pragmatic liberal
Jr. Member
Posts: 520
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« on: July 28, 2008, 07:11:28 PM » |
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This is one of the biggest pieces of conventional wisdom in contemporary politics -- the idea that voters instinctively prefer governors. People never fail to point out that only two sitting senators have been elected directly to the presidency -- Warren Harding in 1920 and John F. Kennedy in 1960.
Of course, this number is skewed downwards slightly. Though they were out of office when they were elected president, the most recent jobs of both Andrew Jackson and Benjamin Harrison was that of senator.
Even so, overall the CW is that governors are elected president -- senators aren't.
How true is this, really?
For one thing, although many ascended to the presidency via the cabinet or the vice presidency, the Senate has been a springboard for many, many U.S. presidents. All of the following presidents served in the Senate at some point:
John Quincy Adams, Andrew Jackson, Martin Van Buren, William Henry Harrison, John Tyler, Franklin Pierce, James Buchanan, Andrew Johnson, Warren Harding, Harry Truman, John F. Kennedy, Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon.
Now, there may not be that much relevance to discussing presidential candidacies from the 19th century. So let's look a little more closely at only the post-WWII era.
Including the 2008 presumptive nominees, the major parties have nominated governors 8 times and sitting senators 7 times. The gubernatorial nominees since 1948 are:
Tom Dewey (N.Y. Gov., 1948)
Adlai Stevenson (Illinois Gov., 1952)
Adlai Stevenson (former Ill. Gov., 1956)
Jimmy Carter (former Ga. Gov., 1976)
Ronald Reagan (former Calif. Gov., 1980)
Michael Dukakis (Mass. Gov., 1988)
Bill Clinton (Ark. Gov., 1992)
George W. Bush (Tex. Gov., 2000)
The nominees who were sitting senators were:
John F. Kennedy (Mass., 1960)
Barry Goldwater (Ariz., 1964)
George McGovern (S.D., 1972)
Bob Dole (Kan., 1996)
John Kerry (Mass., 2004)
Barack Obama (Ill., 2008)
John McCain (Ariz., 2008)
4/8 governors won; barring something unforeseen, by the end of 2008, 2/7 senators will have won. You might say this proves that governors do better than senators -- 50% of the governors nominated in the postwar era were elected and only 28% of the senators will have been.
But the key numbers here are the denominators -- simply put, the numbers are far too small to indicate any overall statistical trend. A single win or loss can drastically change the numbers. For example, had John Kerry won in 2004, 2/5 or 40% of the senators nominated between 1948 and 2004 would have been elected. Likewise, had George W. Bush lost in 2000, only 3 out of the 8 governors, or 38% of the nominated governors, would have been elected.
Moreover, take a look at the senators who lost: Goldwater, McGovern, Dole and Kerry. The only one who lost a remotely winnable race was Kerry; the other three were the nominees of parties running unwinnable races against incumbents. Their losses had nothing to do with them being senators.
My guess is that we've generally elected governors the last 32 years because of chance. Jimmy Carter's nomination success in '76 was probably due in part to him being an unknown, outsider governor. Otherwise, Reagan and Clinton got the nominations, and the presidency, simply because they were the most talented candidates running -- the fact that they were governors was secondary.
In short, I think the underlying trends show that there really aren't any trends. Senators probably in an even contest would do just as well as governors.
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