Let's do another list, this time about geography of the ticket. We can arbitrarily define "The South" as the former
Confederate states: "The 11 states of the Confederacy were Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Louisiana, Mississippi, North Carolina, South Carolina, Tennessee, Texas and Virginia. (Note that the states of Missouri and Kentucky each had two separate governments, one Union, one Confederate. As such, they were claimed by both sides as members)". I'll count Missouri and Kentucky since Ashcroft is from Missouri. Again, we look at the tickets since WW2.
More...
The winning tickets since WW2 were:
Roosevelt-Truman 1944 (Truman from Missouri)
Truman-Barkley 1948 (Truman from Missouri, Barkley from Kentucky)
Eisenhower-Nixon 1952, 56 (Eisenhower born in Texas)
Kennedy-Johnson 1960 (Johnson from Texas)
Johnson-Humphrey 1964 (Johnson from Texas)
Nixon-Agnew 1968, 72 (see below)
Carter-Mondale 1976 (Carter from Georgia)
Reagan-Bush 1980,84 (Bush41 from Texas)
Bush-Quayle 1988 (Bush41 from Texas)
Clinton-Gore 1992 (Clinton from AR, Gore from TN)
GWB-Cheney 2000 (both from TX), or Gore-Lieberman (Gore from TN), depending on who you think "won".
What do we find? Every winning ticket with one exception had either the Pres. or the VP or both, from the South. The exception was Nixon, who of course ran on the famous "Southern Strategy" of pandering to Southern xenophobia. Nixon's opponent was Hubert Humphrey (from Minnesota) running with Edmund Muskie (from Maine), so there wasn't any actual Southern alternative to choose either.
I just don't know what to make of this. Maybe counting Ike as a southerner is a bit of a stretch, since he was born in TX but moved to Kansas as a young child. I don't know whether anyone at that time thought of him as a Texan.
Anyway, the notion of geographically balanced tickets seems misconstrued. Rather, the rule seems to be that the South gets a spot on every ticket, which is disproportionate to its population.
One gets the impression that the US is a split country with de facto dual governance, as post-Civil War integration is still not really complete.