Is Hillary Toast?

[Starlight]

You guys #feelthebern yet?

If only the rest of the Western world got to vote... Sanders would win in a landslide.
A lot of people who follow politics here are excited that there's finally an actually good candidate for US president, instead of the usual choice between
(our response to the usual Democratic candidate)
and
(our response to the usual Republican candidate).

America's political spectrum is so weirdly skewed compared to the rest of the world, that we're all pretty much just pleased to see a candidate who's actually on our political spectrum. (Okay, to be fair to Obama, the response to him was initially hugely positive, back when everyone assumed he actually stood for the things he was saying. Sanders, at least, has a 40 year record of saying and doing the exact same things, so there's no problem with insincerity on that front.)

[One Bad Pig]

I don't think Hillary's toast. She has too many ardent supporters, in whose eyes she can do no wrong. And she has a much wider support base nationwide than her current competitors. She's such a political chameleon, though, that I have no idea what her true views are on anything.

If I were a Dem, I would be supporting O'Malley, who at least has executive experience as a governor to fall back on; senators have not tended to be good presidents.

[One Bad Pig]

And somewhat interestingly, on Democratic side, Sanders is pretty much a run of the mill European-style liberal. He targets pretty much all the topics that liberals in Europe tend to focus on, and points to the most liberal countries in Europe as the most successful ones.

Agreed.

So, it would be interesting if the nominations came down to Trump vs Sanders, the entire US election would be conducted with references to other countries and constant (unfavorable) comparisons of the US to those others countries. It would be curious to see how that would interact with the "we're #1" psychology of the US masses...

If Trump got the nomination, I would vote against him. I don't know that I could say that about any of the other Republican contestants.

[Starlight]

If I were a Dem, I would be supporting O'Malley, who at least has executive experience as a governor to fall back on; senators have not tended to be good presidents.

I find the occasional obsession some Republicans have with "experience as a governor" pretty hilarious. Being president isn't like being a governor, and Scott Walker's "I can beat ISIS because I beat the unions" analogy just plain doesn't work.

Currently the top two polling Republican candidates are Trump and Carson. Remind me which states they governed again...?

[Jaecp]

Plus W was a Governor and he was an atrocious president

The entire concept makes no sense once you stop to consider it.

[One Bad Pig]

I find the occasional obsession some Republicans have with "experience as a governor" pretty hilarious.

Because you're clueless about American political history.

Being president isn't like being a governor,

Being senator is even less like being President.

and Scott Walker's "I can beat ISIS because I beat the unions" analogy just plain doesn't work.

That's not really why I prefer governors as presidents.

Currently the top two polling Republican candidates are Trump and Carson. Remind me which states they governed again...?

Polls this far out are pretty much worthless.

[One Bad Pig]

Plus W was a Governor and he was an atrocious president

Try looking at more than just the immediate past; presidents are rarely graded accurately in the immediate aftermath.

The entire concept makes no sense once you stop to consider it.

The concept that having executive experience makes one better prepared to be an executive makes no sense? I hope that sounded better in your head.

[RumTumTugger]

Because you're clueless about American political history.

Being senator is even less like being President.

That's not really why I prefer governors as presidents.

Polls this far out are pretty much worthless.

Is Starlight still trying to tell Americans what it means to be an American how arrogant of him why doesn't he just admit he knows nothing about American history political or otherwise.

[Sam]

For comparison:

American Senators Who Became President:

James Monroe*
John Quincy Adams
Andrew Jackson
Martin Van Buren*
William Henry Harrison
John Tyler*
Franklin Pierce
James Buchanan
Andrew Johnson*
Benjamin Harrison
Warren G. Harding
Harry S. Truman
John F. Kennedy
Lyndon B. Johnson
Richard M. Nixon
Barack Obama

American Governors Who Became President:

Thomas Jefferson
James Monroe*
Martin Van Buren*
John Tyler*
James K. Polk
Andrew Johnson*
Rutherford B. Hayes
Grover Cleveland
William McKinley
Theodore Roosevelt
Woodrow Wilson
Calvin Coolidge
Franklin D. Roosevelt
Jimmy Carter
Ronald Reagan
Bill Clinton
George W. Bush

*Served as both a senator and governor

[robrecht]

Interesting. Good, Bad, and Mediocre* in both lists.

































*And the Ugly, too!

[klaus54]

"Is Hilary toast?"

