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Description
Robert Dole was apparently more comfortable and successful as a senator than as a candidate for president of the United States. There was real concern within the Dole campaign in 1996 that his bid for the presidency was hindered by his position as a senator. The potential liability of his office became so great that Dole chose to abandon his seat and position as majority leader of the U.S. Senate. This was done to redefine himself as a citizen and presidential candidate rather than as a member of the Senate and to create more time for campaigning. It is not clear that this strategy worked, however, as the Dole-Jack Kemp ticket was soundly defeated with only 41 percent of the popular vote and less than a third of the electoral vote. Though his senatorial experience surely did not cause his defeat, this story raises the question of whether candidates generally find Senate service a liability in their quests for White House.
Contrary to Dole's view, the conventional wisdom holds that senators are prime presidential material. The Senate is thought to be "the major launching pad for presidential contenders." (1) It has been called the "Mother of Presidents," "presidential incubator," "the presidential nursery," and "presidential pre-school." (2) Nearly every senator has been considered a potential candidate for president at one time or another simply because of the office he or she occupies. (3) Some elections have even seen hordes of senators running for president simultaneously. For example, the 1976 contest brought out Senators Henry "Scoop" Jackson, Frank Church, Birch Bayh, Lloyd Bentsen, and Fred Harris, while the 1988 election featured Senators Joseph Biden, Bob Dole, Al Gore, Gary Hart, Ernest "Fritz" Hollings, and Paul Simon. This strong presence would not surprise most scholars and journalists, since they assume that senators are natural candidates for the White House. Among other assets, they have demonstrated campaign e xperience, are able to raise large sums of money, enjoy wide name recognition, and have already managed to represent large and often diverse state constituencies. In short, senators ought to have a head start over other kinds of candidates when the presidential race begins.
Despite these clear expectations, senators have not often been successful presidential candidates, particularly in the modern nominating era. The failure of senators to meet expectations cannot be explained by a series of unconnected anecdotes; statistical evidence shows that the poor performance of senators is more than coincidence. Before turning to empirical analysis or suggesting explanations, I begin by reanalyzing the historical record to reject the basic contention that senators are ideal presidential candidates. The second section reviews relevant political science theory and considers two specific historical events that might have affected senators' success rates. The next section develops the notion of candidate investment found in ambition theory and suggests four explanations flowing from it that might explain why governors in particular perform better than senators. Finally, I collect data on all major presidential contenders over the last forty years to determine how career backgrounds in the Se nate affect campaign success.
THE SURPRISING HISTORICAL RECORD
It is almost unheard of for presidents to come directly from the Senate. Of the forty-three presidents of the United States, only two--Warren Harding in 1920 and John Kennedy in 1960--moved straight from the Senate to the White House. Of the fifty-four presidential elections held since 1789, only fifteen saw current or even former senators win. Limiting the time frame to contemporary elections, some of the worst defeats were suffered by senators who had earned their parties' nominations. Among others, Senators Barry Goldwater (1964), George McGovern (1972), Walter Mondale (1984), and Bob Dole (1996) lost by embarrassing margins. Of the last seven presidents, only Nixon had senatorial experience, and he had but a partial term as senator.
While this brief history does not prove that senators make poor candidates, it seems clear that senators are not the strong candidates that many expect them to be. There are two nuances to this conclusion that require further exploration, however. First, there are probably differences between former and sitting senators. Indeed, many successful presidential candidates--from Martin Van Buren to Harry Truman--are former senators who worked their way to the presidency through the vice-presidency. Thus, the safest path from the Senate to the White House might be indirect. Roughly 142 major-party nominees have run for president, but just forty-four of these were ever in the Senate, most of them earlier in their political careers. Former senators not only make up the lion's share of this group but also won more often. There is either a liability associated with those who are currently senators or a benefit associated with having left the Senate in the past, perhaps attributable to passing through the vice-presidenc y first, a sort of back door strategy.
The second refinement to the conclusion is to point out that governors are senators' main competition. Thus, the story is as much about governors' successful presidential campaigns as it is about senators' unsuccessful ones. Over the last thirty years, senators accounted for the largest group of declared presidential candidates but governors were not far behind. (4) Nearly two-thirds of contemporary presidential candidates are drawn either from the Senate or governors' offices. Longer-range data support this contention too. Table 1 presents data on presidential nominees and the larger pool of presidential "contenders" assembled by Eve Lubalin and separately by Robert L. Peabody, Norman J. Ornstein, and David W. Rohde (hereafter POR) for the period covering 1868 to 1972. (5) Data from both studies are presented to show that results are similar despite their use of slightly different coding procedures. The POR data are further manipulated to compute success rates.
The first column in Table 1 lists the last office held by presidential candidates. This is nearly the same as Joseph Schlesinger's definition of a "manifest office." (6) While not an ideal way to characterize candidates' office-holding histories, it is reasonable shorthand at this point for suggesting from where party candidates are drawn. The Lubalin and POR data roughly agree that governors provide the largest number of major party nominees. Senators and other federal appointees such as cabinet secretaries each comprise about 14 percent of the nominees, while other types of candidates--probably those with military and business backgrounds--are a slightly larger proportion of the pool. For now, note that this low number of senators as nominees is surprising given that senators far outnumber governors and visible executive branch appointees combined.
The fourth column of the table considers all presidential contenders, a larger set of candidates that includes the eventual nominees. Contenders outnumber nominees almost three to one using the POR definition. Among contenders the position of senators changes dramatically. Senators are one of the smallest groups of nominees despite being the largest groups of contenders. Governors, in contrast, tend to be contenders just as often as senators but are much more likely to win nomination.
More interesting for our purposes is the rate at which contenders become nominees. The final column of Table 1 presents the nomination success rate (NSR), computed as the number of nominees divided by the number of contenders. The mean NSR for all contenders is .36, indicating that about one of every three contenders wins nomination. If senators, governors, and other office-holders had equal success rates, all of the entries in the final column would be nearly equal and close to this value. They clearly are not. Aside from House members, who are few in number, the lowest value is for senators. Only three out of every twenty senators who run for the presidency will be nominated. In contrast, nearly half of governors who run for president win their parties' nominations. Governors' nomination rate is nearly three times that of senators.
The simple evidence presented so far demonstrates that senators have fared less well than conventional wisdom would suggest. Their failures have opened the door for governors. Despite this clear statistical pattern, it is tempting to explain some recent failures of senators using stories specific to particular elections. For example, one might argue that ex-Senator Dole lost the 1996 presidential election because he was perceived as too old for the job or because his opponent benefited from presiding over a booming economy. Several other senators lost in November because they were thought to be too ideologically extreme (Barry Goldwater in 1964, George McGovern in 1972, and Walter Mondale in 1984). One might argue that former Senator Hubert Humphrey lost in 1968 because of a fluke third-party candidacy, a lack of unity within the Democratic party, or blame for Lyndon Johnson's handling of the Vietnam War. One could add stories about numerous other candidacies.
While these explanations all have some truth to them, they do not allow one to connect cases to one another in a systematic fashion. Many more complicated stories would have to be told to explain the dozens of senators including tough cases such as Estes Kefauver (1960), Scoop Jackson (1972), Birch Bayh (1976), and John McCain (2000) who failed to earn even their parties' nominations. While it might be feasible to construct idiosyncratic explanations for each case of senatorial failure over the past 200 years, coincidence is not this powerful. There is something more general about the Senate that connects many of these cases; from a political science perspective it is more useful to understand the rule than the exceptions. To do so, our study should be linked to the rich literature on presidential selection.
SENATORS AND THE THEORY OF PRESIDENTIAL SELECTION
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