Give Someone Else A Chance

I have relatives and old (primarily Facebook) friends that are not friendly to the liberal causes. They’re the ones that regularly mock Biden’s cognitive ability and yet fail to realize that their conquering hero hasn’t been able to speak in complete sentences for some years now. They especially fume at the fact that Biden has declared that his vice presidential pick will be a woman with a pretty strong preference for a woman of color. Tokenism, they shriek!  Affirmative action, they bellow! What about all of those more qualified white men being passed over, they ululate!

Just for fun, I decided to take a look at the data. I know that evidence based analysis has fallen out of favor, so I hope that you will indulge me.

To start with, I threw out the first three presidential elections. Those weren’t elections in the modern sense. The first two elections were basically coronations of George Washington. The third election had the nascent formation of political parties but there wasn’t really a concept of a slate of candidates (ie a President and a Vice President running together).

So, I’m counting the election of 1800 as the first modern election. It featured Thomas Jefferson and Aaron Burr, so it wasn’t exactly the smoothest of events, but after ironing out a kink or two, it has served as the pattern for all future elections.

Starting in the year 1800, I took a look at every person that has ran for either President or Vice President on a major party ticket. In most election years, there were only two parties. There were a couple of exceptions that I accommodated.

There was the chaos of the 1824 election where there was not one, not two, not three, but four distinct slates of Democratic-Republican candidates (this was the infamous corrupt bargain that later led the country to the Jacksonian age).

The 1860 election was equally chaotic. Again there were four distinct sets of candidates trying to convince voters that they had the unique nostrum to heal the nation of its slavery woes.

The 1912 election featured Teddy Roosevelt’s Bull Moose Party. Finally, I also counted George Wallace’s third party run in 1968 since he carried a significant number of Southern states.

I then took all of these president / vice president candidates and removed all duplicates. For instance, FDR is only counted once, not four times.

When I added up all of the realistic candidates that could have been President or Vice President, I came up with 165 people.

Of that 165, what was the demographic breakout? Well, there was Barack Obama, the sole person of color. There were three white women (Geraldine Ferraro, Sarah Palin, Hillary Clinton). That leaves us with 161 white men.

What does that mean in terms of percentages? 97.5% of all candidates were white men. 1.8% were white women. 0.6% were black men. 0% were women of color.

Are we suggesting that in the 216 years of modern presidential elections, that there were zero women of color that were qualified to lead this country? Or that white males were always the best qualified (I’m looking at you Millard Fillmore, Warren Harding, James Buchanan, and Franklin Pierce)?

Of course, I know the silliness of what I’m arguing. Black people weren’t even considered citizens until the passage of the 14th Amendment in 1868. Women of any color weren’t allowed to vote at the federal level until the 19th Amendment in 1920. It’s going to be really hard to be President or Vice President if you’re not considered a citizen and/or not allowed to vote.

Still, black people have been citizens for about 150 years and women have been able to vote for 100 years. Why haven’t there been more candidates?

Again, not exactly a trick question. With Black Codes passed right after the Civil War and the establishment of Jim Crow, there was never anything approaching racial equality. Similarly, even after the vote, women were still discriminated against at the federal level. For example, they weren’t allowed to even serve on federal juries until 1957. That is only one example. There were many, many other ways that women lacked equality.

Women and persons of color didn’t even have the most barest of chances for such high office until the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Given that, probably the most extreme earliest chance that a woman or a person of color had a chance to be a major party candidate was probably in 1972.

So, from the year 1800 to the year 1972, the only possible demographic to be President or Vice President was a white male.

What do you call a job where race and/or sex is a prerequisite? Affirmative Action. For at least the first 172 years of modern political elections, the Presidency was an affirmative action program for white males.

Knowing all of this, I have no problem with a candidate in the year 2020 saying that maybe it’s time to give someone else a chance.