Do states usally vote for the president if he is from there

[Metsfanmax]

Keep in mind that candidates are more likely to come from a state that already supports their party (because they were probably a senator, governor, etc. before running), so we should only look at the cases where states that normally voted against that party decided to vote for that party because of the candidate.

This is part of what I was saying earlier.
A person doesn't become a candidate for president unless they already have power, and that power almost always comes from within their own state before they move out to the national level. The exceptions are pretty few, and cases where someone has either tried to side-step that process (Gore, coming back to Tennessee after being "just national" for so long) or where the power base was pretty spread out to begin. Nixon is perhaps an example of that. To contrast, Reagan definitely garnered a lot of fairly liberal votes from CA, as much as anything because "the devil we knew was better than the one we did not". (and I was not being facetious when I said Reagan would be called a liberal if he ran today -- though, in truth, he was too much the politician not to have "swayed" with the tide).

What about Hillary Clinton and how she changed her Home State cause she wanted to go run in New York wasn't it? Do you think that is fair? Do you think her own home state would have elected her? Do you think it's okay for people to go state shopping until they find one that will elect them?

That's not even factually correct, the Clintons had a place in New York before Bill was even out of office.

[Doc_Brown]

As several people have pointed out, the "home state advantage" doesn't automatically flip a state from one party to the other, but it is likely to shift the overall vote by some portion. To take a realistic example, Minnesota leans slightly Democratic in presidential elections. Tim Pawlenty is a potential Republican candidate for president in 2012 and is currently the governor of Minnesota. There are certainly plenty of people in Minnesota that are sticking with their party affiliations regardless of who is on the ballot, but there are likely to be some people towards the middle that could be swayed somewhat by the potential added benefit of a person with particular loyalties to their state now occupying the White House. Now, Obama won Minnesota by 10 points, though it's reasonable to argue that 2008 was a Democratic "wave year." If the political climate is substantially different in 2012, a generic Democrat might be something more like a 4-point favorite against a generic Republican. Thus, if Pawlenty was the nominee and was able to swing his home state by more than 4 points, he would end up swinging the extra 10 electoral votes towards the total of 270 needed to win the presidency. On the other hand Giuliani was a potential 2008 presidential contender from the state of New York. I don't have the exact numbers, but I think Democrats usually win New York by about 20 points or so. Even if the home state advantage accounts for a swing as large as 10 points, if Giuliani had been the nominee, he still wouldn't have won New York (even in a non wave year), even though the vote would have been a good bit closer.

One of the best electoral statisticians I've come across is Nate Silver from http://www.fivethirtyeight.com. I went digging through his site again to see if I could find exact numbers on what the swing actually is. I recall seeing him talk about it a couple times, but the first specific mention I could find in a few minutes of searching was a 7-point swing. However, that's for the president. The vice president doesn't usually offer that much of a swing.

[PLAYER57832]

What about Hillary Clinton and how she changed her Home State cause she wanted to go run in New York wasn't it? Do you think that is fair? Do you think her own home state would have elected her? Do you think it's okay for people to go state shopping until they find one that will elect them?

This is a free country. People can live wherever they like. People are also free to vote for whomever they like.

[Doc_Brown]

This is a free country. People can live wherever they like. People are also free to vote for whomever they like.

Quite true. Republicans complained about Clinton for a while, calling her a parachute candidate. Then they brought Alan Keyes up to Illinois to run for senate against Obama (they hoped that a black conservative would match up well against a black liberal).

[MeDeFe]

I think there have been 56 Presidential elections in the US so far (At least that's what Wikipedia says) and according to the list bedub linked to, a presidential candidate has lost the state where they were born 33 times and their state of residence 25 times.

Those numbers suggest there's no home bonus.

Doesn't that suggest a slight advantage in the resident state? seeing as more times than not Presidential candidates have won their resident states.

I'm not sure 3 out of 56 is a statistically significant deviation, it's 5.4% of the total, but the sample size may be too small to make any meaningful deductions.

[neanderpaul14]

I wonder what the stats are on hometowns voting for their own.