Think what the USA had to do to get an Eisenhower!
Eisenhower had for his opponent in the general election (both 1952 and 1956) Adlai Stevenson II, who refused some of the help offered in Chicago and Kansas City. Eisenhower took 39 states, including California, New York, Illinois (Stevenson’s home state), Massachusetts, while Stevenson only nine smaller Southern states, that had voted for at most one Republican since 1856.
Stevenson famously said “Newspaper editors are men who separate the wheat from the chaff, and then print the chaff.”