There’s a TV ad slogan: “Just OK is not OK,” AT&T tells us, as its commercials portray incompetent surgeons, ethically challenged tax accountants and dangerous amusement park rides. There's good reason to think it applies to presidential races, too. What happens when a party nominates a candidate who triumphs because of familiarity, or because “it’s her turn,” or because he’s steadily ascended the party ranks despite no defining passion or cause? The track record of these “default” nominees, at least in modern political history, is bleak.

Hillary Clinton is the latest and, for the Democrats, still most painful example. The combination of her experience, her family ties and the sense that (in the words of a proposed campaign slogan) it was “her turn” drove every potentially serious rival out of the 2016 race. Bernie Sanders’ surprisingly strong primary challenge was a foreshadowing of her vulnerabilities, even if the signal was mostly dismissed until about 9 p.m. on election night in November.

Four years before Hillary Clinton was defeated, the Republicans trotted out the reliable, central-casting Mitt Romney to lose to President Barack Obama, a campaign that seemed to rhyme with the time the Dems unenthusiastically fell in line for John Kerry against President George W. Bush in 2004. Keep going back, and you see candidates like these over and over, marching under flags of pale pastel, all going down to defeat in November: Al Gore, Bob Dole, Walter Mondale, Gerald Ford, Hubert Humphrey and even Richard Nixon, in his first run, in 1960.

Not every election has a default candidate: The race between Obama and John McCain, for example, pitted a “maverick” Republican against an inspirational Democratic newcomer. But most do, and they tend to lose to rivals who can claim novelty or outsiderhood: Jimmy Carter, Bill Clinton, Ronald Reagan, Obama, Donald Trump. (During the 2016 campaign, Trump knocked his own party’s default candidate, Jeb Bush, out of the primaries.)