Joshua Spivak: “Since 1940, every Democratic vice presidential nominee except two very notable exceptions has been a sitting U.S. Senator. From Harry Truman to Joe Biden, 13 of the last 15 choices have been taken directly from the Senate. Those two exceptions both stand out — U.S. Rep. Geraldine Ferraro in 1984 – who was taken from the House — and Sargent Shriver in 1972. The selection of Shriver deserves a huge asterisk itself. Shriver was George McGovern’s second, desperate choice after Senator Thomas Eagleton was picked and then forced to decline the nomination due to revelations about his having received electro-shock therapy treatments. The 1972 and 1984 elections were also noteworthy for a separate reason – those elections represent the two largest Democratic defeats in history.”

“Even before 1940, Democrats followed a very predictable pattern of selection, staying with House, Senate or cabinet members in Washington for their picks. The party has not chosen a sitting governor as a VP candidate since the 103rd ballot fiasco of 1924 — Nebraska’s Charles Bryan was tapped that year.”

Washington Post: “We looked up every convention in which no one had a majority on the first vote since 1872. And in the majority of those, the person who had the most votes on the first ballot did not end up as the party’s nominee.”

For members: The Most Memorable Contested Conventions

John Boehner: “Twenty years ago, while serving as chairman of the U.S. House Republican Conference, I tried to persuade Scalia to become Senator Bob Dole’s running mate on the 1996 GOP presidential ticket. And out of a sense of duty, he listened.”

David Greenberg: “We gripe about the suffocating presence of ‘spin’: the policies tested by pollsters and focus groups, the slogans and laugh lines penned by speechwriters, the staged photo ops and town-hall meetings… But the spin that we find so pervasive today is nothing new. It actually goes back more than a century. In fact, all those revered past presidents were pioneers in honing the modern methods of image-making and message-craft that we now so often denounce.”

“Since Theodore Roosevelt’s day, when candidates began campaigning for votes and presidents started regularly courting the public, politicians have been refining the tools and techniques of what we now call spin. Spin turns out to be woven into the fabric of American politics, and though it is hardly an unmixed good, it is inseparable from many of the signature achievements of our greatest leaders.”

Larry Sabato’s Crystal Ball presents 48 maps electoral maps from 1824 to 2012.

“Throughout American history, electoral coalitions have been born with fanfare. Then they age and die just like their founders, replaced by some other temporary alignment. Some majorities are flash-in-the-pan but others, like the New Deal coalition, survive for decades, deteriorating only gradually. It will be interesting to see whether the newest in the long line, the Obama majority, continues, dies, or goes into hibernation next year.”

New York Times: “Now, the largest statistical study of its kind, examining elections held in 17 countries from 1722 to 2015, has found that elected heads of government lived 2.7 fewer years and experienced a 23 percent greater risk of premature death than the defeated office seekers.”

“The analysis tested the hypothesis that elected presidents, prime ministers and chancellors experience accelerated aging and premature death because of the stresses of political life. The authors compared 279 elected heads of government with the 261 runners-up whom they defeated and who never served as heads of state. The researchers determined the number of years each competitor lived after the last election in which they ran, and compared the findings with the average life span for an individual of the same age and sex in each candidate’s country during the election year.”