This year, we have a fairly typical mix of presidential candidate: Governors, Senators, and Representatives. Earlier, partly triggered by a dispute I was reading about "leadership experience", I got to wondering things like: "How likely is it that a Senator gets elected President? How about a Governor?" etc.
So I made a quick, simple visualization to try to help me answer my questions. I thought it was somewhat interesting, so I decided to share it here. If you're interested, join me below.
I also used this as an opportunity to try out IBM's "Many Eyes" site for creating visualizations. If you click on the thumbnail below, you'll be taken there and you'll be able to zoom-in-on and explore this picture:
What this shows is the political pathway each US president (going back to 1900) took to get to the presidency. I think it's striking that there have only been two Senators that have been directly elected to the Presidency (ever), Harding and JFK, while no Representatives have been directly elected (since 1900).
Aside: Although it's new, I was somewhat disappointed with the options at Many Eyes. I wanted to be able to also represent how long each person served at each post. I tried a network visualization with the idea that I might be able to represent this with different node sizes, but that feature didn't seem to work. (Also, in my mind, I can see an HMM representation of this data, but I guess that was too much to hope for.)
Anyway, here's a table of the "raw" data (all of which came from poking around in Wikipedia). The numbers in parentheses are approximations of how many years were spent at each post.
President | Political Service (reverse chronological order) |
George W. Bush | Governor(5) |
Clinton | Governor(10) Governor(2) Attorney_General(2) |
George H.W. Bush | Vice_President(8) Ambassador(4) CIA(2) Liason(2) Representative(4) |
Reagan | Governor(8) |
Carter | Governor(4) State_Senator(8) |
Ford | Vice_President(1) Representative(24) |
Nixon | Vice_President(8) Senator(2) Representative(4) |
Johnson | Vice_President(2) Senator(12) Representative(4) |
Kennedy | Senator(8) Representative(8) |
Eisenhower | General(11) |
Truman | Vice_President(1) Senator(10) |
FDR | Governor(4) Secretary_of_the_Navy(7) StateSenator(3) |
Hoover | Secretary_of_Commmerce(8) Humanitarian |
Coolidge | Vice_President(3) Governor(2) |
Harding | Senator(6) Lt_Governor(3) State_Senator(4) |
Wilson | Governor(3) University_President(8) |
Taft | Secretary_of_War(4) Governor_General_of_Philippines(2) Federal_Judge(8) Solicitor_General(10) |
Teddy Roosevelt | Vice_President(<1) Governor(2) Assistant_Secretary_of_the_Navy(1) |
McKinley | Governor(4) Representative(11) |