Feb 19, 2017 3 min read

It was June 1964 and many Republicans were panicking.

Arizona Sen. Barry Goldwater was marching relentlessly toward the party’s presidential nomination, and, it appeared, certain defeat in that fall’s election against President Lyndon Johnson. Some political pros thought Goldwater leaned way too far to the right for the taste of the 1964 American electorate, and Johnson was still reveling in the public’s goodwill after succeeding John F. Kennedy the previous November.

The solution? Putting forward Pennsylvania Gov. William Scranton as a candidate.

Why not? Scranton was wealthy, handsome, young – he was born just weeks after Kennedy – and was impeccably moderate. For a country that missed JFK, Scranton seemed like a made-to-order Republican substitute.

It was not to be, though. Scranton entered the race, carried some state delegations at the GOP convention, but failed to stop Goldwater. When his single term as governor ended two years later, Scranton vowed he would never run for public office again and, in fact, never did.

Scranton is just one of the many coulda-been presidents that litter Pennsylvania politics. Despite being the second state admitted to the union and supplying a hefty trove of votes in the Electoral College, only one Pennsylvanian has ever become president – the hapless, scorned and deplored James Buchanan, the Democrat who served a single term from 1857 to 1861. As staff writer Barbara Miller pointed out in a story in today’s edition of the Observer-Reporter, Buchanan is now remembered as “a sort of 19th-century Nero, fiddling around, not while Rome burned, but as the United States crumbled.”

In theory, Buchanan had all the necessary qualifications to be president and then some – he had served in the Pennsylvania House of Representatives, the U.S. House of Representatives, the U.S. Senate, and had been minister to both Russia and Britain before becoming secretary of state. And yet, Buchanan’s tenure was considered a failure, and he routinely ends up at or near the bottom when historians rank the presidents. Nowadays, when most people talk about Buchanan, it’s to speculate on whether the country’s only bachelor president was gay.

Is there something about Pennsylvania politics that has led the commonwealth to produce so few presidents? After all, Ohio has given the country a handful, as has Virginia. But the reality is it’s likely less a matter of design that it is of sheer bad luck.

Sure, the political pendulum can swing and it can seem inevitable in retrospect that certain figures were bound to be in the Oval Office. Abraham Lincoln, Franklin Roosevelt and Dwight Eisenhower seem to have been touched by destiny. But what if, say, Mitt Romney had opted not to run for president in 2012? Former Sen. Rick Santorum’s unlikely campaign could have been triumphant. After all, he did finish second to Romney in the nomination battle.

What if Gov. Tom Ridge had been chosen as George W. Bush’s running mate in 2000, rather than Dick Cheney? What if Gov. Milton Shapp had gained more traction in his bid for the 1976 Democratic nomination? Heck, what if Scranton-born Joe Biden had decided to run for president last year? It’s not hard to imagine him carrying this state, along with Michigan and Wisconsin, and heading to the White House.

There’s always the possibility the next president from Pennsylvania is now a lower-level elected official, or sitting in a classroom or even a daycare center. If that’s the case, on this Presidents Day, let’s hope they have an easier time than poor old James Buchanan.