Bush not a winner in 'home' state, but not alone

WASHINGTON (CNN) -- President Bush boldly, albeit light-heartedly, announced that

he was "going to stay out of Connecticut" and its senatorial race, adding he may be "the
only presidential candidate who never carried the state in which he was born."

When Bush made the remark at a Monday press conference, he admitted it may not hold
up to extensive research. And in this case, fact-checkers didn't have to dig too deeply.

His father George H. W. Bush -- born June 12, 1924 in Milton, Massachusetts -- lost his
"home" state by decisive margins in his two runs as a major party's presidential candidate.
In 1988, Massachusetts Gov. Michael Dukakis won the state 53-45 percent (though Bush
went on to become the nation's 41st president). Then-Arkansas Gov. Bill Clinton defeated
the elder Bush, 48 percent to 29 percent (with independent candidate Ross Perot winning
23 percent) in the Bay State four years later.

And if 1992 seemed like the distant past, the 2004 election itself disproved Bush's
assertion. Not only did President George W. Bush lose his native-born state, so did his
Democratic opponent, John Kerry.

The Massachusetts senator was born December 11, 1943, at Fitzgerald Army Hospital in
Aurora, Colorado. But his Centennial State roots only went so deep, as Kerry lost
Colorado -- winning 47 percent of votes, compared to Bush's 52 percent.

In fact, roughly one in five major party presidential candidates since 1789 did not win the
state they were born in, according to CNN's Keating Holland.

That list doesn't include Al Gore, who notably lost Tennessee -- which he represented
between 1976 to 1985 in the House of Representatives and from 1985 to 1993 in the
Senate -- to Bush in the 2000 presidential race. But while raised partly in Carthage, the
former vice president was actually born in Washington, D.C., where his father served as a
senator. Gore carried the District of Columbia in the 2000 election with 85 percent of the
vote.

-- CNN's Keating Holland contributed to this report.