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Bit of a vague and open-ended question I know, but...

I'm currently reading Decades of Darkness properly again and it struck me that an awful lot of timelines draw from the same fairly small pool of presidents as OTL. I.e. if there's an allohistorical president between the foundation of the USA and about 1860, it's either the losing candidate from an OTL presidential election, or perhaps the vice-president of an OTL president who never got to be president in OTL. You don't seem to see many people who were just Congressmen or Senators in OTL deciding to run for the presidency and win, or people who in OTL became supreme court justices for example.

Basically I just wanted to ask people whether you think this tendency is just because people don't want to do the research/prefer using more recognisable figures, or whether the early USA really did only have a small pool of people who could realistically have become president - say because they belonged to big rich political families or had access to political machines and so on.
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