Candidates for the presidency of the United States are overwhelmingly governors or congressmen. The only serious run by a big city mayor I can remember was Rudy Giuliani, and the last big city mayor to be nominated IIRC was Grover Cleveland. Considering how cities like NYC/Chicago/LA are larger than most states, why don’t more mayors run for President?
Didn’t John Lindsay make a run for President at some point?
Cleveland was mayor of Buffalo, and then Governor of New York. He was elected President while governor, so I don’t think he meets the OP’s criterion.
Yep, in 1972. He dropped out pretty early though.
Sam Yorty, mayor of Los Angeles ran in the primaries that year as well. Didn’t really do any better though.
I wouldn’t be surprised to see Rahm Emanual toss his hat in the ring one of these days.
NBC Chicago did an article about this topic in 2013:
Quora also has a thread:
[URL=“https://www.quora.com/Why-hasnt-a-mayor-of-a-major-US-city-become-president”]https://www.quora.com/Why-hasnt-a-mayor-of-a-major-US-city-become-president
Wikipedia has a list of other offices held by U.S. Presidents:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Presidents_of_the_United_States_by_other_offices_held
If you’re interested in bios of former presidents, Biography.com has a special site:
http://www.biography.com/people/groups/political-leaders-us-presidents
According to her campaign bio, current 2016 Presidential candidate Jill Stein has not served as mayor but has served on her local town council:
http://www.jill2016.com/about
It turns out this question has also been asked about the Vice Presidency. Recently VP candidate Sarah Palin was a former mayor as was Calvin Coolidge:http://www.citymayors.com/politics/usa-mayors-white-house.html
Finally, current VP candidate Tim Kaine served as mayor of Richmond, VA in the late 1990s before becoming Governor:
http://www.biography.com/people/tim-kaine-338982
URL="https://www.hillaryclinton.com/about/tim/https://www.hillaryclinton.com/about/tim/
At least part of it is just the optics. Yes, anyone who stops to think about it knows that New York City is bigger than Arkansas, but for most non-New Yorkers, that’s not the image that pops up in their head for “mayor”.
Plus, why wouldn’t you run for governor or senator first?
How much executive power do these big city mayors have? In my town, Mayor is a ceremonial position. The officeholder goes to photo ops, and various public discussions of civic issues, but the City Manager is the real executive.
I think in a lot of major cities, the mayor has so much visible and tangible power, that they are unwilling to give it up to become merely President. No cite, just my general impression. I think what Boffking suggests would apply mostly to smaller cities.
Also, there is often a strong animosity between a big city and the out-state citizenry, and it would be hard for an urban mayor to win the hearts and minds of rural precincts.
The position of City Manager was created as part of the progressive era reforms a century ago, when Mayors had near-absolute powers and corruption was rampant because of big-city political machines. The thought was that an impartial executive, who used scientific management, could do for cities what managers were doing for large corporations.
Problems developed quickly. Politics is not business. (Write that on the blackboard 1000 times.) People want someone who takes personal responsibility when they have complaints, they want someone who they can bond with personally to take an interest in their affairs, they want someone with the political pull to battle with other political entities (Governor, school boards, counties, the Feds), and they want someone who shows personal leadership in a crisis. That person is called a Mayor.
So most large cities who went to a City Manager switched back and started electing Mayors again. Only a few of the more “suburban” large cities in the Southwest, Phoenix e.g., have a City Manager. Smaller cities are more likely to use them. I think it’s about 50/50 today between Manager and Mayor in cities over 5,000 population.
Mayors who run big cities have tremendous power. Power alone is not enough. Texas famously has a weak governor (the lieutenant governor runs most of the day-to-day functions) but George W. Bush won the Presidency and others were serious candidates. The potential for national visibility and the public perception of power positions counts more, which is why mayors have a hard time being taken seriously outside their state.
most large cities (NYC, Chicago, etc.) have a “strong” mayor-council government. Mayor is directly elected and is the executive, council is the “legislature.” In my experience, most smaller suburban cities are council-manager with a “weak” mayor; mayor is a ceremonial position for the “head” of the council but doesn’t carry with it any real additional power or responsibility. Council appoints (hires) a city manager to run day-to-day operations.
somewhat unique to Michigan are many suburbs are charter townships, sort if in between a village and a city. Those have a board consisting of supervisor, clerk, treasurer, and trustees.