Not from this, no. If she goes up against Jeb!, he used a private e-mail, too. If she goes up against Walker, he's got that whole "secret network" thing. If she goes up against Trump, she could light a kitten on fire and still win.

And if she goes against Carly or Rubio, she'll have her behind handed to her.

Edited to add: My hunch is that you're a Bernie "B.S." Sanders guy.

[Starlight]

Try looking at more than just the immediate past

Okay, let's do it!
I'm actually genuinely curious about this...


I've chosen an arbitrary range of 80 years back to FDR, because that covers all the presidents even the oldest fogies here can remember, and much more than that and we're getting into a very different pre-war America (and no, it was not selected in advance to make the conclusions I wanted... I personally didn't know for most presidents which had been governors and which were in congress until I looked it up).

As for methodology, wikipedia has a very helpful collection of 18 different scholarly rankings of US presidents from best to worst. These surveys generally use a balanced mix of conservatives and liberals in order to not skew results in favor of either political party (wikipedia discusses their methodologies further). Wiki gives a helpfully color-coded table indicating quartiles (ie in the top 25% vs next 25% etc). I have interpreted the quartiles as "Excellent", "Good", "Bad" and "Terrible" and put those in my table below. Where there is substantial disagreement between multiple different rankings resulting in a near-tie as to which quartile to rate the president in, I have included both in the table below.

Name	Ranking	Gov or Con/Sen or VP
Obama	Good	Sen
Bush W	Terrible	Gov
Clinton	Good/Bad	Gov
Bush HW	Bad/Good	Con+VP
Reagan	Good	Gov
Carter	Bad	Sen+Gov
Ford	Bad	Con+VP
Nixon	Bad/Terrible	Con+Sen+VP
Johnson	Good	Con+Sen+VP
Kennedy	Good/Excellent	Con+Sen
Eisenhower	Excellent	Gov*
Truman	Excellent	Sen+VP
Roosevelt	Excellent	Sen

Hopefully I've classified everyone correctly in terms of whether they were in congress or a governor, or VP...

Now, doing some math, and treating Excellent = +2, Good = +1, Bad = -1, and Terrible = -2 (and borderline in between as +1.5 etc), we can see that on average the presidents of the last 80 years had a rating of around +0.38. This suggests they were slightly better on average than the other presidents of American history (according to modern scholars at least). Now for the interesting part... what effect does having been a governor have on this as compared to having been a congressman or senator...?

If my math is correct:
Average: +0.38
Con/Sen: +0.44
VP: +0.38
Gov: +0.00

It would be reasonable to think that having been Vice-President gives you the closest thing to "presidential-type experience" that it's possible to have short of actually being president. Yet in fact, we see that being VP had zero effect, altering the quality of the set of presidents not at all from the average of +0.38 in our set. The most positive effect turned out to be having been a congressman and/or senator, which increased the quality of the president negligibly from +0.38 to +0.44. While by far the strongest effect in the dataset is the negative impact that having been a governor has on presidential quality - it reduced it from +0.38 to +0.00, quite a large change. And, furthermore, if we don't count Eisenhower as a "governor" (he was military governor of occupied Germany, but never a governor of a US State), then governor changes to having an average effect of -0.5.

The moral of the story appears to be, that if you want to "learn from history", then state governors make for bad presidents.


(...it is however, easy to see how the situation might have appeared different to someone following politics during the Nixon to Reagan period. A series of 3 bad presidents all of which had been in congress or the senate were followed by a good president who had been a governor. It's easy to imagine that the people in the era following Reagan might have leaped to the conclusion that governor=good and congress/senate=bad in terms of presidents.)

[Sam]

And if she goes against Carly or Rubio, she'll have her behind handed to her.

Edited to add: My hunch is that you're a Bernie "B.S." Sanders guy.

I prefer people who can win the general election. That's Biden or Clinton, by preference.

Rubio could win but in a personality election. He would do worse that Bush, Kaisch, and probably Walker in a policy election. And Trump is the millstone around the party's neck. Rubio can't win by being the Immigration Guy if he has to hew close to the Trump line to win the primary.

[Darth Executor]

Sam talks about Trump much like Republicans talked about Obama before he was president. We all know how that one turned out.

[Cow Poke]

Sam talks about Trump much like Republicans talked about Obama before he was president. We all know how that one turned out.

Trump is tapping into America's frustration with politics as usual. I would really love to see Trump win just to be a pain in the butt to the Washington establishment. I have no idea if he can maintain his lead, but a lot of his appeal is his disdain for the political correctness crap.