Josh Zeitz has taught American history and politics at Cambridge University and Princeton University and is the author of Lincoln’s Boys: John Hay, John Nicolay, and the War for Lincoln's Image. He is currently writing a book on the making of Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society. Follow him @joshuamzeitz.

He didn’t admit it outright, but it’s pretty clear why Marco Rubio announced last week that he would seek reelection to the United States Senate after promising he wouldn’t. The 45-year-old, who during his many months as a presidential candidate denigrated the Senate as inconsequential, “told colleagues and advisers that he is considering running for president again in 2020 or 2024,” the New York Times reported. “And as he and his team weighed a re-election campaign, they debated how well situated he would be in once more seeking the presidency from the Senate.”

The reasoning might seem sound—national pulpits are supposed to be a good thing, right?—but had Rubio consulted the history books, he might have made a very different decision. The Senate, it turns out, has not traditionally been a solid platform for a presidential run. And for a second presidential run, it’s been even worse.


In the whole of American history, just 16 of the country’s 44 presidents served in the Senate. Of this number, only three—Barack Obama, John F. Kennedy and Warren G. Harding—were elected directly from the Senate, and four others—John Tyler, Andrew Johnson, Harry Truman and Lyndon Johnson—ascended to the presidency by virtue of the incumbent’s death, not by election in their own right.

More to the point, while many senators have run for the presidency and lost, a handful of onetime presidential aspirants have returned to the Senate after leaving it (or, in Rubio’s case, almost leaving it)—only to run for president again. Of those returnee candidates, none was successful in using the Senate as a platform for another run at the White House. Some found it impossible to shake off the loser’s reputation. Others found themselves bumped aside by newer, younger models. Still others learned that being in public life means owning responsibility for its problems.

The case of three such contenders—Henry Clay, Daniel Webster and Hubert Humphrey—calls Rubio’s logic into question.

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Henry Clay and Daniel Webster—along with their longtime colleague, John C. Calhoun—formed the “great triumvirate” that dominated Congress from their service in the House of Representatives during the War of 1812 through the dark and stormy debates over the Compromise of 1850.

The two men were in some ways as different as night and day: Webster, a Dartmouth graduate and distinguished member of the Massachusetts bar, was a renowned orator in the classical style, so famous for his rhetorical skills that 100 years later the author Stephen Vincent Benet would memorialize him in fiction as the legislator who out-debated the devil. He was also a man of few inhibitions, fond of good liquor and good food. Clay—whose upbringing in Virginia was in fact more comfortable than Webster’s in New Hampshire, and who was also a skilled attorney and speaker—would come to be known as “Harry of the West,” the embodiment of America’s frontier scrappiness and ambition whom many young members of the Whig Party, like Abraham Lincoln, regarded as their “beau ideal of a statesman.”

Clay served off and on in the House of Representatives from 1811 to 1825—for much of that time as speaker, a position to which he was first elected as a freshman member of Congress. In 1824, he was a candidate for president, trailing in the popular vote and electoral college to Andrew Jackson and John Quincy Adams. With no candidate securing enough electors to win the presidency outright, the contest went to the House, where Clay helped Adams cinch the presidency, in return for which (or so Jackson’s supporters would later claim, calling it a “corrupt bargain”) he was appointed secretary of state.

Clay entered the Senate in 1831 (technically, this was his third term: He had served two very short stints between 1806-07 and 1810-11), from which perch he went on to launch two unsuccessful presidential campaigns. In 1832, he was the consensus candidate of the anti-Jacksonian forces, soon to be known as the Whig Party, but lost the general election in a rout to the popular incumbent, Andrew Jackson. Clay was hurt as much by his reputation as a political deal-maker as by Jackson’s common appeal. In 1840, still a senator, Clay tried but failed to secure the Whig nomination. Having seen Jackson and his supporter, Martin Van Buren, flay a steady lineup of elite Whig politicians, and aware that Clay’s long legislative record left him vulnerable to attack, the party settled instead upon former senator and Army General William Henry Harrison, a wealthy landowner whose supporters nevertheless positioned him as a rough-hewn frontiersman and political outsider.

Perhaps with this memory in mind, Clay actually left the Senate in 1842 to prepare for a third presidential bid. He was once again his party’s nominee in 1844, losing narrowly to Democratic candidate James K. Polk. After a seven-year absence, he returned to the Senate in 1849, where he was regarded as one of the body’s leading lights—but no longer presidential timber. Clay’s star was soon eclipsed by a rising generation of politicians who seemed better fit to the times. He was a lead architect of the famous Compromise of 1850 and died two years later.

