Why have so few American presidents been from the West?
WHEN KAMALA HARRIS secures the Democratic nomination for president it will mark a number of firsts. She will be the first black woman, and the first Asian-American, to be a major party’s nominee for president. But she will also achieve a lesser-known first. Ms Harris will be the first presidential nominee in the Democratic Party’s nearly 200-year history to hail from a western state.
The West has been underrepresented among major parties’ candidates (see chart 1). Just 9% of presidential and vice-presidential nominees since the Democratic and Republican parties were formed in the 19th century have been westerners. (Barack Obama is considered to be from Illinois, where he was a senator, rather than Hawaii, where he was born.) The Northeast has been home to more nominees than any other, at 35% of the total, but just barely. The Midwest and the South both put up a respectable showing. The only presidents from the West—Herbert Hoover, Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan—were Californian Republicans.
Why this woeful showing? America’s changing demography, and the evolution of the two main political parties, help explain the West’s crummy record.
The West’s absence from early presidential contests is easily explained: in 1828, when the Democratic Party was formed, there were no western states. California did not join the union until 1850, and it wasn’t until nearly a century later that Alaska and Hawaii followed suit. For most of America’s political history the West was the country’s least populous region. It would have been hard for a garrulous Montanan, for example, to compete for the presidency, or become a viable vice-president pick, if no one knew their name outside Helena, the state capital. New York, for a long time America’s most populous state, has provided the most nominees.
This is beginning to change (see chart 2). The second half of the 20th century saw the great westering of America. Around 1990 the West’s population surpassed that of the Northeast. Roughly a decade later it inched past the Midwest’s as well. Much of this is due to California’s rapid growth. The Golden State’s population more than doubled between 1960 and 2000, to 34m, more than a tenth of America’s total. The demographic disadvantage of being from the West has shrunk, but it has not yet disappeared. Running for president for a former senator from California, like Ms Harris, is an altogether different proposition for a governor of Wyoming—which has fewer than 600,000 people.
While western states remained largely white and rural, they voted Republican. But as the region has grown and diversified, it has turned purple. Colorado and New Mexico have voted Democratic in every presidential election since 2008. Arizona and Nevada are now swing states. It seems unlikely that Ms Harris would pick a fellow westerner to be her running-mate, given her need to appeal to voters in the Midwest. (There has only ever been one true western ticket: the Republican pairing of John McCain and Sarah Palin in 2008.) But the Democrats now have no shortage of talent west of the Mississippi. Mark Kelly, a senator from Arizona and a former astronaut, and Jared Polis, the governor of Colorado, are new stars in the party.
What does all of this mean for Ms Harris’s candidacy? It is not being a Californian itself that could hurt her. The success of Nixon and Reagan on the national stage was in part due to California’s political heft. She is vulnerable to Republican attacks because she is a California Democrat, the most liberal contingent of American liberals. Trash-talking California and San Francisco, where Ms Harris became district attorney in the early 2000s, is a favourite Republican pastime. Those attacks are about to get much louder. ■