Senators do not win Presidential Elections

[ThorsteinVeblen]

http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn?pagename=article&node=&contentId=A26390-2002Jun21¬Found=true



In all of American history, only two men -- Warren Harding and John Kennedy -- have gone straight from the Senate to the White House. Bob Dole in 1996 was the last sitting senator to win a party nomination (though he resigned his Senate seat a few months before the convention) and, like most of his predecessors, he was whomped in the election.

The statistics show that vice presidents (many of them, like Gore, former senators) and governors and former governors (such as George W. Bush and Jimmy Carter) have far greater success in winning nominations and in making it to the White House than do senators.

Between 1960 and 1996, senators were the largest group of presidential contenders, providing almost 37 percent of those who ran in at least one primary outside their home states, as compared with 23 percent who were governors. But only one out of 10 senators won nomination and only one out of 50 (Kennedy), the election. Governors did better in both regards

All these factors apply to the Bush-McCain contest, our most recent governor vs. senator test: age, size of state, Dixie base, recent tough election experience and ready-made campaign staff -- Bush had them all.

There may be a message here for the Democrats -- and all those senatorial wannabes.

http://www.people.fas.harvard.edu/~burden/psq2002.pdf