Neither of the current major party candidates is the "Grey Champion".

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I don't think it works quite as well in the pre-New Deal era; actually, the model works a bit better in the Jacksonian era - Jackson as Prophet, van Buren as Bureaucrat, Harrison/Tyler as Interregnum, Polk as Disaster, Taylor/Filmore as Transitional and Pierce/Buchanan as Transitional II - though of course it's still far from a perfect fit, and Polk is only a "Disaster" in hindsight, in that his expansionism opened the door to increased sectionalism in the 1850s. The Gilded Age is harder to score along these lines, so who knows? Maybe it's an empty pattern. Or maybe not.