People often talk about parties having "prospects" to run for President, and having or not having a "deep bench" for a given race; both are more or less baseball terms. In that spirit, if we view the Presidency and Presidential elections as the equivalent of the Major Leagues of American politics, then the AAA level would be top statewide elected offices: Governors and Senators. AA would be, let's say, Congressmen and lower-ranking state offices like Attorney General, and perhaps the Mayors of certain prominent cities. Single-A would be state legislators, and rookie ball, well, let's say city councils? I dunno, it's probably not important; maybe you can throw mayors of random towns in there as well. In any event, the AAA level is where a team's best prospects are located, and that's true for the Presidency as well. There have been nineteen men (hey, they've all been men) elected to the Presidency who had not previously been part of the federal executive branch, either as Vice-President, a Secretary of something, or a military general. Of those nineteen, two (Lincoln and Garfield) had only ever been a Representative, while ten were Governors and seven were Senators. So the AAA-level really is where most of the prospects come from.
Who are the big prospects at that level right now? Nate Silver's recent post about Republican governors gives us an idea. What I think you look for in a governor are for them to be popular in their home state and for that home state to be large. Of the ten Presidents whose primary credential at their election were a governorship, two each governed New York and Ohio, while the other six came from Tennessee, New Jersey, Georgia, California, Arkansas, and Texas. Of those, only Arkansas was a small state at the time in question, and Bill Clinton was so popular he was elected about six different times (and was a dark horse for the nomination to boot!). So to launch a Presidency from a Governor's Mansion, you want to be either really, really popular or the governor of a big state, and preferably both. Who meets these criteria?
Well, once again we have Andrew Cuomo at the head of the pack. Obviously, Cuomo is the governor of the third-largest state in the nation, and the largest in terms of media share. He also has a 69/18 average favorability rating, which is insanely popular. There's a reason why Cuomo is the early favorite to be President in 2017. No one else jumps out at me on the Democratic side: Steve Beshear of Kentucky is popular, but I don't see Kentucky as a good launching state for a Democratic contender; Lynch (NH), Tomblin (WV), Abercrombie (HI), Schweitzer (MT), and Kitzhaber (OR) are from reasonably strong states; Jerry Brown is ancient and only mildly popular in deep-blue California; Mark Dayton (MN) has a long history of wackiness; and I don't see Deval Patrick (MA) being very successful immediately after his known pal Barack Obama. Also, he was down in the low 20's a few months ago, and it's tough to bet on that kind of turn-around.
On the Republican side, the name that jumps out is Bob McDonnell, who sports a net +33 approval rating in deep-purple Virginia, a big, important state. He didn't impress me at his answer to Obama in early '10, but whatever, he's looking good right now. The only other current Republican governors with appreciably positive approvals are Haslam (TN) and Susana Martinez (NM), neither of which is a very big state. I've speculated about Susana Martinez, since she is a) female, b) Hispanic, and c) popular in a Democratic state, but my guess from the Clinton model is that she would need a kind of weak field and have to sneak in as a dark-horse. But the Republican bench doesn't look very deep at the AAA level, probably because they elected a whole host of new governors in big swing states (MI, NJ, IA, PA, WI, OH, FL) and they're a combined 65 points below water on their approval ratings. That ain't a good start.
Sometime soon I'll take a look at the prospects on the Senate side, though lacking such a nifty chart of approval ratings I'm not sure that it can be quite as objective.
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