Is there a bias in how strong or oft-occuring a US presidential candidate with a governor’s office his background is compared to one with senate experience or vice versa?
Once more, this time in English?
Like, you’re going to have to kind of learn how to read if you don’t like totally understand that. It’s fine English.
Sorry, dude, but that doesn’t quite make sense. You’re asking about how often governors’ records are compared to senators’?
No, your OP sentence was not in any form of English grammar that I recognize.
The question that I’m guessing you’re asking is whether the public tends to prefer candidates who were governors over candidates who were senators.
Recent history does bear this out, since no sitting senator has become president since Kennedy, while Carter, Reagan, Clinton and Bush II were governors (and Johnson, Nixon, and Bush I had been vice-president since their senatorial days). John Kerry, Al Gore, Bob Dole, Walter Mondale, George McGovern, Barry Goldwater - the list of defeated senators is long and the only defeated governor was Dukakis. Anything earlier is harder to compare, but governors have predominated since senators started being directly elected in 1914.
Why? The usual answer is that the president is seen as running the country and so someone with executive experience is preferred. Senators don’t run anything, don’t have to manage anything, don’t have to propose or live up to budgets, etc.
While true, I’ve never found this answer satisfying. Texas has what is known as a weak governor position, with the governor’s office largely ceremonial and the real power elsewhere. Nor is a state as small or as low in the rankings in almost every category as Arkansas much of a major starred entry on a resume.
A better explanation is the kind of person and kind of campaign that is required to become and thrive as a governor rather than a senator. Senators are somewhat more detached, more policy types whose political expertise is inward, in smaller groups. It is impossible to imagine an academic like Daniel Patrick Moynihan serving as governor of New York, but he was a hugely respected senator.
Bill Clinton and George Bush, by contrast, despite the Ivy League degrees they had and Moynihan lacked, were seen as much more folksy and regular. They knew how to go out and press the flesh and they were good with groups of voters more than with groups of policy makers.
So my general inclination is to say that governors attract a different personality type than senators and that this personality type is more attuned to what the public wants as a president.
It has absolutely nothing to do with their records. The factors are the personalities and the times. Nothing else matters.
Are you asking how likely governors are likely to be elected President as opposed to Senators? In recent history quite a bit better. Even looking from the start of the 20th century, the governors do a bit better.
Only two people were elected in that time directly from the Senate: Harding and Kennedy. Three others served in the Senate before becoming president, but held other offices (notably VP) in the intervening period.
Four people were elected directly from the State House: Bush (43), Clinton, F. Roosevelt, Wilson. Reagan and Carter were not elected from the State House, but served in no other offices before their election.
Just so you know, three people were elected with no elective experience whatsoever.
But just so Senators don’t feel like they are totally being dumped on, they have a better track record than Vice Presidents and Congressmen.
Bush (41) was the only one to win from the Vice Presidency in the 20th century and I believe that you have to go back to Van Buren (1836) to find another. For men elected from the House, you have to go back to Garfield in 1880.
Governors predominated before then as well, with 5 governors versus 4 Senators being elected. Of course, 9 VPs were elected, and 5 secretaries were also elected, with the remainder going to Congressmen Lincoln and Garfield before 1914. Interestingly, half of the VPs have been Senators since 1914, and it was much less common before then.
If Garfield had lost the presidential election to Hancock in 1880 (and in hindsight, he probably wished he had), he would have become a senator as the Ohio legislature had already picked him for that slot.
This is not a use of “predominated” that I would vote for. Edged. Barely beat out. Almost even, maybe. But “predominated”?
Definitely predominated: only two sitting senators in US history. That’s fewer than the number of ex-Generals elected.
The issue today is illustrated by John Kerry’s loss: a senator has to vote on a lot of legislation, and some of his votes can be portrayed in a very negative light. A law can come up, that intends to put more cops on the streets, but the original version makes this an unfunded mandate. Senator X votes it down, knowing the cities in his state can’t afford it. A second bill comes up to do the same thing, but with funding. Senator X votes for it.
And, when Senator X runs for president, his opponents say, “Senator X opposed putting more cops on the street! Soft on crime!”
“No,” says Senator X, “I voted for the second bill. The first was going to be an unfunded mandate!” (And at the words “unfunded mandate,” the audience falls asleep.)
“Flip flop,” cries his opponents.
A governor, OTOH, can stick with a single plan. If he doesn’t get what he wants, then he can blame the legislature for not passing his proposal. If he gets what he wants, he can point it out without anyone saying he flip flopped. And if a successful law is passed over his veto, he can later claim his state passed the law while he was governor (GWB did this a lot).
The political system today prizes consistency; you are supposed to take a position and stick to it through thick and thin. A governor can do this; a senator has problems.
George H. W. Bush served in a lot of public offices, but never as U.S. senator. He did serve one term in the U.S. House of Representatives, I believe.
His father, Prescott Bush, did serve as a U.S. senator from Connecticut.
While there have been a lot of sitting senators defeated in their bids for the presidency, I think it’s given way too much attention. First of all, there are too few presidential elections to establish any kind of a reasonable sample. Second, there are way too many factors in any one presidential election. I doubt very much that many – if any – people go to the voting booth thinking “senator vs. governor.”
The whole “legislators can’t be effective executives” is just one of those public myths that’s hard to kill, primarily because it’s often to the advantage of too many candidates to perpetuate it.
Some positions matter. I would argue that VPs were handicapped for many years because they spent four or eight years in jobs where they were effectively buried. One could say that House members were held back due to the lower profile and their limited geographic reach. Although, until the last 40 years at-large house seats had the same constituencies as Senators and Governors. War heroes have tended to get a free pass from the electorate.
But its hard to look at a Senator/Governor matchup and draw any conslusions. There haven’t even been that many times in recent history where a Senator faced off against a governor directly. 1920 comes to mind (the Senator won).
Goldwater and McGovern were up against strong incumbents and did little to help their causes. Reagan, Carter and Clinton didn’t win thanks to their governorships, they won because they faced unpopular incumbents.
Neptunian Slug:
Washington, Grant and Eisenhower?
Zachary Taylor not only had held no elective office, he’d never voted.
He was talking about presidents since 1900. The three never elected to public office were Taft, Hoover, and Eisenhower. Taft was a judge and Governor-General of the Philippines; Hoover’s major prior public office was Secretary of Commerce.
Good point. I just didn’t want to leave the impression that Senators were all that much better off before then. Keep in mind that we’ve had a good bit more time without the 17th amendment than with it, so part of the reason that there were so many more Senators moving to the WH might simply have been that there were more Presidents in that period. I think also that having fewer states means that one Senator can stand out more, but probably wouldn’t benefit governors the same way.
No, he ran once for the House, but lost and quit politics. I think it’s his only loss in an election actually.
No, I checked Wiki when ascenray correctly corrected me. Bush ran for the Senate twice and lost; he ran for the House twice and won. He quit to run the unsuccessful Senate race against Ralph Yarborough.
Didn’t he also lose a presidential election?
Indeed.
But he ran for the Senate twice. First he was defeated by Yarborough in 1964 and then he quit Congress to run against Yarborough again in 1970. (Yarborough lost the primary so Bush’s opponent ended up being Lloyd Bentsen).