and only used the house for entertaining, though he donated millions in furnishings.