Split-ticket voting played a prominent role in several battleground states in last week’s election, although the practice is becoming increasingly infrequent.
Democrats won gigantic Senate victories in Arizona, Michigan, Nevada and Wisconsin, saving the party from total collapse in the upper house, even though Vice President Harris fell to President-elect Trump in all of those states. In North Carolina, Gov.-elect Josh Stein (D) prevailed in the governor’s race, while voters ultimately cast more votes for Trump.
After months of speculation about what role the distribution of ballots would play, the results showed the highest level in the last three presidential election years.
Charles Franklin, director of the Marquette Law School Wisconsin poll, found that in virtually all battleground states, “Republican Senate candidates underperformed presidential candidates.”
“I think that’s the broader problem we saw in the 2022 midterms: that Trump’s personal popularity is not transferring to his party’s Senate candidates,” he added.
The so-called “ticket splitting”, in which voters cast their votes for different parties, has become less common in recent years. In 2016, there was no state that voted for a presidential candidate and a Senate candidate from different parties. In 2020, Sen. Susan Collins (R-Maine) was the only exception – the state chose President Biden at the top of the ticket while re-electing 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 mix,” with Trump securing its 16 electoral votes while Democrats had “pretty significant victories” in several other statewide elections.
The race other than the presidential contest that drew the most attention in the Tar Heel State was the race for the governor’s mansion, in which Stein, currently North Carolina’s attorney general, defeated Lt. Gov. Mark Robinson (R) easily defeated.
Robinson’s rise owed in part to the attention he received as a conservative firebrand and his willingness to take controversial stances, but his campaign faltered after an explosive CNN report in September detailing a variety of inflammatory statements he had made message board of a pornography website more than a decade ago.
This reportedly included calling himself a “black Nazi,” wanting slavery to be reinstated, and preferring Adolf Hitler to rule the country over the current government.
Robinson denied the allegations, but his campaign never recovered and he lost to Stein by 14 points. After the report, Democrats launched attacks linking Trump to Robinson and pointing out the many compliments he had paid the lieutenant governor, but Harris still lost the state by about 3.5 points.
Wilson said he believes Trump is his own “institution,” as were former Presidents Reagan and Obama, which allows him to avoid becoming embroiled in the controversy.
That wasn’t the only victory 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’ victory in the state’s 1st Congressional District. They also broke the Republican supermajority in the House of Representatives.
Over in Michigan, Democratic Rep. Elissa Slotkin prevailed in the Senate race to replace outgoing Sen. Debbie Stabenow (D-Mich.), and Democratic-leaning candidates easily won in state Supreme Court races that were largely in name only are impartial. This increased the Liberal majority on the court from 4:3 to 5:2.
However, the mixed results are not entirely due to the distribution of tickets. Some voters who supported Trump simply didn’t vote in other races on the ballot.
Republican strategist Saul Anuzis of Michigan, a former chairman of the state GOP, pointed to the Trump campaign’s strategy of relying on low-propensity voters, which ultimately did not provide the same advantages for Republican candidates like former Rep. Mike Rogers ( R-Michigan), who ran for Senate in the Great Lake State.
Anuzis found that a significant number of these voters only voted for Trump and did not continue to vote against him. He said it was a communications issue about getting more voters in the coalition to understand the process and the need to vote across different elections.
“That’s going to require a lot of education to understand the value of voting against the ticket, why it’s important, etc. So that’s going to be a challenge,” Anuzis said.
There were fewer radiant spots for Democrats in Pennsylvania, as two of their House incumbents lost re-election and Republicans won several other statewide races alongside Trump. A petite victory, however, was that Democrats were able to maintain their narrow 102-101 lead in the House of Representatives.
“In a state like Pennsylvania, swing voters are important, and too many people in our party have denied that over the years,” said Pennsylvania Democratic strategist Mike Mikus. “But when you see that we’re winning the majority of the House races … I know there are swing voters, and some people have figured out how to communicate with them.”
Despite widespread ticket splitting in several huge battleground states, Marquette Law School’s Franklin noted that the result of this year’s election is less divided Senate delegations. Wisconsin and Maine both have split Senate delegations, while Decision Desk headquarters has not yet called the Pennsylvania Senate race. If Republican Dave McCormick prevails there, there will also be a divided Senate delegation in Pennsylvania.
Meanwhile, Montana, Ohio and West Virginia will lose their separate Senate delegations after next year.
And while there may have been a ticket split this year, Franklin also cautioned against interpreting the results.
“Yes, there are these split results, and they are very striking, but to interpret it as a return to split voting in the traditional sense, we are talking about gains of inches, not fairly large margins,” he said.
