A running mate is a person running together with another person on a joint ticket during an election. The term is most often used in reference to the person in the subordinate position (such as the Vice President running with a presidential candidate) but can also properly be used when referring to both candidates, such as "Michael Dukakis and Lloyd Bentsen were running mates in 1988".

The term is usually used in the United States, in reference to a prospective Vice President. In some states, candidates for lieutenant governor run on a ticket with gubernatorial candidates, and are also known as running mates.

In the United States, "running mate" refers to a candidate for vice president (federal); or, to a candidate for lieutenant governor (state), in those states where the governor and lieutenant governor are elected on the same ticket. Historically, running mates were chosen by political parties in consultation with the principal candidate (i.e., the person running for president or governor). In the late 1960's. it became the practice of the principal candidate in presidential elections to announce his preferred choice of running mate at his political party's national convention. The current practice is for the presumptive nominee of a political party to announce his choice for running mate before the national convention which, because of the extensive primary election and caucus system, is becoming increasingly irrelevant.

Sebastián Francisco de Miranda Rodríguez (Caracas, March 28, 1750 – San Fernando, Cádiz, July 14, 1816), commonly known as Francisco de Miranda (Spanish pronunciation: [fɾanˈsisko ðe miˈɾanda]), was a Venezuelan revolutionary. Although his own plans for the independence of the Spanish American colonies failed, he is regarded as a forerunner of Simón Bolívar, who during the Spanish American wars of independence successfully liberated a vast portion of South America. Miranda led a romantic and adventurous life. An idealist, he developed a visionary plan to liberate and unify all of Spanish America but his own military initiatives on behalf of an independent Spanish America ended in 1812. He was handed over to his enemies and four years later, in 1816, died in a Spanish prison. Within fourteen years of his death, however, most of Spanish America was independent.

Sebastian Francisco de Miranda was born in Caracas, Venezuela. His father, Sebastian de Miranda Ravelo, was a wealthy merchant from the Canary Islands, and his mother, Francisca Antonia Rodríguez de Espinoza, was a wealthy Venezuelan.

Barack Hussein Obama II (ⁱ/bəˈrɑːk huːˈseɪn oʊˈbɑːmə/; born August 4, 1961) is the 44th and current President of the United States. He is the first African American to hold the office. In January 2005, Obama was sworn in as a U.S. Senator in the state of Illinois. He would hold this office until November 2008, when he resigned following his victory in the 2008 presidential election.

Born in Honolulu, Hawaii, Obama is a graduate of Columbia University and Harvard Law School, where he was the president of the Harvard Law Review. He was a community organizer in Chicago before earning his law degree. He worked as a civil rights attorney in Chicago and taught constitutional law at the University of Chicago Law School from 1992 to 2004. He served three terms representing the 13th District in the Illinois Senate from 1997 to 2004.

Following an unsuccessful bid against the Democratic incumbent for a seat in the United States House of Representatives in 2000, Obama ran for the United States Senate in 2004. Several events brought him to national attention during the campaign, including his victory in the March 2004 Illinois Democratic primary for the Senate election and his keynote address at the Democratic National Convention in July 2004. He won election to the U.S. Senate in Illinois in November 2004. His presidential campaign began in February 2007, and after a close campaign in the 2008 Democratic Party presidential primaries against Hillary Rodham Clinton, he won his party's nomination. In the 2008 presidential election, he defeated Republican nominee John McCain, and was inaugurated as president on January 20, 2009. Nine months later, Obama was named the 2009 Nobel Peace Prize laureate. In April 2011, he announced that he would be running for re-election in 2012.