Tag: Alton B. Parker

It’s often been said that Donald Trump destroyed all precedents in his astonishing rise to the presidency in 2016. And one of the unusual things about him was his complete lack of prior experience in public office or running for public office. A few major-party nominees were closer to Trump in the empty resume department (notably 1904 Democratic nominee Alton Parker, a state judge, and 1940 Republican nominee Wendell Willkie, a utility executive), but for the most part, especially in more recent times, the major parties have nominated former or current senators and governors. That could help explain why two candidates (one potential and one actual) who together have 81 years of experience in elected office, Joe Biden and Bernie Sanders, top every poll. But as Nathaniel Rakich of FiveThirtyEight observes, voters tend to adapt their view of desirable candidate qualities to how they see their preferred candidates, more than the other way around. Thus Republicans told Pew pollsters early in the 2016 cycle that they valued experience over “new ideas” until Trump emerged as a favorite and flipped that particular script. The near–draft-level interest in former Georgia state legislator Stacey Abrams is unusual, too. It’s possible that while Trump hasn’t totally dispelled an interest in experience among voters in either party, Democrats are less worried than they might normally be about sending up a relative novice to oppose him; it’s not like Trump is going to depict himself as the wise, credentialed, steady hand on the tiller. It’s notable that candidates at both ends of the experience spectrum — Biden and Sanders, and O’Rourke and Buttigieg — are thought to be potentially strong among the white working-class voters so important to Trump’s 2016 election and 2020 reelection prospects. Perhaps all that’s going on is that against the terrifying Trump Democrats are valuing perceived electability above all.