The Republican presidential candidates during last week’s debate. (Chris Carlson, AP)

At this point in the race to be chief executive of the United States government, the advantage seems to belong to candidates who have never held public office.

“Outsider-ism” certainly dominates a Republican presidential contest in which the polls are led by three novice candidates: Donald Trump, Carly Fiorina and Ben Carson, all of whom say current office-holders are failing their constituents.

“If someone’s been in a system their whole life, they don’t know how broken the system is,” Fiorina said on Fox News Sunday. “It’s not that politicians are bad people. It’s that they’ve been in that system forever.”

Rand Paul, a first-term GOP senator from Kentucky who casts himself as another anti-establishment candidate, told CBS’ Face the Nation that outsiders are doing well in the polls “because the Republicans in Washington are doing nothing to rein in spending on anything.”

The emphasis on outsiders has forced more established candidates — a collection of current and former governors, senators, and U.S. House members — to argue that their experience gives them the better shot at actually changing the way government works.

Ohio Gov. John Kasich, also a former U.S. House member, told CNN’s State of the Union that he is “fundamentally a reformer” who has always sought to shake things up.

“I’m both an inside and an outside player,” Kasich said.

Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton (David Richard, AP)

The vogue for outsiders has also been a bit of a factor in the Democratic presidential race. Some critics have decried Hillary Clinton — former first lady, New York senator, and secretary of State — as the embodiment of the political establishment, though she rejects the claim.

“I cannot imagine anyone being more of an outsider than the first woman president,” Clinton said on CBS’ Face The Nation. “I mean, really, let’s think about that.”

Running against Washington, D.C. — “the political establishment” — is nothing new.

It became a favored tactic after the traumas of the Vietnam War and the Watergate scandal gutted the presidencies of Lyndon Johnson (1963-69) and Richard Nixon (1969-74).

After Nixon’s resignation in 1974, nominees from each party — Democrat Jimmy Carter in 1976 and Republican Ronald Reagan in 1980 — won the presidency by running against Washington.

In more recent years, Barack Obama and George W. Bush captured the White House in part by running against the status quo in Washington.

Yet each of those of candidates, as well as the vast majority of presidential election winners, have had some sort of government experience. If they weren’t current or former office-holders, they were military leaders like Ulysses Grant or Dwight Eisenhower.

Some political leaders and analysts believe that, the closer voters get to the Iowa caucuses, the New Hampshire primary and more contests, the more they will look for government experience.

Sen. John Thune, R-S.D., appearing Monday on MSNBC’s Morning Joe, said GOP voters are test-driving certain candidates at this point. In the end, he said, they will look more for “a record of getting things done.”