Falling Into The Grand Canyon?

One strange phenomenon in this year's presidential election is the relatively slim margin by which John McCain leads in the polls in his home state of Arizona. Real Clear Politics lists polls showing McCain ahead by a bit more than the margin of error, but still only in single digits. And this report in Politico mentions a poll with only a four-point McCain lead.

Not that it would be unprecedented for a presidential candidate to fail to carry his home state.

The last such case was in 2000, when George W. Bush beat Al Gore in Tennessee.

In 1972, South Dakota Sen. George McGovern, the Democratic presidential nominee, lost his home state (as well as 48 others) to President Richard Nixon. But McGovern, who lost in a crushing landslide, had a higher percentage of the vote in South Dakota (45.5%), which has generally voted Republican in presidential elections, than his dismal 37.5% of the nationwide popular vote.

In 1968, Nixon was, I believe, the only winning candidate ever to fail to carry his home state. But, in that decade in which the asterisk was so controversial in baseball, an asterisk needs to be added to that observation about Nixon. Although he was a New York resident in 1968, and he lost that state to Hubert Humphrey, he was really more a Californian than a New Yorker. Nixon moved to New York after his 1962 defeat for governor of California, and was a partner in a law firm there, until he became president in 1969. But all of his congressional and gubernatorial campaigns were in California, and he re-established his official residence in California shortly after the 1968 election. He did, however, subsequently return to the New York area, spending his last years in North Jersey.

The only previous major-party presidential nominee from Arizona, Barry Goldwater, carried very few states in his campaign against Lyndon Johnson, in 1964. However, he did win the electoral votes of Arizona, but just barely. But that was only worth five electoral votes to Goldwater. Due to subsequent growth, Arizona now has 10 electoral votes.

Adlai Stevenson, who was badly beaten by Dwight Eisenhower in 1952, did not let that discourage him. He came back for more in 1956. He lost Illinois, the state of which he had been governor, to Eisenhower, by large margins in both 1952 and 1956. It appears that that will not happen to another Illinoisan, the current Democratic nominee.

One last trip down memory lane (no, I'm not actually old enough to remember this): in 1944, one of the candidates had to lose his home state, because they were both New Yorkers, a former governor, President Franklin Roosevelt, and the incumbent Governor Thomas Dewey. Roosevelt defeated Dewey, both in New York, and nationwide.