RIGHT SPEAK: Political Hometowns are Losing Clout

It's been 20 years since Bob Dole ran for president as the small town boy who never forgot his roots in windblown Russell, Kan., where he worked in high school as a drugstore soda jerk and recovered from his wounds after World War II. Even after he went to Congress, he never changed his legal residence.

Norma Jean Steele and Gloria Nelson, sisters of Bob

Dole, stand outside the family house in Russell,

Kansas, in this 1995 photo. (Photo: Charlie Riedel)

Playing the hometown card is a bipartisan tradition. Candidates as varied as Calvin Coolidge of Plymouth Notch, Vt., Jimmy Carter of Plains, Ga., and Bill Clinton — the Arkansan who campaigned as the son of "a place called Hope" — have tied themselves to one special place where their character and values were formed.

But to judge from the 2016 presidential field, the hometown political card may be fading.

Hillary Clinton, standing, was junior class vice

president at Park Ridge East High School.

She's seen with classmates in this 1964

yearbook photo. AP

This year's crop of candidates is comparatively rootless. Some were born and raised in a series of communities, with no single one they always called home. Some come from places lacking that "hometown" feel — formless suburbs (like Hillary Clinton's Park Ridge, Ill.) or big cities (like Donald Trump's New York) — that don't evoke the feel of Dole's Russell.

Meanwhile, other candidates — notably Mike Huckabee, also of Hope, Ark. — continue to play the hometown card like it's a potential winner.

These more rooted candidates are more like the country. Despite Americans' reputation for mobility, 2013 census data indicates that more than two-thirds of native-born Americans live in the state where they were born — roughly the same as in 1960.

Mike Huckabee announces his presidential candidacy

at an event in Hope, Ark., on May 5, 2015.

(Photo: Matt Sullivan)

But other candidates' rootlessness also reflects something profound in the national experience, says Julian Zelizer, author of biographies of Lyndon Johnson and Jimmy Carter, and may resonate with middle class voters whose own lives have changed so much technologically and economically, if not geographically.