Where Do They Go?

I've been thinking about unsuccessful candidates for President and Vice President, partly as a result of my recent post about Sarah Palin, and partly because of this Paul Ryan story at The Daily Beast. I'm struck by the contrast in the post-campaign activities of, not to mention the amount of media attention paid to, the two most recent losing VP candidates. Unlike Palin four years ago, Ryan went back to his day job in the House of Representatives and has pretty much stayed out of the spotlight. Palin went back to her day job, too, at least initially, but the lure of fame and fortune was too much for her and in July, 2009, she famously quit her job as governor and set out to get rich.

The Ryan story got me thinking: What have other recent losing candidates done? Where do they go, what do they do once the campaign is over? Here's a "blast from the past" list of the losing POTUS/VP candidates going back to 1972. Yes I remembered most of them, but I admit I did a little googling to come up with the complete list.

1972 McGovern/Shriver
1976 Ford/Dole
1980 Carter/Mondale
1984 Mondale/Ferraro
1988 Dukakis/Bentsen
1992 Bush/Quayle
1996 Dole/Kemp
2000 Gore/Lieberman
2004 Kerry/Edwards
2008 McCain/Palin
2012 Romney/Ryan

So what did they all do when the election was over? Some go back to the Senate (McGovern, Bentsen, Lieberman, Kerry and McCain) or the House (Ryan and Ferraro). Defeated incumbents settle into the life of a retired/former POTUS or VP (Ford, Carter, G.H.W. Bush, Quayle, Gore). Some VP nominees regroup to run for the top spot (Mondale and Dole, who were nominated by their respective parties then lost in the general election; and Edwards, who dropped out of the race after a few primaries), and some just go back to whatever they had been doing before (Shriver, Kemp, Romney). Given conventional wisdom that being a governor is a better path to the White House than being a senator, I was surprised to realize that of all the unsuccessful candidates since 1972, only two, Michael Dukakis and Sarah Palin, were sitting governors. When their campaigns were over, they had to go back to their home states and resume trying to govern. In Palin's case that didn't work out so well.

Going back a few years, two candidates actually got their party's presidential nomination twice. Richard Nixon (Nixon's The One...) was the Republican nominee in 1960 and lost to JFK, ran unsuccessfully for governor of California in 1962, then reinvented himself effectively enough to be elected president in 1968. And in the fifties, Adlai Stevenson II (madly for Adlai...) was nominated by the Democrats in 1952 and 1956 and lost to Eisenhower both times.