Running for President? No Experience, No Problem!
How we’ve given presidential candidates with less political experience a leg up for 2020.
By Amit Thakkar | LawMaker, Founder & CEO | May 10, 2019
We’re 18 months away from the 2020 elections, the day the entire country (or roughly 60% of it) gets together to choose our leaders. And the year(s) leading up to our elections are spent talking, telling others, and being told how we should decide who to empower. Campaign season, they say, is like a year-long job interview, and like a job interview, we choose the candidate with the most experience.
Or do we?
More and more it seems that experience in government is no longer a prerequisite for election to high office, and this phenomenon may factor considerably in the 2020 primaries and the general election.
A TREND LINE IS FORMING
In the run-up to the 2000 election, few people questioned George W. Bush’s “on-paper” qualifications to be President. He came from one of America’s great political dynasties, first ran for office at the age of 31 (he won the primary, but lost the election), and was Governor of Texas before he ran for President at age 53. His campaign continually reminded Americans that his credential for the White House was his significant “executive experience” as governor of a major state.
Executive experience like Bush’s governorship is traditionally only matched by decades of experience in the House or Senate as a baseline qualifier for a presidential run.
However, in 2006, we saw the rise of Senator Barack Obama. At 45 years old, he was not only considerably younger than most contenders for the presidency, but a beltway narrative started to build that he had little of the traditional experience necessary for the office. He had only been in the US Senate for a year by the time he started to acquire presidential buzz, and had previously only been engaged in state level politics. Even members of his own party attacked him for his lack of a conventional presidential pedigree, which he successfully countered showing 20 years in civic life and public service work. And yet, without executive experience, many felt he lacked the experience to serve the country as President.
Yet serve he did, for two full terms.
President Obama’s critics must have been chagrined in 2016 with the election of President Donald Trump, who had no experience in public or civil service, and not a day served in government.
Are these three points enough to see the beginning of a trend?
Yes, the US has seen presidents with no prior elected experience, but prior to President Trump they were either military leaders, in case of Eisenhower, Grant, and Taylor, or Cabinet members for previous administrations, in the case of Hoover and Taft.
And so, with this history, we arrive at the 2020 elections, with over 21 candidates (and counting), and a long-running debate about how important “experience” is for the highest office in the land.
OUR 2020 CONTENDERS
Much has been reported on 37 year old presidential candidate Pete Buttigieg of Indiana, who has no federal or executive experience but has served as the Mayor of South Bend for 7 years. However, Buttigieg’s surprise ascension has eclipsed the fact that there are quite a few other candidates who have similar credentials to his.
Candidates Wayne Messam (mayor of Miramar, Florida), Julián Castro (former mayor of San Antonio, Texas, and Obama Cabinet secretary), Andrew Yang (tech entrepreneur), and Marianne Williamson (motivational author and social entrepreneur) all have similar or less government experience than Buttigieg and have each thrown their hats in the ring for the 2020 Democratic primary.
What does it say that we have abundant candidates with limited to no federal experience running to lead our nation? Maybe it means that “experience” isn’t our litmus test anymore. Or, it could mean that experience itself has become a political liability.
MORE EXPERIENCE = TOO MUCH TIME TO ACQUIRE NEGATIVE BAGGAGE
A long record of experience in any field gives you an established record of accomplishments. But it also gives you a long time to pick up negative baggage. Hillary Clinton, for all her vast accomplishments and government experience, had to fight 30 years of her own political history in two primaries and a general election.
From voting records to accurate quotes, “misstatements,” and lies, the longer you’ve been in the public sphere (or even alive), the more material journalists can dig up to report on your flaws.
Joe Biden, who could technically be the most experienced candidate ever to run for president, also has decades of decisions for which he may need to answer. From his leadership of the Anita Hill hearings, to his involvement in the 1994 crime bill, Biden is finding that his experience is being subsumed by his errors (and so many verbal gaffes), at least as far as media coverage goes.
And organic media coverage, like Biden’s campaign has seen, isn’t the only threat. The moment a candidate gains momentum, opposition research starts in earnest from a bevy of interested parties. Rival candidates, think tanks, and lobbying groups spend millions to unearth a smoking gun to derail a contender’s campaign. And just as often as they unearth something of professional relevance, they also strive to surface personal details that may have nothing to do with a candidate’s time in office, but will tarnish her/him in the eyes of voters.
Even candidates who are too young or too well-mannered to have much to fear from opposition research should be wary, as we learned last week. Mayor Buttigieg was the victim of a orchestrated false accusation by political grifters Jacob Wohl and Jack Burkman, who solicited numerous individuals to falsely accuse the mayor of sexual impropriety. Lucky for Buttigieg, the lie was revealed before it branded his campaign for good.
Unfortunately, we’re likely to see more of such deplorable tactics as the campaigns continue. The past three years have been object lessons in how even false narratives can dramatically transform the political landscape.
YOUTH HAS ITS BENEFITS
We are a society that worships at the alter of youth and newness in entertainment and retail, so it only makes sense that we’ve finally started to experience this in politics.
The 2020 election is likely going to be a battle to attract the youth vote, especially millennials. Ranging in age from 23 to 38, millennials of all political persuasions are prime voters for candidates that have experienced a similar cultural, economic, and social background. Much like JFK was a generational candidate in the 60s, younger candidates may speak to the concerns and desires of younger voters, particularly those facing economic hardship in the post-recession economy.
Furthermore, young candidates are often implicitly tied to new ideas (even when those ideas may be decades old). A recent YouGov poll found that Americans value “fresh new ideas” above years of experience, a hypothesis many believe was confirmed with the election of President Trump.
In a political environment in which the “political establishment” has become a slur, new faces are more easily able to distance themselves from the political machine and make the case for their outsider status. And it seems “outsider status” is becoming more and more in demand these days.
OR PERHAPS WE JUST DON’T CARE ABOUT EXPERIENCE ANYMORE
A strange thing happened when the media started demystifying the White House in the 70s and 80s — the sentiment started to build that anyone could lead the country.
As the political arena has tarnished its own reputation over the past five decades, voters no longer look to political experience as an admirable trait — even in politics. And it’s hard to ask voters directly how they feel, because they may not understand their motivations themselves, as Ed Kilgore pointed out in the Intelligencer:
“A recent Morning Consult poll suggests that rank-and-file Democratic voters still value that kind of high-level experience, with 66 percent saying that “decades of political experience” was “very important” or “somewhat important” to them in choosing a 2020 nominee. That could help explain why two candidates…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. So it’s worth noting that two 2020 Democratic candidates that have created some initial “buzz,” Beto O’Rourke and Pete Buttigieg, have qualifications typically considered insufficient for presidential candidates…The near–draft-level interest in former Georgia state legislator Stacey Abrams is unusual, too.”
So do we want experience, new ideas, or just whichever quality the candidate we gravitate towards happens to possess? It seems the 2020 Elections may be the bellwether that answers that question for us. Right now, it may just be too early to tell.
When he announced his candidacy only three weeks ago, Mayor Buttigieg made a confession to his adoring crowd: “I recognize the audacity of doing this as a Midwestern millennial mayor. More than a little bold — at age 37 — to seek the highest office in the land.” Perhaps this was a true admission of vulnerability, accepting the limitations of youth and relative inexperience in the political arena. Or, perhaps he was acknowledging the dawn of a new political age, where experience is no longer the silver bullet to secure the presidency. It’s possible we’ve entered an era in which bold and audacious candidates can rival those with decades of political experience.
We’ll likely learn for sure in 18 months.
