American politics abounds with campaign folklore and truisms. One such aphorism is that popular candidates for high office generate a ‘coat-tail’ effect, whereby lower-tier candidates are boosted by the popularity of the candidate at the ‘top of the ticket’. Another axiom is that candidates for national office can benefit from a ‘favourite son’ (or daughter) effect, whereby voters give an additional boost in support to a candidate from their own state. A third adage of US elections relates to those contests when the president’s name is not on the ballot: midterm elections. A common theme in midterm election scholarship centres on the motif of ‘over-correction’ or ‘balancing’. Voters who provided an electoral mandate to a presidential candidate then offset their choice two years later by voting for candidates of the opposition party.

Scholars have studied the various configurations of these apparent laws of American politics at considerable length. No study has yet considered how these three maxims – (1) presidential coat-tails, (2) the favourite son effect, and (3) midterm election backlash – relate to each other. This is not surprising. Given that the president is not on the ballot in midterm elections, it is not immediately obvious that the presidential coat-tail or favourite son effect would apply. This chapter, however, posits that presidents have a ‘ghost coat-tail effect’ in these elections. The midterm election backlash theory implicitly embraces the idea that presidents have some effect on voting behaviour even in those elections in which they are not a candidate. This is well established, but no study has yet looked at how presidents’ ‘ghost’ presence in a midterm election might play in their home state in particular. Is there some residual pride for the president that makes their home-state audience less inclined to ‘punish’ the president’s party in the midterm elections? Can presidents use their personal ties to their home state as a means of assisting local candidates better than they can in the rest of the country?

This chapter explores the effect of a president’s ghost coat-tails in midterm elections in the president’s home state. It finds that in general, the evidence for such an effect is mixed. Sometimes the president’s party did exceptionally well in the president’s home state relative to the rest of the country, but at other times the effect was seemingly null or even negative.