Webster first entered the Senate in 1827 after serving both his native and adopted states (New Hampshire and Massachusetts, respectively) in the House. In 1836, the Whig Party failed to agree on a single nominee and instead ran multiple candidates for president on the hunch that if each carried his own section, the Democratic nominee would not be able to win an electoral majority, and the decision might be thrown to the House, where at least they might enjoy a better shot than at the ballot box. Webster carried the party’s banner in the Northeast, but the divided Whig field failed to block Jackson’s hand-picked successor, Van Buren, from winning in the Electoral College.

Every four years, for the rest of his life, Webster was either an active or passive aspirant for the presidency. He left the Senate in 1841 to become secretary of state; he returned in 1845 and served again through the middle of 1850, when he went back into the Cabinet. In 1852, he made one last bid for the White House, but once again, the Whig Party staked its hope on a military man and political outsider, former General Winfield Scott, the hero of the Mexican War. Having failed so many times to capture the White House, Whigs had little stomach to recycle a candidate who had for so long been a perennial hopeful.

To be sure, politics in the antebellum era was decidedly different from that in the modern age. Candidates won their party’s nomination through elite selection at state caucuses and national conventions; the franchise was closed to all but white men; and state legislatures elected senators, which made it easy for men like Clay and Webster to enter and exit the Senate at will. What was true then, and may be true now, however, is that once each man had lost a presidential race, restoration to the Senate did not enable him to run successfully again.

In the antebellum era, especially, the Whig Party struggled consistently to out-Jackson the Jacksonian Democrats. In such an environment, running institutional insiders seemed a poor strategy, and there was no institution more on the inside than the Senate.

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A more recent example, too, suggests that the Senate isn’t necessarily the right platform for a once and future presidential aspirant.

In 1968, Vice President Hubert Humphrey, who served in the Senate from 1949 to 1964, won the Democratic presidential nomination after a heated convention battle. Running against Republican Richard Nixon and independent George Wallace in the general, he tried to campaign on “the politics of happiness, the politics of purpose, and the politics of joy,” sounding traditional liberal themes and affirming that “for every jail Mr. Nixon wants to build I’d like to build a house for a family. And for every policeman he wants to hire I’d like to hire another good teacher.” But with his fortunes tied so strongly to the Johnson administration’s losing policy in Vietnam, and with the country riven by urban violence and social unrest, he remained locked in a very close race.

In the end, Nixon took 43.4 percent of the popular vote to 42.7 percent for Humphrey and 13.5 percent for Wallace.

Out of office for the first time in over two decades, Humphrey returned to Minnesota where, in 1970, he leapt at the opportunity to run for the Senate seat that Eugene McCarthy had decided to vacate. He won easily.

While Humphrey remained a towering figure in the Senate, a new generation of liberals—including George McGovern, Edward Kennedy, Ed Muskie, Birch Bayh, Frank Church—now seemed better-equipped to assume the party’s leadership. Many of these men had been in the Senate for the better part of a decade (in Church’s case, more), but they hadn’t run for president and lost, and they hadn’t left Congress only to return.

In 1972, Humphrey ran hard for the Democratic nomination but lost to McGovern. He considered making another bid in 1976 but ultimately bowed out. He was battling cancer, which would claim his life two years later, but equally compelling, he understood that he bore the mark of a consummate insider and failed candidate. Just two years after Watergate, 1976 would be the year of Jimmy Carter, not Hubert Humphrey. Running again would be “ridiculous,” he told his aides, “and the one thing I don’t need at this stage in my life is to be ridiculous.”

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There is, of course, a counter-example. Richard Nixon, who served in the Senate for two years, and then for eight years as vice president, narrowly lost the presidency to John Kennedy in 1960. Two years later, believing that a return to public office was a necessary predicate for a rematch with JFK, he ran for governor of California but lost unexpectedly to incumbent Pat Brown.

Hurt and dejected, the former vice president addressed reporters the day after the election and bitterly announced, “You won’t have Nixon to kick around anymore, because gentlemen, this is my last press conference.” It was a bizarre and ungracious performance. In its aftermath, ABC television aired a special segment titled “The Political Obituary of Richard M. Nixon.” “Barring a miracle,” Time announced, “Richard Nixon can never hope to be elected to any political office again.”

But rumors of his political death were premature. A private citizen throughout the turbulent years that followed, and wholly unaccountable for Vietnam, urban unrest and inflation, Nixon was well poised to run against Humphrey in 1968.

American politics is full of second acts, and even his bitterest detractors acknowledge Marco Rubio’s considerable skill as a candidate. The question, however, remains: Given the examples of Webster, Clay, Humphrey and Nixon, can one man elide history? In a deeply partisan and charged political environment, would Rubio not be better served by leaving public life—as Clay did in 1842 and Nixon in 1962? By staying, he risks losing perhaps his greatest asset: the luster and polish of the rising star.