[T]he more you dig into the record, the more the underlying principle becomes clear: Résumés are a lousy way to pick a president.

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A CBS News/New York Times poll released earlier this week contains an amazing statistic: More than half of GOP voters’ first choice for their party’s presidential nomination is someone who has never held elected office before. Among them, Donald Trump, Ben Carson, and Carly Fiorina win the support of 54 percent of the Republican electorate.

The conventional wisdom is that this represents a distaste for professional politicians reaching a boiling point. There’s probably some truth to that. There’s also, however, a danger in over-reading these results. We still have four-and-a-half months before anyone anywhere casts a single ballot. It’s a cheap form of protest to tell a pollster that you’re backing an outsider. We should probably wait for the results to come in before we start inaugurating a new day in American politics.

More interesting than trying to diagnose the psychology behind this trend is thinking through its ramifications. Here’s the big question: Could a political novice be an effective president?

Any answer, of course, is going to be tentative, but let’s start with a look at the relevant history. For one thing, it is not an absolute novelty to elect someone without previous elected experience to the presidency.

As a matter of fact, we’ve done it six times. Four of those figures — George Washington, Zachary Taylor, Ulysses S. Grant and Dwight Eisenhower — were wartime military heroes. The two others — William Howard Taft and Herbert Hoover — had previously served as cabinet secretaries (Taft as Secretary of War for Theodore Roosevelt, Hoover as Secretary of Commerce for Warren Harding and Calvin Coolidge).

That list represents a fairly standard distribution of presidential aptitude. Washington, of course, is almost universally ranked as a great president, and often as the greatest. Eisenhower, under-appreciated in his own day, is increasingly recognized as a canny tactician and manager.

Grant and Taft usually fall somewhere towards the middle of presidential rankings, with Taylor (who died only a little over a year into his term) slightly lower. Hoover, of course, suffers from his association with the Great Depression, and tends to rank the lowest amongst the group (an irony given that, prior to his presidency, Hoover was considered an administrator of unrivaled brilliance.)

The upshot: a non-political background doesn’t seem to be predictive of much of anything. You can either be a legend like Washington or widely perceived as a failure, à la Hoover.

There’s one important caveat though: All six of those men had overseen complex public-sector institutions prior to ascending to the presidency. Carson, Fiorina and Trump can’t say the same. But then again, neither could Barack Obama, John F. Kennedy or Abraham Lincoln, none of whom served in executive capacities prior to moving in to the White House.

In fact, the more you dig into the record, the more the underlying principle becomes clear: Résumés are a lousy way to pick a president.  If experience was the sine qua non of effective leadership, James Buchanan should have been the greatest president in American history. He had been a state legislator, a congressman, a U.S. Senator, the Ambassador to Great Britain and Secretary of State prior to assuming office. Yet, largely because of his passivity in the run-up to the Civil War, Buchanan is now regularly ranked at or near the bottom of all American presidents.

You can take this argument from the other side too. Abraham Lincoln had nothing more than four terms in the Illinois House of Representatives and two years in the U.S. House before becoming president. You’d have been hard-pressed to find anyone who would’ve predicted that would be the background of the only man to contend with Washington for the title of greatest president ever.

Here’s the bottom line: There’s no magical formula for finding a good (let alone great) president. In general, you want to look for three traits: literacy on the issues, an ability to manage complex institutions and a penchant for good judgment. Those aren’t talents you can discover just by skimming someone’s CV. They require prolonged observation and scrutiny to detect.

So what I’m saying, dear voters, is this: You’ve still got to do your homework. There’s no shortcut for picking an effective president.