As far as I can tell only James Garfield went straight from the House to the White House, nobody else before or since. Meanwhile, there are many who were senators or state governors immediately before being elected president. I’m not that au fait with the US political system - is it that Representatives are seen as junior or unseasoned, that you haven’t earned your stripes until you’ve been in the senate or governed a state? What about the Speaker of the House? From what I can gather, that is a very senior position in US politics, and yet it doesn’t seem to be a stepping stone to the presidency. Speakers often seem to be controversial figures - are they tainted by being involved in day-to-day political infighting?
Or maybe it’s just that it’s a lot harder to build a national profile needed to be a Presidential contender when your one of 435 representatives rather than 100 senators or 50 governors?
American here. The House does have a “junior” feel to it- I believe that Representatives have less autonomy and are more or less just a drop in a pond that can’t do much, but Senators have more of an individual impact.
Newt Gingrich, former Speaker of the House, was considered a candidate for the 2012 presidential election, but he didn’t receive a party nomination. Rudy Giuliani, former Mayor of New York City, ran in the Republican presidential primaries for 2008 but didn’t win the party nomination. He decided not to run in 2012. Mayor of a city is fairly low on the “hierarchy”, certainly below a governor and teetering on the edge of Notability. He is famous, though, for stepping up as a leader of NYC after the 9/11 attacks and also NYC is a very prominent city.
Well, your statistics are a little off. There were only three people who went straight from the Senate to the White House, Barack Obama being one of them. So both bodies of Congress are similar in that respect.
The House of Representatives has 435 members, the Senate has only 100, and the House is re-elected in entirety every 2 years, whereas the Senate has staggered 6-year terms. So the Senate is quite a bit more prestigious.
Additionally, senators nominally represent their entire state, whereas representatives represent just a single district. This means senators have to be politically appealing to their entire state (like governors), which may make it easier for them to win presidential elections, in which votes are also allocated on a per-state basis. Representatives will often have somewhat more extreme views that may make them electable in their district, but not in the state as a whole.
I live in a fairly conservative county in my state. While our representative won his most recent election by a decent margin, there is zero chance he could win a Senate seat, and zero chance he’d win this state if he ran for President. Other counties in this state are just too liberal.