Localism and Regionalism in Presidential Elections: Is There a Home State or Regional Advantage?

Abstract

NE major tenet of folk wisdom in American national politics suggests the importance of geographic considerations in the determination of presidential nominations and final election outcomes. According to the conventional wisdom, presidential and vice-presidential nominees of the two major political parties must be selected with great attention paid to potential home state and regional advantages that might be brought to the party presidential ticket. Such a view places great emphasis on the ability of presidential and vice-presidential candidates to capture their states for the party ticket, as well as to increase the probability that states within each candidate's home region will give their electoral votes to the ticket in November. Of course, this assumes that aggregate electoral outcomes at the state level are affected positively by home state and regional considerations in other words, that having a presidential or vice-presidential candidate from a given state or region on the party ticket increases the likelihood that the ticket will carry the advantaged states in the presidential election. Further, at the individual level this view assumes that home state and/or regional attachments enter into the decisional calculus of at least some voters, with the result being shifts in aggregate behavior away from what would be expected in the absence of such advantages. Is the conventional wisdom about geographic advantages supported empirically? At the very simple level of winning and losing, home state and regional advantages do not appear to be significant. For instance, Lewis-Beck and Rice (1983) note that, of the 42 cases from 1884 to 1980, only 23 (about 55 percent) presidential candidates were able to carry a plurality of the vote in their home states. During the same period, only 29 of 48 (approximately 60 percent) vice-presidential candidates were able to deliver their states to their presidential party ticket. Rosenstone (1983) demonstrates that in more recent years (i.e., 1948 to 1972), 11 of 14 of the major party presidential candidates were able to carry their