The President Pool
To run for president (in the US), you usually have to be a senator or a governor, which means coming from a state where your party is electable. This means ~half the politicians in the country[^1] are unlikely to become president simply because their state is not realistically going to elevate them to the necessary stepping stone, through no real fault of their own.
You could argue that this isn't actually true, for a number of reasons:
- A sufficiently ambitious and talented politician could shift their state's political allegiance.
- A sufficiently ambitious and talented politician can sometimes leapfrog from the local to the federal level, e.g. by going from a city mayor to a cabinet secretary.
- A sufficiently strategic politician can move states / choose which of several plausible states they will run office in.
- A sufficiently strategic and apolitical politician can choose which party to join based on which gives them a better chance at the presidency.
On the other hand, you might expect the best national candidates to be blue politicians in red states or vice-versa: obviously these candidates are unusually well-placed to understand their political rivals and speak across the aisle, etc. "Swing State Governor" is a sought-after presidential archetype for basically this reason, but in some ways a state-defying politician would be even better.
I'm not sure it's a coincidence that the most transformative figure in modern American politics is a red politician from a deep blue state, who got into office by bypassing the traditional senator/governor route.
Finally, I think it's worth noting that I might be committing a common fallacy here. Basically: "leapfrog from mayor to cabinet" or "shift your entire state's politics to the right/left" are incredibly hard to do, but so is becoming president. Maybe politicians from states that disagree with them are deeply disadvantaged in the presidential race, but maybe that doesn't matter: in order to win the presidential race, you should also be the kind of person who could have massively outperformed in an unfavorable state political environment.
I'm not sure this is true – sometimes even a generational talent needs stepping-stone experiences to unlock their full potential – but I do think it's an interesting fallacy that people often fall into.
I have deliberately kept this post free of specific names, would appreciate if you do the same in comments.
[^1]: it's complicated: more than half the states are in play for any given politician (your party's states + swing states), but some of the largest states are safe for one party or another, I don't know exactly how it shakes out.