But what if she is the one on the ballot?

There are no fewer than five couples testing that proposition as we ramp up to the 2020 election season. When it is the wife who is making her case to the voters, the answer thus far appears to be: The husband makes himself scarce.

John Bessler, Bruce Mann, Douglas Emhoff, Jonathan Gillibrand and Abraham Williams are in no immediate danger of becoming household names. (You might be drawing a blank. They are the spouses of Democratic presidential contenders — respectively, Sens. Amy Klobuchar (Minn.), Elizabeth Warren (Mass.), Kamala D. Harris (Calif.), Kirsten Gillibrand (N.Y.) and Rep. Tulsi Gabbard of Hawaii.)

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The husbands give few, if any, interviews. While you might spot them occasionally at campaign events, it is usually at a distance from the stage. As Gabbard gives her stump speech, Williams, a cinematographer , can be found in the crowd behind a camera, not in front. After Warren’s rallies, more of her fans clamor to have their picture taken with her golden retriever Bailey than with Mann, Warren’s legal-historian husband.

This, no doubt, will change, whether the men know it yet. As recently as 2004, Howard Dean’s wife, Judith Steinberg Dean, a physician, tried to tend to her patients, rather than her husband’s effort to win the Democratic nomination. When her absence became an issue, she was practically dragooned onto the former Vermont governor’s campaign bus in Iowa.

The Clintons, of course, are not particularly instructive when it comes to figuring all of this out. They offered themselves as a package deal from the start. “Buy one. Get one free,” he quipped, setting off a national argument that saw her branded as “the yuppie wife from hell” and “Lady Macbeth of Arkansas.” When she twice ran for president, it was far from clear whether her husband’s looming presence and occasional outbursts helped or hurt.

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That so many women are in the 2020 race is only one factor that may redefine the expectations Americans have of those who would share the residential floors of the White House with the next president.

The campaign’s crop of partners also includes Chasten Glezman, the husband of South Bend, Ind., Mayor Pete Buttigieg. Glezman is a teacher who does comedy on the side and who gins up support for his spouse on his highly entertaining Twitter feed.

And if Sen. Cory Booker (D-N.J.) remains single and is elected, he would be the first bachelor to enter the White House since President Grover Cleveland in 1885. (Cleveland married the following year.)

All of which suggests the time has finally arrived for a long-overdue reconsideration of the role of the presidential consort.

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The traditional title of first lady comes with no job description beyond the presumption that she should take on an unobjectionable cause or two and enthusiastically offer her unpaid services as event planner, decorator and catering manager. As first gentleman, would venture capitalist Gillibrand or litigator Emhoff be picking out the china?

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Standards are changing, even for couples playing more familiar roles.

It was considered unremarkable — even expected — for Nancy Reagan and Barbara Bush to be seen and not heard on the campaign stage, silent presences beaming at their husbands. But when former congressman Beto O’Rourke’s wife, Amy Hoover Sanders, did that during his announcement video, the image generated a torrent of commentary and an article in the New York Times.

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O’Rourke, meanwhile, felt compelled to apologize for joking in Iowa that his wife has been raising their two sons and daughter “sometimes with my help.”

But Democratic pollster Celinda Lake notes that when women with young children run for office, they often deliberately put their husbands in their campaign ads to make precisely that point. “They’re there to reassure voters that someone is there to take care of the kids,” Lake told me.

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Meanwhile, with so many women in the race, male candidates are likely to be relying on their wives more heavily than usual for validation with female voters.

The true running mates in 2020 will be a diverse cast. They are male and female, straight and gay. What we can hope is that, at the end of it all, they will have at last written a new script — which is no script at all — for the most difficult supporting role in politics.