Governors may not have edge in 2016 presidential race

After the Civil War, governors started to come into popular favor. In 1876, both parties nominated a governor for president. Although New York Gov. Samuel Tilden won the popular vote, Ohio Gov. Rutherford B. Hayes received the majority in the electoral college. (It was the Bush vs. Gore election of its day.) For 52 of the next 68 years, the Oval Office was occupied by former governors. State governments in the early 1900s became “laboratories of democracy,” as future Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis called them, experimenting with workplace safety regulation and a host of other reforms. That made state governors like Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson into much more prominent figures, who moved easily onto the national stage.

But after World War II, experience in Washington came into vogue. All of our chief executives from Truman to Ford were former members of Congress, with the notable exception of ex-Gen. Dwight D. Eisenhower. Amid the national security concerns of the Cold War, voters wanted their commander in chief to be someone who knew his way around the federal government.

Writing in 1959, pollster Louis Harris wondered whether an ex-governor could ever win the presidency again. “In a cosmic, atomic, mass-media age, governors have shrunk to … local figures,” Harris wrote.