Lose the Carpet Baggage, Wannabe Senator!

Political scientists have verified over the decades that voters favor electoral candidates with tight connections to the areas the candidates are campaigning to represent. A pair of Boise State University and George Washington University researchers says this home-area advantage amounts to about an additional 2% to 7% of the vote in U.S. Senate races where an incumbent is not running. There is still evidence of home-area advantage when an incumbent is running, but it is less than for open-seat contests.
     This happens in large part because a candidate who has lived in the area for a long time has better established place identity, mastering the principles, issues, and dialects of the locale. The researchers cite the anecdotal example of Mehmet Oz being mocked for mixing up the names of local grocery stores in his 2022 run to represent Pennsylvania in the U.S. Senate and ultimately losing to John Fetterman, who happens to have the zip code of his Pennsylvania hometown tattooed on his arm.
     The researchers show how the place attachment generates in voters relatability, trust, and reduced resistance to choosing a candidate of the opposite party. This is especially relevant because the U.S. Senate decides issues on a national level and views of those issues are often based on a voter’s strong partisan identity as either liberal or conservative. The data indicate that Democratic candidates benefit more than Republicans from what voters see as local ties, and Republican candidates are punished more than Democrats from what voters see as the carpetbagging of recent arrival or deceptive representations.
     This set of studies considered only U.S. Senate races. We might expect to see the home-area advantage in other elections, too, where the definition of area could range from neighborhood up to nation. The appeal of being local seen in selection of legislators also might generalize to a consumer’s selection of merchandise or service. “All politics is local,” attributed to Tip O’Neill, corresponds to “All retailing is local.”
     The advice for political candidates is to sidestep any indications you’re a carpetbagger—toting your suitcase in from out of town or mispronouncing the names of the neighborhood grocery stores. When voters these days praise “outsiders,” note the Boise State University and George Washington University researchers, those voters are probably referring to candidates from outside the ranks of career politicians rather than to candidates from outside the voters’ area of residence.

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