Do vice presidential candidates help a ticket win their home state? Not really. A new book by two political scientists — “The VP Advantage: How running mates influence home state voting in presidential elections” — finds that these effects are “conditional and rare” and uses American National Election Studies data to demonstrate that even famously strategic picks, such as John F. Kennedy’s selection of Lyndon Johnson in 1960, did little to influence election performance. This is all consistent with previous research,2 which points to an unsurprising conclusion: Presidential elections are about presidents, not vice-presidents, and that goes even for residents of the running mate’s home state. Beware stories claiming a vice-presidential nominee will put his or her home state in play. [...]
All but two Democratic candidates picked running mates who moved the ticket to the center. In 1988, for example, Michael Dukakis picked a running mate who was well to the right of his own positions, Lloyd Bentsen. These scores also suggest that Biden was much closer to the center than Obama. For Republicans, the opposite is true: Most vice-presidential candidates have been more conservative than the presidential candidate. [...]
There’s often a big gap between what we think matters and what factors seem to influence candidates’ choices, and how voters react to them. The research isn’t always consistent, but a few patterns are clear: Experience matters. Female running mates garner media attention, but not all of it is positive. Home-state advantage may exist, but only in certain cases and even then at the margins. And ideological balancing, along with other forms of ticket balancing, is a much smaller part of the modern VP selection process than many media accounts would suggest.
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