I don’t know if this would be better in general questions, but since it is about elections I put it here. Currently candidate Romney is trailing President Obama in MA by around 20 points. This was surprising to me; they must really dislike him up there… Anyway, what other presidential candidates have not carried their home states and by what margins?
Apologies for any misspellings, I am doing this on my phone.
Al Gore lost Tennessee. It was close (about 4%) and obviously would have been enough to win the election.
Or that.
Al Gore failed to carry Tennessee in 2000, and George McGovern failed to carry South Dakota in 1972. And if you want to get technical, Ross Perot obviously “lost” Texas in his two runs, and John Anderson “lost” Illinois in 1980.
FDR lost his home county every election.
Mitt Romney is likely to lose Michigan, too.
So only James Polk lost his resident and birth state and won the thing. How odd that he managed that.
Odd - wikipedia lists Nixon’s home state as New York for the 1976 election page.
And that was the year that he ran for State Dog-catcher, too.
Good catch. In 1976 Nixon lived in political purgatory/oblivion, didn’t he? 
Well, if we’re going down that road, the Communist, Libertarian, Green, Socialist Worker, and Prohibition candidates have a long history of losing their home state too!
Although Bush the Greater was technically a resident of Texas (his voting address was a hotel room in Houston in both 1988 and 1992, IIRC), he won Maine, the state where he lived most of the time when outside of Washington D.C., in 1988, but lost it four years later.
Here’s another question (can’t find a Wiki page for it) - what major-party campaigns have lost the state of their Vice Presidential nominees? Off the top of my head I can think of Geraldine Ferraro (Reagan took New York in 1984) and Lloyd Bentsen (Bush took Texas in 1988), but there must be others.
Kerry/Edwards in '04. Dole/Kemp in '96.
Heh - whoops! 1968.
What happened to Al Gore is what will happen to Mitt Romney. It’s hard to be conservative enough to win a southern statewide election and yet liberal enough to win the Democratic nomination. AG moved leftward from when he was senator from TN. The reverse is true of Republicans and MR.
What would be odder would be if a current statewide elected official lost his home state.
Romney has three or four “home” states, right? I only care about him winning one of them: New Hampshire.