The consensus across America, and perhaps especially along the I-95 corridor, seems to be that Jeb Bush and Hillary Clinton are on a nearly inevitable collision course, with one or the other poised to be declared president-elect on November 8, 2016. At a minimum, they are viewed as the frontrunners—or, in Bush’s case, the co-frontrunner—for their parties’ nominations. At the same time, most Americans don’t seem to view either Bush or Clinton as a particularly fresh, exciting, or desirable candidate or as among the most relevant thinkers, speakers, or actors on the biggest issues of the day.
Something, it would seem, has got to give. Either the citizenry will learn to love—or at least to like—the latest iteration of Bush-Clinton, or the two candidates’ aura of inevitability will soon vanish. History suggests that the second scenario is the more likely—for Bush and Clinton are each trying to break a political pattern that has remained intact for more than 150 years.
Presidential hopefuls seem to have about a 14-year shelf-life once they acquire a position of national prominence. Jonathan Rauch wrote on this phenomenon a little over a decade ago and credited an unnamed government employee—who he now confirms was George W. Bush speechwriter John McConnell—with having been the first to see this trend. The theory advanced herein is a variation on the one that Rauch wrote about and is based on McConnell’s original insight.
With just 5 exceptions, the 38 men in our nation’s history who have been elected to the presidency (as opposed to ascending to it without ever being elected in their own right) have all first been either elected senator, governor, or vice president or appointed cabinet secretary. Four of the 5 exceptions have been commanding generals who were national military heroes: George Washington, Zachary Taylor, Ulysses S. Grant, and Dwight Eisenhower. The fifth was Abraham Lincoln, a former House member and the foremost spokesman on the preeminent issue of his day.
In other words, Americans seem to have rather specific notions of what jobs they want their presidents to have held before entering the White House, and those requirements have remained surprisingly constant across more than two centuries. (Ben Carson, therefore, appears to have his work cut out for him.)
But Americans also seem to want people to move up or move out. At least that’s how things have played out since the Civil War. From the moment someone has first been elected or (in the case of those who become cabinet secretaries) appointed to a presidential steppingstone position, he’s had 14 years to get elected to either the presidency or the vice presidency, or else he’s never been elected president. Since 1860, there have been no exceptions.
(Those who succeed in being elected vice president within the 14-year window are no longer on the clock and can potentially remain viable presidential candidates for some time to come. It took Richard Nixon only 2 years to move from senator to vice president, but 16 years to move from vice president to president.)
The 14-year rule is bad news for Hillary and Jeb. In 2016, Clinton will be 16 years removed from first being elected to the Senate from New York. Bush will be 18 years removed from first being elected to the governorship of Florida.
Across the past 150 years of presidential history, nobody has ever moved that slowly from Point A to Point B. James Garfield was elected president the same year he was first elected to the Senate. (He never even began his Senate term.) Grover Cleveland and Woodrow Wilson were elected president (and Theodore Roosevelt, Calvin Coolidge, and Nixon vice president) two years after first being elected governor or (in Nixon’s case) senator. And William Howard Taft, Franklin Roosevelt, and Barack Obama were elected four years after first becoming secretary of war, governor of New York, and senator, respectively.
At the other end of the spectrum, late-bloomers Ronald Reagan and Bill Clinton were each elected president 14 years after first being elected governor. Since 1860, that’s the longest anyone has taken.
Over that same span, the 14-year rule has usually applied even in relation to initial election to the House. Lincoln, the outlier in not having filled any presidential steppingstone position, was elected president 14 years after being elected to his single term in the House. John F. Kennedy, Nixon, and George H. W. Bush all went from election to the House to election as president or vice-president within 14 years. Indeed, among former House members who have been elected president in the last 100 years, only Lyndon Johnson wasn’t elected vice president or president within 14 years of his initial election to the House.
So even before considering that Hillary Clinton would become president 24 years after she became first lady, or that Bush is trying to achieve the fourth family victory in a presidential election in the last eight contests, Clinton and Bush are trying to defy historical norms. That is to say, people don’t have to be particularly bothered by the idea of political dynasties to sense that Hillary and Jeb themselves have been around a long time.
Hillary, of course, became secretary of state in the interim. And there is actually a fair amount of precedent for being elected president more than 14 years after first holding a presidential steppingstone office if one has become secretary of state in between—but you have to look back before the Civil War to find it. Thomas Jefferson, James Monroe, John Quincy Adams, and James Buchanan all took this route, the last of them in 1856. (And even without having been secretary of state, William Henry Harrison and Franklin Pierce went 16 years between first getting elected to the Senate and getting elected president, but they preceded Buchanan.) So the question is, after 160 years, will voters be ready for Hillary?
At least Hillary can take some comfort in antebellum precedent. Bush, who was first elected governor in the late 1990s, is trying to do something that no one has done in all of American history: get elected president 18 years after first being elected to a presidential steppingstone office, without becoming secretary of state in the interim.
Nor are Clinton and Bush the only potential candidates who are trying to defy historical norms. As of 2016, it will have been 18 years since Mike Huckabee was first elected governor and 22 years since Rick Santorum was first elected senator.
Based on history, then, the smart money would seem to be on one of the prospective candidates who were first elected to a presidential steppingstone office less than 14 years before 2016: Ted Cruz (elected 4 years prior to 2016), Mike Pence (4), Rand Paul (6), Marco Rubio (6), Scott Walker (6), Chris Christie (7), or Rick Perry (14, as Perry took over from Governor George W. Bush in 2000 but was himself first elected governor in 2002) on the Republican side; and Elizabeth Warren (4), Martin O’Malley (10), or Jim Webb (10) on the Democratic side. Joe Biden doesn’t meet the 14-year standard, as it took Slow Joe 36 years to get from the Senate to the vice-presidency—22 too many. (Al Gore, however, does qualify, having gone from senator to vice president in 8 years, thereby making himself more or less permanently eligible for voters’ consideration.)
Of course, historical patterns can be broken. When George H. W. Bush was elected president in 1988, he became the first man since John Adams to do so with the vice presidency having been his sole presidential steppingstone office (although CIA director nearly qualified), thereby breaking a streak of 192 years. Still, American history provides a great deal of support for what appears to be the widespread popular sense that Hillary Clinton and Jeb Bush are both past their political prime. And it suggests that the general consensus about their inevitability isn’t inevitably right.
Jeffrey H. Anderson is executive director of the 2017 Project, which is working to advance a conservative reform agenda, including “A Winning Alternative to Obamacare.”
