Split-ticket voting saves Democrats in key battleground races

Split-ticket voting played a prominent role in several battleground states during last week’s elections despite the practice becoming increasingly less common.

Democrats clinched major Senate wins in Arizona, Michigan, Nevada and Wisconsin, saving the party from a total wipeout in the upper chamber, despite Vice President Harris falling short in all of those states against President-elect Trump. In North Carolina, Gov.-elect Josh Stein (D) prevailed in the governor’s race while voters ultimately cast more ballots for Trump.

After months of speculation about the role ticket-splitting would play, the results showed the highest level in the past three presidential election years.

Charles Franklin, director of the Marquette Law School Poll in Wisconsin, noted that across virtually every battleground state, “the Republican Senate candidates underperformed the presidential ticket.”

“I think that is the broader issue that we've seen in the 2022 midterms, is that Trump's personal popularity doesn't transfer to his party's Senate candidates,” he added.

Ticket-splitting — where voters cast ballots for different parties — has become less common in recent years. In 2016, there was no state that voted for a presidential candidate and Senate candidate of differing parties. In 2020, Sen. Susan Collins (R-Maine) was the only exception — the state went for President Biden at the top of the ticket while reelecting the Republican senator.

Compare that to 2012, when eight states split their tickets between the presidential and Senate races.

North Carolina-based Democratic strategist Doug Wilson said his state was a “mixed bag,” with Trump carrying its 16 electoral votes but Democrats achieving “pretty significant victories” with several other statewide races.

The race other than the presidential contest that received the most attention in the Tar Heel State was for the governor’s mansion, in which Stein, currently the North Carolina attorney general, easily defeated Lt. Gov. Mark Robinson (R).

Robinson’s rise stemmed in part from the attention he received as a conservative firebrand and a willingness to take controversial stances, but his campaign was left spinning after an explosive CNN report in September detailing a wide range of inflammatory statements he made on a pornography website’s message board more than a decade ago.

They included reportedly referring to himself as a “black NAZI,” wishing for slavery to be reinstated and preferring Adolf Hitler to be in charge of the country over the current administration.

Robinson denied the allegations, but his campaign was never able to recover, and he lost to Stein by 14 points. After the report, Democrats launched attacks tying Trump to Robinson and pointing to the many complements he has given the lieutenant governor, but Harris still lost the state by about 3.5 points.

Wilson said he believed Trump is his own “institution,” as were former Presidents Reagan and Obama, allowing him to not get caught up in the controversy.

That wasn’t the only win Democrats saw in North Carolina: They won several other statewide positions, including lieutenant governor and attorney general, and the only competitive House race with Rep. Don Davis’s win in the state’s 1st Congressional District. They also broke a Republican supermajority in the state House.

Over in Michigan, Democrat Rep. Elissa Slotkin prevailed in the Senate race to succeed retiring Sen. Debbie Stabenow (D-Mich.), and Democratic-aligned candidates easily won in state Supreme Court races that are largely nonpartisan in name only. That expanded the liberal majority on the court from 4-3 to 5-2.

The mixed results are not due entirely to ticket-splitting, however. Some voters who backed Trump simply didn’t vote in other races on the ballot.

Michigan Republican strategist Saul Anuzis, a former chair of the state GOP, pointed to the Trump campaign’s strategy of relying on low-propensity voters, something that didn’t ultimately have the same benefits for Republican candidates like former Rep. Mike Rogers (R-Mich.), who ran for Senate in the Great Lake State.

Anuzis noted that a significant number of these voters voted only for Trump and didn’t continue to vote down the ballot. He said this concerns a messaging issue of getting more voters in the coalition to understand the process and the need to vote across different elections.

“That is going to take a large educational effort, understand the value of voting down the ticket, why it matters, etc. So that's going to be a challenge,” Anuzis said.

In Pennsylvania, there were fewer bright spots for Democrats, with two of their House incumbents losing reelection and Republicans winning multiple other statewide races alongside Trump. But one small victory was that Democrats were able to hold their narrow 102-101 margin in the state House.

“A state like Pennsylvania, swing voters matter, and too many people in our party over the years have denied that,” said Pennsylvania Democratic strategist Mike Mikus. “But when you see us winning a majority of the House races … it tells me that there are swing voters, and some people figured out how to communicate to them.”

Despite the prevalence of ticket-splitting in multiple major battleground states, Franklin of Marquette Law School noted the result of this year’s election is fewer split Senate delegations. Wisconsin and Maine both have split-Senate delegations, while Decision Desk HQ has not yet called the Pennsylvania Senate race. If Republican Dave McCormick prevails there, Pennsylvania will also have a split Senate delegation.

Meanwhile, Montana, Ohio and West Virginia will lose their split Senate delegations after next year.

And while ticket-splitting may have been on display this year, Franklin also cautioned against reading into the results.

“Yes, there are these split outcomes and they're very striking, but to interpret it as a return to split-ticket voting in the traditional sense, we're talking about gains of inches here, rather than pretty wide margins,” he said.