It has been nearly 46 years since Hillary Clinton’s name first appeared in The New York Times. Were she to win the Democratic nomination for president in 2016, her time in the news in this publication before becoming a presidential nominee would be longer than that of any other Democrat.

Mrs. Clinton’s span would be more than twice that of her husband, Bill Clinton: 18 years between his first mention in 1974 and his nomination 1992, and longer than that of John Kerry, the 2004 Democratic nominee, who appeared in a 1966 wedding article.

Prolonged national exposure can be both a blessing and a curse, as the term “Clinton fatigue” implies, but Mrs. Clinton’s time in the public eye is unusual in that it has been almost entirely in the political realm. Only one Republican nominee has been in the news longer: Mitt Romney, who was first mentioned in The Times in a 1962 article about his father’s run for governor of Michigan.