Presidential Versus Vice Presidential Home State Advantage: A Comparative Analysis of Electoral Significance, Causes, and Processes, 1884‐2008

The perception of a home state advantage in presidential elections has been evident throughout American political history. Most presidential nominees have come from populous states with the potential to deliver many electoral votes (Adkison 1982). (1) Likewise, party leaders and presidential nominees have tended to select vice presidential running mates from large states (Sigelman and Wahlbeck 1997), although seemingly less so in recent decades (Hiller and Kriner 2008; see also Baumgarmer 2008). Today, the prospect of a home state advantage influences popular discussion of vice presidential selection and even presidential campaign strategy (see Devine and Kopko 2011). The perception of a home state advantage was not subjected to systematic empirical analysis, however, until the 1970s and 1980s, when political scientists began studying its strength and causes. The home state advantage literature today boasts many theoretical, methodological, and empirical advances. Yet it also has important limitations that we seek to address in this article. First, most studies of the home state advantage analyze presidential or vice presidential candidacies, but not both. (2) In this article, we provide the most comprehensive comparison of presidential and vice presidential home state advantage to date. We analyze and compare the strength and causes of presidential versus vice presidential home state advantage, using identical empirical measures and methodologies that are consistent with the leading works in that literature. Most fundamentally, we attempt to document and explain the differential strength of presidential and vice presidential home state advantages. Based upon the discrepant power of their offices and recent studies of interaction effects on the vice presidential home state advantage, we expect vice presidential advantages to be rather small and highly conditional, in contrast to relatively large and universal presidential advantages. If this is so, our analysis will help to guide expectations for whether and when to expect substantial presidential and/or vice presidential home state advantages. Also, this analysis will contribute to scholars' understanding of voting behavior in presidential elections, particularly in terms of the weight given to presidential versus vice presidential characteristics. Second, previous studies of home state advantage have not explored the process by which a home state advantage occurs. In this article, we seek to identify patterns in state voting behavior that could help to explain the occurrence and size of a home state advantage. Vote choice, after all, is the product of numerous influences, most notably party identification and candidate attributes (Campbell et al. 1960; Lewis-Beck et al. 2008). Given the abundance of alternative motivations, the decision to vote on a home state basis is actually quite remarkable and surely limited to a relatively small subset of the state electorate. Previous studies of the home state advantage, however, offer little insight into the characteristics or behavioral patterns of those individuals who provide a home state advantage. Home state advantage could be attributable to various aggregate behavioral patterns. We propose the following explanations: disproportionate partisan conversion among the previously existing state electorate, disproportionate partisan mobilization of previous nonvoters, or a combination thereof. (3) This conceptualization closely mirrors a major debate in the partisan realignment literature about whether critical elections and subsequent realignments are best explained by conversion among existing voters or mobilization among previous nonvoters. We draw upon this literature to interpret the process by which home state advantages occur. Our analysis of that process begins by measuring the effect of home state candidacy on home state turnout. After analyzing presidential versus vice presidential home state turnout advantage, we incorporate a turnout variable into empirical models predicting the size of home state electoral advantages. …