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A few weeks before Texas Senator Ted Cruz officially decided to seek a new job—that of President of the United States—Catherine Frazier had to quit hers. For the past two years, she’d been Cruz’s Senate press secretary; now she was going to do the same job for his presidential campaign—which meant leaving the federal government payroll. Quitting one’s job to join a presidential campaign is unsurprisingly common: According to Frazier, at least three other aides in Cruz’s Senate office have decamped to his presidential campaign team. Even Cruz’s wife, Heidi, has taken an unpaid leave from her job at Goldman Sachs for the duration of her husband’s campaign.

Seemingly the only person in Cruz World whose job hasn’t been impacted by Cruz’s decision to run for president? Ted Cruz. As he crisscrosses the country in pursuit of the presidency—this weekend was in South Carolina for a Republican cattle call—he continues to represent Texas in the U.S. Senate (and pull down his $174,000 annual salary). There on Capitol Hill, he’s joined by three other officially-declared presidential candidates: Kentucky’s Rand Paul, Florida’s Marco Rubio, and Vermont’s Bernie Sanders. Next month, a fifth U.S. Senator, South Carolina’s Lindsey Graham, is expected to toss his hat in the ring. Meanwhile, it’s only a matter of time until Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker, New Jersey Governor Chris Christie, and Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal officially launch their own presidential bids. And none of them will quit their taxpayer-funded day jobs in order to do so.

But the option to holding down other jobs while running for president isn’t always available to candidates in the private sector. Right before retired neurosurgeon Ben Carson officially launched his presidential campaign last week, he resigned from the corporate boards of Costco and a biotech firm. Former Arkansas Governor Mike Huckabee, meanwhile, gave up his Fox News show and even stopped serving as the spokesman for a questionable diabetes cure in order to run for the White House. Maybe that’s why, in announcing his presidential candidacy earlier this week, Huckabee took a shot at his fellow presidential candidates who haven’t made such sacrifices. "If you live off the government payroll and you want to run for [an] office other than the one you’ve been elected to," he said, "then at least have the integrity and decency to resign the one that you don’t want anymore."

Huckabee’s got a point. Yes, there’s a long and venerable tradition of this sort of political multitasking. When John F. Kennedy ran for president in 1960, he remained a U.S. Senator from Massachusetts. In 1992, Bill Clinton continued to govern Arkansas while he pursued the White House — even abandoning the campaign trail at one point to fly back to Little Rock to oversee an ecution. But, while those campaigns were undoubtedly full-time endeavors, they were shorter ones: Kennedy’s campaign didn’t officially begin until about 11 months before election day; Clinton’s kicked off in a little over a year before he won the White House.