Senators and the Presidency
A sitting senator has never defeated an incumbent president.
A sitting senator has never defeated an incumbent president.
This, in and of itself, is not a particularly remarkable fact, given that there have only been five cases in which a sitting senator challenged an incumbent president, and in one of those cases, the senator resigned from office before the election. However, it does reflect two persistent and statistically significant facts of American presidential elections.
Incumbent presidents are often re-elected.
Senators are usually bad at running for president.
The first fact is the well-known incumbency advantage. The second fact is less familiar to the public … and as a unique quirk of American presidential politics, it’s less clear why it is the case. (This paper is a good place to start.)
Who becomes president?
From 1788 to 2016, there have been 58 presidential elections. Most feature two major candidates, but a few feature three or four major candidates. For my purposes, I will count 124 major candidates, and organize them by their last position in government service prior to running (military or civilian).
Incumbent presidents have run thirty-one times, winning twenty-one times (a 68% win rate). This includes two unopposed elections (1792 and 1820).
Governors have run twenty-four times, winning ten (42%). They are the second-most common type of presidential candidate, and clearly perform better than senators.
Senators have run twenty times, racking up a total of five wins (25%), performing significantly worse than governors.
Vice presidents have run eleven times and won six times (55%). Cabinet members have scored five wins out of eight attempts (62.5%). In total, that means that other ranking members of a previous presidential administration account for nineteen candidates and eleven wins.
Generals have run nine times and won five times (55%). The first was George Washington in 1788; the most recent was Dwight D. Eisenhower in 1952. Many other presidential candidates had military service in their background; Teddy Roosevelt famously enjoyed being addressed as “Colonel.”
Members of the House of Representatives have run five times and won twice (40%). Members of the foreign service (ambassador or minister) have an identical two out of five record (40%).
Most of the candidates in these two categories were known for other reasons than their most recent office. Abraham Lincoln, for example, was better known from his failed Senate race than from his brief term in the House more than a decade earlier.
All other major candidates account for two more wins out of eleven runs (18%). The wins include one businessman and one former president, but no colonels or judges. The win rate of these other candidates is lower than that of senators, but not significantly.
If we look further back in their careers, eighteen presidents served as House members, seventeen as governors, sixteen as senators, nine as generals, eight as Cabinet members, and seven as ambassadors or ministers. Having served in the Senate before going on to other offices doesn’t seem to hurt candidates.
The Senator Presidents
A grand total of sixteen out of forty-five presidents (35% of all presidents) have served in the Senate at some point, but eleven of those served in some other capacity before becoming president. Only three were still in office as senators when they succeeded to the office, and at most five could be called “senator presidents.”
In each of these five cases, the successful candidates had limited experience in the Senate. Two of the wins were by exceptionally narrow margins, one was against a more experienced senator, and in two cases, the candidates were better known as former generals than as senators.
Andrew Jackson resigned from the Senate in 1825 after losing his first presidential campaign, and went on to win the 1828 election. He served two partial Senate terms for a combined three years in the Senate. Before his presidency, “Old Hickory” was best known as a general.
Benjamin Harrison was well known as the grandson of the first President Harrison and as a brigadier general in the Civil War. He served only a single term in the Senate (1881–1887). As a presidential candidate in 1888, he won by an exceptionally narrow margin, losing the popular vote while winning the Electoral College by the margin of a single closely contested battleground state (New York).
Warren G. Harding was the first sitting senator to win election. He served a single term as senator before winning by one of the largest electoral landslides ever in 1920. The election of 1920 was also the first election in which women were allowed to vote.
John F. Kennedy served almost eight years in the Senate, longer than any other of the five candidates to go from the Senate to the presidency. His victory in 1960 was one of the closest presidential elections of all time. Its legitimacy was contested by some Republicans, who alleged that the election was decided by fraud in Chicago and the part of Texas near the Mexican border.
Barack Obama served a partial term of four years in the Senate before he was elected to the presidency in 2008. It is worth noting that while his margin of victory was decisive, his only major opponent, John McCain, was a more experienced senator, one who was much more closely associated with the Senate.
The relevance today
About half a year from now, Democratic primary voters will start deciding on a presidential candidate. Most likely, that candidate will run against incumbent president Donald Trump. Many of the more serious contenders for the Democratic nomination are senators.
Trump won his election narrowly in the Electoral College while losing the popular vote. His party lost badly in the midterm elections in 2018, and his approval ratings have been persistently low. Nevertheless, he is an incumbent president, and even very unpopular incumbent presidents have won re-election.
Democrat Harry Truman became president in 1945, following the death of Franklin Delano Roosevelt.
Truman proved unpopular. In the 1946 midterm elections, Democrats lost their majorities in both chambers of Congress, losing fifty-five seats in the House and eleven in the Senate.
Public opinion polling had Truman’s approval rating as low as 33% during the presidential campaign. The southern wing of the Democratic party revolted and ran a segregationist candidate, Strom Thurmond, as a “Dixiecrat.” Political pundits thought that Truman was doomed in the three-way race. Nevertheless, Truman won re-election in 1948.
When I look at the Democratic candidates and ask myself how each is likely to perform in the general election, I keep in mind the fact that incumbent presidents have won 68% of the time while senators have only won 25% of the time. It is not impossible for a senator to defeat an incumbent president, but history gives a reason for pessimism about whether any particular senator’s chances of doing so are good.