Do presidential candidates get home-state advantages in primaries?

They sure do! But it's unlikely to make a difference in 2024.

It can be tough out there for a presidential candidate. The travel, the tweets, the vitriol, the occasional indictment. No fun at all, as far as I can tell. And it's particularly tough for candidates running in party primaries, who have arguably a much tougher job than general election candidates in trying to convince voters to support them instead of their opponents.

Regardless of who the Republican nominee ends up being in 2024, they will have absolutely no trouble hammering Joe Biden policy differences, prescriptions for how to take our country in the right direction, and probably a fair number of insults about his age or his son or his dogs or something.

But for the Republicans running against each other for the nomination right now, and for all primary candidates in recent history, the differentiator of the party label isn't available to them. It's tough to gain advantages and attention for how relentlessly you’re castigating the Democrats for ruining America when all of your other opponents are doing the same exact thing. In a primary, you probably also agree with your opponents on all but 10% or so of the issues—chump change in comparison to the differences between Democrats and Republicans. In 2020, even Bernie Sanders and Joe Biden had little difficulty setting aside their differences and crafting a pretty cohesive Democratic agenda and platform for the general election.

Mr. Party Unity himself. Photo Credit: Vidar Nordli-Mathisen via Unsplash

So if you don't have your party label, your shared hatred for the other side, or meaningful policy differences, what advantages can candidates leverage as they campaign across the country over the next eight months or so? One is the same kind of advantage a football team might have over an evenly-matched opponent: playing on your home turf. Knowing the field and its nuances; not having to travel long distances to play; having the comforts of home before and after the competition—these are all nice perks of having home field advantage.

Maybe the biggest advantage, though is the fact that your home crowd enthusiastically supports you and can give you a nice boost. Many candidates for public office hope that running in or near their home area can do the same thing. For presidential primary candidates, the hope is that when the primary calendar rolls around to their home state, they'll have a built-in advantage they can give them some crucial delegates, a leg up in media coverage, and some momentum for the states to come. But does that advantage actually materialize? Has it ever? And what are the answers to these questions mean for the upcoming primaries in 2024? Let's get into it.

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What does the political science say?

Believe it or not, political science hasn’t weighed in too heavily on this subject, and certainly not recently. Some older works, including a classic 1983 article by Michael Lewis-Beck and Tom Rice, have looked mainly at whether presidential home state advantages play a role in general elections. Lewis-Beck and Rice found an average general election boost of about 4 percentage points—no small feat if we’re talking about a swing state. A more recent 2007 study from Rice and co-authors finds similar effects. Some of my own work has found evidence in the U.S. Senate for the “friends and neighbors” effect: when statewide candidates pull in higher-than-expected support in the counties where they were born, raised, and currently live, compared to others in the state.

Why might presidential candidates pull in more support in their home places? There are a few theories, and some solid evidence for many of them. For one thing, a candidate has naturally higher name recognition in their home states after having built a (hopefully positive) reputation there. Voters have gotten to know them and their record of achievement. A personal familiarity with the state and its political pressure points also helps. Political scientists like Kal Munis have also shown that shared ties in a particular place are a meaningful identity that strengthens a symbolic connection based on trust. Being an out-of-towner, on the other hand, can often make you seem out-of-touch; just ask Dr. Oz.

So how come nobody (to my knowledge) has examined home-state advantages in presidential primaries? There are actually a few good reasons:

• Presidential primaries take place in individual states on different days on the calendar, and over inconsistent intervals of time. This makes them susceptible to time effects (i.e. if a candidate faces a major scandal midway through the campaign), including the inevitability that candidates will drop out along the way, sometimes with little warning.

• Because different numbers of candidates run for each party, the results are inconsistent from one cycle to the next — for example, a candidate is obviously more likely to get a bigger share of the vote with just one major challenger (Barack Obama versus Hillary Clinton in 2008) rather than many (Donald Trump versus everyone else in 2016).

• If you study congressional elections like I do, you get about 350-400 elections to work with and analyze (and twice the number of primary elections) for one election cycle. With primaries, you get a dozen candidates if you’re lucky, and that’s every four years. Such low numbers of observations make unbiased analysis difficult, so it can be tough to draw conclusive evidence from presidential primaries.

There are also good reasons to suspect these advantages might not play out in these primaries. Yes, there are fewer other differences between the candidates, which might make it easier for a local connection to break through. On the other hand, the kinds of Americans who vote in primaries tend to be strict and loyal partisans; much more ideologically extreme; and much more likely to pay attention to national news. It’s reasonable to expect they’re making their decisions based on criteria like “who’s the most conservative on immigration?” or “who’s best equipped to beat the Democrats in November?” So on the whole, it’s not that surprising that political scientists haven’t really touched this specific question.

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Let’s go to the data anyway

Fortunately for everyone, You Are Here is not a peer-reviewed academic journal, so we get to dig into the historical data with reckless abandon to see whether candidates get these boosts in primaries. To do this, I collected election results for both parties’ presidential primaries for each election year from 1992-2020. Then, for each major candidate during these cycles¹, I compared the percentage of the vote they received in their home state (the state they either lived in at the time or represented most recently in public office) with an average they received in the other states that held primaries most recently on the calendar.² Then I subtracted the difference—the higher the number, the bigger advantage the candidate enjoyed on average in their home state. Here’s what I found:

I realize that I didn’t control for anything or come up with an advanced model, but this is pretty convincing to me. Only three major candidates in this time period (Ron Paul in 2008; Rick Santorum in 2012; and Donald Trump in 2016) did not outperform expectations in their home states, and all three ran about even. Four others had advantages less than 10%, and only one of them (George W. Bush in 2000) was a truly viable candidate. All twenty other candidates had advantages of 10% or more, with most enjoying a 20% or higher advantage. To me, these advantages don’t show consistent patterns: that is, it appears to work for both Democrats and Republicans; frontrunners and also-rans; across various states and regions of the country; and most interestingly, it’s pretty stable over time.

