Last week, when rumors hit that the Washington Nationals are considering adding a new contestant to their famous fourth-inning Presidents’ Races, we decided to offer an assist by polling our readership on which U.S. president should join the likes of Washington, Jefferson, Lincoln and Theodore Roosevelt next year.
We threw the vote open to all presidents past and present and bracketed the 40 non-Mount Rushmore executives—Grover Cleveland gets two nods—into preliminary rounds of 10. For good measure, we also threw in a division of fictional presidents. After all, some people will always vote for Kang.
After four days of voting, we have our finalists. And, as he did on Friday afternoon, Richard Nixon led the pack, with 436 votes, for a 38 percent plurality of his bracket. John F. Kennedy was the only other president to eke past 400 votes, finishing with 404, or about 30 percent of his group.
But aside from the villainous 37th president, most voters preferred the presidents who are most revered in U.S. history. Other top vote-getters included Franklin D. Roosevelt, Dwight D. Eisenhower, John Adams, John Quincy Adams, Andrew Jackson and Ronald Reagan. Among the living presidents, Bill Clinton and Barack Obama came closest to getting to the final round, but were still outpolled by their predecessors. George H.W. Bush, who captained the Yale University in two College World Series, finished with a paltry 50 votes. His son garnered only 33.
James Buchanan, the 15th president and the man whose haphazard efforts to maintain warm relations between Northern and Southern states only helped exacerbate the Civil War, finished dead last among real-life presidents, with just 13 votes. John Tyler, William Henry Harrison and Warren Harding also failed to clear 30 ballots. Grover Cleveland was more popular in his first term than he was in his second.
As for the the fictional presidents, that contest also belonged to Tricky Dick, who in preserved-head form (as he appears in Futurama) took a 28 percent plurality of the fake-president vote. Villainous executives led the pack, with Kang and Lex Luthor coming in second and third place, respectively.
Fans of the modern version of Battlestar Galactica made a solid case for Laura Roslin, but the schoolteacher-turned-sometimes-despot didn’t make the final cut.
Charles Lindbergh, as he was depicted in Philip Roth’s The Plot Against America, came in fifth, besting ass-kicking Oval Office-dwellers like Independence Day‘s Thomas J. Whitmore (Bill Pullman) and Air Force One’s James Marshall (Harrison Ford).
But Merkin Muffley, the bumbling chief executive from Stanley Kubrick’s Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb came in next-to-last, getting only 13 votes. For shame. The only one Muffley beat? Tom Beck, Morgan Freeman’s president who reassured a world threatened by a comet in Deep Impact.
Now comes the final round, made up of the top two finishers from each of last week’s brackets. We’ll announce the winner on Wednesday morning, before the Nationals’ last game of the season, in which Theodore Roosevelt is rumored to get that long-awaited first win:
