|
By Ronald A. Faucheux
Every leap year around this time, we play the vice-presidential selection game. And every time, there's an assumption that a running mate's ability to carry his or her home state could make a difference.
Unlike so many assumptions, this one is based in fact. Yet in recent campaigns, home state advantage hasn't been the most important factor in putting together a presidential ticket. George W. Bush and his campaign wizards weren't thinking about Wyoming and its three electoral votes when they picked Dick Cheney. Al Gore wasn't merely coveting Connecticut's eight (now seven) electoral votes when he chose Sen. Joseph Lieberman.
But with the results of the 2000 election still fresh in the Democratic Party's memory banks, it's politically understandable why John Kerry might have electoral votes on his mind. If the 2004 campaign turns out to be a close approximation of Bush-Gore, having a vice presidential nominee from a crucial swing state might be too enticing to pass up. Here's why:
Since Franklin D. Roosevelt's election in 1932, most winning tickets have carried the home states of their vice-presidential nominees. In fact, only two of the 18 did not. (They were the Roosevelt-Henry Wallace ticket in 1940, which failed to carry Iowa by 4 percentage points, and the Richard Nixon-Spiro Agnew ticket of 1968, which lost Maryland by two points.) On the other side of the coin, only seven of the 18 losing presidential candidates carried their running mate's home states.
But these overall statistics don't answer the most important question: Can a vice-presidential selection help the Democrats win states that they lost in 2000?
For example, could Sen. John Edwards take North Carolina back from the GOP? Could either Sen. Bob Graham or Sen. Bill Nelson nab Florida? Is it possible for Sen. Evan Bayh to bag Indiana, for Gov. Tom Vilsack to tip Iowa or for Rep. Dick Gephardt to reel in Missouri? Could Gov. Ed Rendell hold Pennsylvania?
Let's look at the history books. If you discount the landslide presidential wins during this period (1932, 1936, 1952, 1956, 1964, 1972 and 1984) on the premise that any one state doesn't matter much in a lopsided national triumph, we find that there were -- arguably -- six instances, out of a total of 22 elections, when a vice-presidential pick may have successfully flipped a state:
In 1944, Roosevelt and the Democrats carried veep candidate Sen. Harry Truman's Missouri by 3 percentage points in an election that Roosevelt won by a heftier 7.5-point margin nationwide. Without Truman on the ticket, it's possible that FDR would have lost the Show Me State. Considering that Roosevelt carried Missouri by a margin of 5 percentage points four years earlier without Truman, one may conclude that Truman's role was possibly decisive in holding onto Missouri. Or one might conclude that Truman was of minimal help in picking up additional votes -- if indeed he was responsible for any at all.
Also in 1944, Republican presidential candidate Thomas E. Dewey carried the home state of his vice presidential nominee, Gov. John W. Bricker of Ohio, by less than 1 percent of the vote. It was a state that had gone Democratic four years before and one that was likely pulled to the GOP's side by Bricker's addition to the ticket.
John F. Kennedy won Texas, the home of Sen. Lyndon B. Johnson, by only 2 percentage points in 1960. Had LBJ not been on the Democratic ticket, it's probable the Republicans would have won Texas -- as they had in 1956 by 11 points and in 1952 by 7 points. Had Kennedy lost Texas, he would still have won the presidency. But if he had failed to win both Texas and Illinois -- another state he barely carried -- he would have lost the whole ball game.
Democrat Hubert H. Humphrey's choice of Sen. Edmund S. Muskie of Maine in 1968 clearly made the difference in that state. GOP nominee Nixon carried Maine by 14 points in 1960, but lost it by 12 points with
|
|
