WASHINGTON – Rep. Tom Cole, R-Okla., a former history professor, said he thinks historians will look back on this election and wonder the same thing that has puzzled him: How’d we end up with these two?

The campaign between Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump has been remarkable on many levels – from the debate over hand sizes, mentions of menstruation, braggadocio about sexual assault, hacked emails and, certainly, the nomination of the first woman for president by a major party.

But to many who study the past, what’s historic is the dissatisfaction among voters over their choices. Many of the nation’s most noted historians say Trump’s lack of credentials usually seen as prerequisites for a president — while a selling point for his supporters — is unprecedented.

“We’ve never had a major party candidate who doesn’t have a lot of knowledge about how government works and doesn’t seem to care,” said Margaret O’Mara, a former policy aide to President Bill Clinton and now an associate history professor at the University of Washington.

Some of the nation’s most well-known historians, including documentary film maker Ken Burns, were so distressed by Trump’s candidacy, they created a Facebook page in July, Historians on Donald Trump. They’ve posted videos criticizing his candidacy.

“How in the world can it be that the Republican Party, the party of Abraham Lincoln, is on the verge of nominating the likes of Donald Trump for president of the United States?” David McCullough asks during his video.

McCullough, who won Pulitzer Prizes for his biographies of Presidents Harry Truman and John Adams, told the New York Times he grew up a Republican and stays neutral in elections but felt compelled to speak out about Trump.

Cole is backing Trump, though, like many voters this year, less from admiration than a distaste of the alternative.

Trump has been “rhetorically reckless” and “makes half-cocked proposals,” he said.

“He’s been very much shoot-from-the-hip. His rhetorical excesses are divisive, and not what you want to hear from someone you want to trust with responsibility,” said Cole, a seven-term congressman who taught at the University of Oklahoma and Oklahoma Baptist University.

Like other historians, Cole notes that Trump is unusual in never having served in public office before being nominated for president.

You have to go back to Wendell Willkie, an electric utilities attorney who ran and lost as the Republican nominee in 1940, to find another one, Cole said in an interview this week.

Those who’ve not held public office but became president, including Dwight D. Eisenhower and Ulysses Grant, had been generals.

“They’d won wars,” Cole said.

Certainly, Trump’s supporters view his lack of political experience as a positive.

Even so, a Pew Research Center poll this summer found only 40 percent of Republicans were happy with him as their nominee.

Cole said Clinton does not have the trust of Americans, either. The Pew poll found that only 43 percent of Democrats were happy with her selection.

It’s the first time in 20 years — since the 2000 election between George Bush and Al Gore — where the majority of voters in both parties were dissatisfied with their nominee after the summer conventions.

The country has faced other times of crisis and division, but those produced the likes of Abraham Lincoln and Ronald Reagan, Cole said. This time it’s Clinton or Trump.

“First thing (historians) will wonder,” he said, “is how did a country that selected Washington, Adams, Jefferson and Monroe, in succession, end up with just these two choices?”

Trump, in particular, falls short for many who’ve studied the 44 presidents who came before this election.

“There are no parallels between Donald Trump and Ronald Reagan,” said Craig Shirley, a Reagan biographer and former campaign staffer, on his video on the Historians on Donald Trump Facebook page.

Reagan never would have said “Let me be your voice,” as Trump did in his Republican National Convention acceptance speech.

“That’s an inverted look at American conservatism,” he said, which believes in “less power for the state and more power for the individual.”

Reagan was “a gentle and thoughtful man,” Shirley continued. “The idea of him using vulgarities in describing his political opponents (would have been) something completely and utterly foreign to Ronald Reagan.”

While Trump is accused of dividing the country, Lincoln historian Harold Holzer, in his video, said the 16th president was one to “bind up the nation’s wounds, not rub salt in them.”

Foreign-born Americans “have every right to live and thrive in United States as if they were the ‘blood of the blood, and the flesh of the flesh, of the men who wrote the Declaration of Independence,’ and so they are,” he said, quoting Lincoln.

Bruce Schulman, a history professor at Boston University, noted in an interview how much times have changed since Eisenhower’s 1952 campaign, when some questioned his lack of political experience.

“We seem to live in another world from the one in which Americans seriously questioned Ike’s qualifications because he lacked experience in civilian public office,” he said.

Vicki Lynn Ruiz, a distinguished professor of history at the University of California, Irvine, said, “This politics of fear propels us backwards.”

Congress, in the midst of anti-immigrant fervor in the 1920s, passed restrictions on European and Asian immigrants.

Between 1931 and 1935, one-third of Mexicans — 60 percent of them citizens born in the United States — were deported or convinced to go to Mexico by “duplicitous” social workers who exaggerated the economic opportunities in Mexico, Ruiz said.

Cole cautioned that historians should “be careful not to let their ideological views color their historical judgement.”

A member of the Chickasaw Nation, he has no love for President Andrew Jackson, who forced the relocation of the tribe from their native Mississippi.

Yet many historians judge Jackson to be among the nation’s greatest president, he said.

So, too, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, who ordered the imprisonment of more than 100,000 Japanese American citizens in internment camps during World War II.

This election has brought out feelings of being left out economically by people on the left and right, O’Mara said, and the next president may be judged by how they deal with it.

Whatever the outcome, the election could bring soul-searching and changes by both parties,” Cole said.

“If Democrats win the election, Republicans will be asking, ‘How could we lose to Clinton?’ Democrats will be asking the same thing: ‘How could we lose to that guy?’”

Kery Murakami is the Washington, D.C. reporter for CNHI’s newspapers and websites. Contact him at kmurakami@cnhi.com.