Races involving highly familiar candidates such as Hillary Clinton and Richard Gephardt also were excluded.
Advertising and news media coverage of the race has been scant, and so less familiar candidates will have a chance to improve their name recognition.
Hall of Fame voters in baseball, pro football and hockey are primarily confined to considering familiar candidates from major league baseball, the National Football League and the National Hockey League.
This election — like every presidential race since 1996 — was a foregone conclusion, since Mr. Putin's rivals were docile, familiar candidates who had already lost to him and his allies repeatedly.
In 2016 and 2017, the shock was how casually Republican-primary voters rejected familiar candidates for new figures, whose politics, until recently, had been seen as beyond the pale.
The changes would appear to benefit well-financed and already familiar candidates and diminish the prospects of those with less money and name recognition going into such a highly compressed series of contests early next year.
"It costs nothing to ask, in an annual review, what steps an individual has taken to build a culture of inclusion -- or to educate your colleagues about the difference between a 'search' and a 'sort,' " she said, referring to efforts to actively search for qualified minority and female faculty and not to simply sort through already familiar candidates.
Other voters in the party seemed increasingly interested in younger, less familiar candidates, such as Beto O'Rourke, the Democratic congressman from Texas who came surprisingly close to ousting Republican Sen. Ted Cruz.
The Republican system tends to favor the familiar, the candidate seen as next in line — Richard Nixon in 1968, Ronald Reagan in 1980, Bob Dole in 1996, Mr. McCain this year.
