Meaning of the Top of the Ticket

Question

Lara Trump on Kamala Harris pick: It's still 'old slow Joe at the top of that ticket'

I know that 'ticket' means a list of candidates for an election. Because the candidate selection of the Democratic was completed, the 'ticket' would have no meaning now.

If so, what does the latter sentence mean? Does 'the top of the ticket' have an extended meaning of 'president' and does Lara think that picking Harris have made him a president already? But in this undertanding, 'stiil' doesn't make sense.

Answer 1

From Wikipedia:

In the United States, political parties nominate one candidate each for President of the United States and for Vice President of the United States. These candidates attempt to win presidential elections by taking a majority of the electoral vote. The two candidates together are known as a ticket.

(List of United States major party presidential tickets)

In this figurative sense, we think of the presidential nominee as being at the top of the ticket. That is Joe Biden.

Also, still roughly means nevertheless here:

still
adverb
4 : in spite of that : nevertheless
// those who take the greatest care still make mistakes
(M-W)

So, Lara Trump's comment can be rephrased as:

It's nevertheless 'old slow Joe at the top of that ticket'

Trump's comment suggests that picking Harris does not make up for Biden's shortcomings. Or, despite choosing Harris, Biden is still a flawed nominee.

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_{Technically, at this time, they still need to be formally nominated at the party convention. That is why you might hear/see "presumptive nominee(s)".}

Answer 2

While the method is no longer used for US political elections, some elections are handled by giving a small slips of paper called “tickets” to each voter, who then fill in their choices and places them in a box to be counted later.

The US President and Vice President are elected together, and they would naturally be written with the candidate for President first, at the top of the ticket.

Related: parties would hand out preprinted or “straight” tickets that had the names of their candidates, which voters (especially illiterate ones) could take directly to the ballot box. The President, naturally, would be at the top, followed by the VP and lesser offices.

That system was obviously open to people voting more than once, and both parties took advantage of that to “stuff the ballot box”, which is why it fell out of favor. But some of that ticket terminology survived even though we now use ballots instead.