Democrats Are Getting Help in Tight Senate Races From Split-Ticket Voting

Gregory Korte and Mark Niquette
·4 min read
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(Bloomberg) -- Voters are picking and choosing between candidates on their state ballots, recent polling suggests, splitting their tickets between Democrats and Republicans in a way that’s helping struggling Democratic Senate candidates.

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In most battleground states, Democratic Senate candidates who make conspicuous appeals to independent and Republican voters are outperforming their party’s candidate for governor.

Polling in Arizona, Georgia, Nevada, New Hampshire, Ohio, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin suggests voters could elect a senator from one party and a governor from the other. In at least four of those states, it’s the Democratic candidate for Senate gaining more support than the Democratic gubernatorial candidate, sometimes by an average of 16 percentage points, according to RealClearPolitics polling averages.

But it may not be enough to help Mark Kelly in Arizona, Raphael Warnock in Georgia, Catherine Cortez-Masto in Nevada or John Fetterman in Pennsylvania, all of whom are in tight races with their GOP opponents with one day until Election Day.

The number of ticket-splitting voters has declined in recent decades, as elections have become more nationalized and parties more polarized. But they can still be decisive in competitive races.

“In some of these races it doesn’t take that many voters to lead some of those swings we might see,” said Joel Sievert, who studies voter behavior at Texas Tech University.

Yet Twitter Inc. owner Elon Musk urged his 100 million followers on Monday to vote for Republicans, saying that divided government limits “the worst excesses of both parties.”

In Pennsylvania, Fetterman has launched a series of ads appealing to Republican voters. And he’s trying to counter the national headwinds by tailoring those ads to specific regions of the state, reminding voters of his Pennsylvania roots and casting his opponent, celebrity doctor Mehmet Oz, as an outsider.

“I’ve been a Republican since I voted for Richard Nixon,” said Shelley Howland of suburban Philadelphia, in one ad. “But I’m voting against Dr. Oz.”

Fetterman is also trying to tie Oz to Doug Mastriano, the less-popular Republican candidate for governor who’s cast a hard line against abortion. As Oz tried to stake out a moderate position in their televised debate in October, Fetterman interjected, “You roll with Doug Mastriano!”

Mastriano, as a state legislator, challenged President Joe Biden’s win in Pennsylvania, appeared at the US Capitol during the Jan. 6 insurrection and has warned that he will cancel all voter registrations in the state if he wins and have everyone reapply. The nominee, who has ties to White Christian nationalists and wants to ban and criminalize abortion, is trailing Democrat Josh Shapiro in the governor’s race and underperforming Oz in polls by an average of 5 percentage points.

Republican Senator Patrick Toomey, whom Oz and Fetterman are vying to replace, said at a Wall Street Journal-hosted event in Philadelphia that Oz “has been able to completely separate himself from Mastriano in the minds of most voters, and he’s a totally different kind of person.”

Fetterman may have aided that phenomenon with an unsteady debate performance in which he struggled to articulate his policy differences with Oz, a polished television performer.

Berwood Yost of the Franklin & Marshall poll said Democrats and Trump-aligned Republicans were mostly voting along party lines, and that the difference is coming largely from traditional Republicans. Among those voters, 79% were supporting Oz and only 60% were backing Mastriano -- with almost a third of traditional Republicans supporting Shapiro, according to the poll.

Perhaps nowhere is the gap between Senate and governor candidates larger than in New Hampshire. An Emerson poll on Friday showed Democratic Senator Maggie Hassan leading Republican challenger Dan Bolduc by 4 points -- while Republican Governor Chris Sununu leads his Democratic challenger, Tom Sherman, by 21 points.

Incumbency has also helped Republican Ohio Governor Mike DeWine pull out to a 20-point advantage over Democratic former Dayton Mayor Nan Whaley. DeWine has served decades in public office and is winning over independents and some conservative Democrats who may be turned off by Whaley’s abortion-focused campaign, Ohio Republican strategist Mark Weaver said.

The Republican Senate candidate, JD Vance, has a much smaller lead over his rival, Democratic Representative Tim Ryan.

“DeWine is largely liked and well known,” Weaver said. “Vance is neither.”

But Vance has started to build a small lead as Ryan tries appealing to independents, moderate Republicans and disaffected Democrats by distancing himself from President Joe Biden.

Ryan is targeting those voters in a new ad that notes that he once challenged Nancy Pelosi as speaker of the House and opposed Chinese trade deals. “I have the guts to take on the extremists on both sides,” Ryan says. “Doesn’t matter if you’re a Republican or Democrat, you’re an Ohioan to me.”

(updates with Musk tweet in seventh paragraph)

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