It’s hinted at in the introduction to the Raft paper, that Raft is "most notably" similar to Viewstamped Replication from Brian Oki, Barbara Liskov and James Cowling at MIT. Reason being that Raft’s primary goal was not so much to reinvent or contribute consensus, so much as to repackage consensus to be "more understandable than Paxos". Nevertheless, it’s not widely known, and probably could be emphasized a bit more, that the protocol is otherwise pretty much ‘88 Oki VSR (same essential protocol, different terms), itself predating Paxos a year.
For example, if you compare '14 Raft (Stanford) with '12 VSR (MIT’s revision to their ‘88 original), the resemblance is striking:
2012: http://pmg.csail.mit.edu/papers/vr-revisited.pdf [1]
2014: https://raft.github.io/raft.pdf
Presentation aside, the only major difference is that Raft’s view change (called leader election in the Raft paper) preserves the flavor of Oki’s ‘88 Viewstamped Replication view change, electing the candidate with the longest log, and missing out on the improved round-robin view change from MIT in ‘12, that brings better stability and availability, with lower latency, and no dueling leaders.
Raft has had a tremendous impact, compared to Paxos, in helping engineers to understand consensus. But once the training wheels are there, it’s important that we also understand and preserve the history of consensus, the people who pioneered these protocols.
[1] It's an accident of history that '12 VSR wasn't promoted as much as Raft would be, two years later. Otherwise, '12 VSR from James Cowling is arguably just as understandable, if not more. For example, because of the improved view change, the paper can begin immediately with normal replication. And there's no discussion, for example, of the need for randomized timeouts, it's elegantly designed away.