There can be only one victor in the United States’ presidential election. Here’s what the prominent runner-up from the last several elections did after coming oh-so-close to becoming Commander-in-Chief.

Adlai Stevenson (1952 and 1956)

After losing to World War II general and Republican nominee Dwight D. Eisenhower in the 1952 election, Adlai Stevenson II finished out his term as the governor of Illinois, and then embarked on a world tour as a travelogue writer at-large for Look, which published his journals. Then he hit the road to advocate for Democrats in the 1954 midterm elections before securing his party’s nomination for president once more in 1956. Again, Stevenson lost to Eisenhower and then went into private practice as a lawyer in Washington and Chicago and served as counsel to the Encyclopedia Britannica. 

Barry Goldwater (1964)

Credited with starting up the modern conservative Republican movement that ultimately resulted in the election of Ronald Reagan in 1980, Arizona senator Barry Goldwater lost in a landslide in 1964 to incumbent president and assassinated John F. Kennedy successor Lyndon Johnson. In 1968, Goldwater reclaimed a U.S. Senate seat from retiring democrat Carl Hayden. And there Goldwater remained until he retired in 1987, acting as a power broker and philosophically high-ranking member of the party. He successfully convinced President Richard Nixon to resign during the Watergate scandal, and he later sued President Jimmy Carter for violating international treaties when he tried to establish diplomatic relations with China. 

John B. Anderson (1980)

Ronald Reagan handily defeated incumbent president Jimmy Carter in 1980. The latter went on to become a highly visible humanitarian (leading up Habitat for Humanity), diplomat, and prolific author. There was a relatively strong third-party candidate in that election: Republican congress member John B. Anderson ran as an independent moderate to counter the conservative Reagan and received 7% of the vote. Following the election, Anderson entered the academic sector as a professor and became a leading advocate of electoral reform measures. He created the nonprofit organization Citizens for Proportional Representation. Now known as FairVote, it adopted Anderson’s ideas about instant-runoff voting practices.

H. Ross Perot (1992 and 1996)

After becoming a billionaire through his information technology companies H. Ross Perot mounted an unaffiliated presidential campaign in 1992 and accepted the nomination of the Reform Party in 1996. Running almost entirely on a platform of broad econcomic reform, Perot captured 19% of the vote in 1992, and 8% in 1996. As the de acto head of the Reform Party thereafter, Perot refused to engage in the 2000 presidential election over ideological disputes with fellow higher-ups and endorsed Republican nominee George W. Bush. Perot stayed quiet for most of the 2000s, emerging in 2005 to publicly and in front of the Texas Legislature, become among the first public figures to lobby for school-funded laptops and to distribute textbooks in the then-nascent e-book format. He launched a political blog in 2008 where he wrote prolifically until his death in 2019.