Or Michael Bloomberg, who would probably be winning if he was running right now.
“senators”. That little oddity that in the US, “congress” may collectively mean both houses, but “congressman” is normally assumed to mean “representative”, not “senator” (it’s also usually replaced with a non-gendered term these days). Not that many have run for president while in the house, particularly in modern times - they’re usually senators.
Couple points:
If you are going to base your reasoning on size, the governor of the state the big city is in is automatically the head of a larger entity than the big city. So the governor of New York might be considered more appropriate presidential timber than the mayor of New York City.
More importantly, when city mayors have to face a larger electorate, they have some baggage - a large city mayor will be perceived as not having understanding of the problems of the rural or small town areas they are now trying to get votes from. People in those constituencies will be suspicious of that background, and it is a somewhat legitimate argument. Even a lot of suburbanites might be suspicious of a big city mayor, particularly one from another metropolitan area. That’s still a big enough block to be significant, and the electoral college skews representation to the smaller states (if we must discuss THAT in detail, let’s do it another thread).
It’s rare for a mayor to have the same national recognition as a governor or senator, and often when they do, it’s for unflattering reasons.
I’m sure you could name far more of the 100 current Senators than you can for the mayor’s of the country’s 100 largest cities.
Being where the criminals are helps, and big cities like NY are happy to oblige.
Speaking of progressive era reforms, Teddy Roosevelt made his name in NYC as police commissioner. In a later generation, Thomas Dewey, who to some briefly succeeded his cousin as president–and interestingly not unlike Giuilani pre 9/11–became nationally famous as The Man Who Faced Down the Mafia in NY.
I’d say there are even bigger practical reasons that name-recognition.
Cities tend to have very insular political cultures, and you can’t necessarily translate skills from one to another, and certainly not from a city to an entire state. The political knowledge needed to succeed is simply very different. States have much wider needs and interests. A city mayor probably neither knows nor cares anything about agriculture - but it’s a rare state without a significant agriculture interest. These days, most cities probably lack significant manufacturing, too, so that’s an entirely separate interest group that needs to be understood, balanced, and managed. Sure, more than a few governors mess it up, but I don’t think it’s a stretch to say that would-be governors and presidents spend a lot of time making connections with very disparate and far-flung groups to persuade and gather political support. Mayors don’t, and the narrow political focus they do have is likely to make them unappealing in a larger race.
Then on top of that, most states have a similar political structure as the U.S. as a whole: legislature, executive, judicial, and often similar contests between right and left, constitutional issues, etc. Cities don’t; they tend to have much flatter and more limited government systems. This means that mayors just don’t have the basic experience people usually think is necessary for high executive office. It’s worth noting that traditionally in U.S. politics, Presidential candidates are either governors or generals.
The current election is very unusual, in that one of the two most significant candidates is a Senator with no executive experience whatsoever, and the other has no political experience at all.
By and large, a mayor is either going to have a history of aggressive policing or a lot of violent crime. The former was a huge liability for Martin O’Malley in the primaries. Emanuel would bring both.
First, Senators are often Presidential candidates, probably even more than Governors and definitely more than generals. Senators are sometimes criticized - usually by supporters of Governors - for not having executive experience but that’s almost always a non-issue in reality.
Second, I don’t understand what you mean by saying that cities don’t have the three branches of government. They certainly do. Mayor with a plethora of internal departments, city council, a whole mess of judges. And school boards and bunches of other boards. New York City has more of everything than probably 45 of the states. Nothing flat about it.
They have not been very successful candidates, on average, in the last 50 years. Every Senator may look in the mirror and see a president, but it doesn’t seem that the public usually agrees.
This is a facile analysis. Cities generally have very limited, and unimportant judicial branches, because the important court systems lies at the state level, and are not in any way controlled by the city. The people who vote in city elections make a very different constituency that a national or even state election, and city governments often work in very different ways than most state or national governments. They have more limited authority and scope.