So, can we estimate what the “average” advantage is for a home-state candidate if we’re trying to predict outcomes? I actually think the 2008 Democratic primary between Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton is probably the most reliable and instructive case study, for a few reasons:

• The two primaries in question (Illinois and New York, Obama’s and Clinton’s home states respectively) were held on the same day (February 5th, 2008) so Obama and Clinton enjoyed the same national reputations and news cycles as they did in other Super Tuesday states.

• Because they took place on Super Tuesday, they can be directly compared to a large average from a wide variety of other states.

• Because it was still early in the campaign, Obama and Clinton were on relatively even ground at the time, and either could feasibly have won the primary going forward.

• At this point, it was a clear one-on-one race, making the sizes of their shares of the vote comparable and easy to understand.

Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama making nice and leaning heavily on the symbolism. Unity, NH, June 27, 2008. Photo by the author.

In this case, Obama and Clinton enjoyed advantages in their home states of 16% and 10%, respectively. This is in the ballpark of the average for all the candidates in the table above, which was about 19%.

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What does this all mean for 2024?

This is all very interesting (to me, anyway). But are these findings closer to practical, game-changing primary influences; or fun but ultimately pointless trivia? The answer is probably in the middle, and it can help us understand the likelihood that home-state advantages will matter for the Republicans in 2024. To start, not all home-state advantages are created equal. Whether the advantage actually has an impact on who ends up as the nominee depends largely on when the home state contest is on the calendar.

Take, for example, darkhorse candidates Nikki Haley and Tim Scott, both of whom have close ties to South Carolina (Haley was the governor of the state before serving as UN Ambassador; Scott is the state’s current junior U.S. Senator). Haley and Scott both continue to be longshots for the nomination; however, South Carolina is early enough in the primary calendar (February 24th) that either could feasibly benefit enough from a boost in their home states to keep their heads above water in the race (or at least justify staying in until South Carolina). What’s less certain is how much benefit there will be for either if both homegrown South Carolinians are still in the race. At this time, it looks like Haley is definitely enjoying a home-state polling bump there (but of course is still miles behind Donald Trump).

Compare that with the party’s two most prominent Trump-skeptical candidates, former Vice President (and, before that, Indiana Governor) Mike Pence and former New Jersey Governor Chris Christie. Both are even longer-shots than Haley and Scott, but also have much less home turf to count on, with the Indiana and New Jersey contests not taking place until late in the calendar.

A final state that deserves special mention here is Florida, whose primary takes place on a crowded day of contests in mid-March. Ron DeSantis, as the state’s governor, is obviously hoping A) that Floridians reward him with a voting advantage, and B) to be in the race long enough for that advantage to matter. His problem is that over the last 8 years, Donald Trump has pretty clearly transitioned his permanent residence from New York—a place with which his name was synonymous for decades—to Florida, the home of his (in)famous Mar-a-Lago resort, and the scene of Trump’s alleged classified document-hoarding crime being prosecuted by the Department of Justice.

Ron DeSantis making a very serious point that ultimately won’t matter at all (sorry). Photo Credit: Matt Johnson

And so, DeSantis is hoping to avoid what I call the “Marco Rubio Problem.” Rubio (Florida’s senior U.S. Senator) got a pretty sizable (+22%) boost from his home state when he ran for President in 2016. But he had already underperformed so significantly in the previous contests—especially compared to Trump—that Rubio’s home-state surge came across as more of a sputter, the last gasp of a campaign that overpromised and underdelivered (Trump actually beat Rubio in Florida). Similar concerns are already simmering about DeSantis months before voting even begins, despite his second-place showing in the polls.

The caveat for all of these possible home-state advantages is that, if the polls stay the way they are, the primary will be all but decided by the time any of these advantages could make a difference. Donald Trump remains the frontrunner by a long shot, and no amount of local heroism can counteract that reality. He’s also far more popular—and more widely known—among Republican voters than any other candidate, even in those other candidates’ home states.

Even so, another related lesson we can probably take away was put best by the Washington Post’s Phillip Bump back in 2020: if you don’t win your home state, you’re probably not going to be the nominee. Winning your home state, therefore, might be what political scientists might call a “necessary, but not sufficient” condition of winning the nomination; not because any one state matters dispositively, but rather because a loss in your home state is pretty certainly a sign that your campaign is almost over, if it isn’t already.

1. In this case, “major candidate” means a candidate that either 1) was a frontrunner or strong second or third at some point during the voting, and/or 2) was still in the race at the time of their home-state primary. I probably over-included here (i.e. John Edwards in 2004 had dropped out well before the NC primary, but was the eventual Vice Presidential nominee), but I did not exclude any outliers.

2. In most cases, these were collections of primaries that were held on the same day; this is the gold standard. When this wasn’t available (i.e. the primary didn’t share a date with any other state on the calendar), I used the candidate’s average in the half dozen or so primaries leading up to their home state’s, as long as they took place within a couple weeks.