President Boehner? Statistically unlikely.

Note: This blog post originally ran in 2008 on a different blog.

There are several different paths to the White House, but I was trying to determine which ones were the best and which were the worst.

 So I ran the numbers based on history to find out which jobs best position you to win the presidency. In general I shied away from "uncountable" items such as "war hero" or "nominated for President." [Which nominations do you count and which do you not?] I tried to pick from categories that had a small group to start with. Some of the results are a little surprising. And yes, I recognize that these are small sample sizes that give weird results, but that's part of the fun.

The premise is that first you must do the item in column A. If you do that, then column B shows you what your chances are of becoming president.

Some people were president, then did the item in column one (like come in 2nd in the Electoral College) but then never became president again. So they would count in column C but not column D.

Hopefully this all makes sense. Al Gore, by the way, has done 4 of the top 5.

If true, Marvin Bush has a statistically better chance of being President than Nancy Pelosi does. 

This is all as of late October 2008.