Unwilling to Hold Their Nose and Vote, Ticket-Splitters Make Their Mark

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/11/09/us/politics/ticket-splitters-midterms.html

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For years they seemed to be an ever-more-endangered species, increasingly subsumed by the bitter tribalism that has come to define the nation’s politics.

But on Tuesday, ticket-splitters reasserted themselves as a still small, but clearly consequential, force in American life. From Georgia to Pennsylvania, there are signs that at least some voters are resisting the complete polarization of the country, emphasizing candidate qualifications, personal attributes and basic likability over partisan identity alone, and sending a sharp message to the Republican Party that there are consequences for promoting people regarded as well outside the political mainstream.

In Pennsylvania, Josh Shapiro, a Democrat, defeated his far-right Republican opponent, Doug Mastriano, by 13 percentage points with nearly 95 percent of the vote counted in the governor’s race, even as John Fetterman won the Senate race over his Republican opponent, Mehmet Oz, by around three percentage points.

In New Hampshire, Gov. Chris Sununu, a Republican, won with 57 percent of the vote — while the Republican nominee for Senate, Don Bolduc, pulled in about 45 percent, losing to Senator Maggie Hassan, a Democrat, by nearly double digits.

And in Georgia, Gov. Brian Kemp, a Republican, defeated the Democratic candidate, Stacey Abrams, by about 8 percentage points, while the Republican Senate candidate Herschel Walker, embroiled in significant controversies in his personal life, narrowly trailed Senator Raphael Warnock, the Democrats’ nominee, on Wednesday afternoon ahead of a runoff election.

“It’s pretty clear to me that Walker is not capable of being a U.S. senator,” said Brian Gage, 48, of Sandy Springs, Ga., who voted for former President Donald J. Trump in 2020 and this year backed Mr. Kemp and, reluctantly, Mr. Warnock. “His marital issues and his domestic violence issues, and things like that, yeah, those concern me,” he said of Mr. Walker.

Certainly, ticket-splitting has declined substantially in recent years and it is not yet clear how widespread a phenomenon it was this election. Margins in races between the candidates for Senate and governor could tighten as more results come in, and there is no doubt that the country remains deeply divided, with many Americans more comfortable in their partisan corners.

In some races, the gap in performance between candidates for Senate and governor may have also been shaped by voters’ staying out of races rather than crossing over. And voters often draw distinctions between federal and state candidates: Liberal Massachusetts has a long record of electing Republican governors; conservative Kansas just re-elected a Democratic governor.

But both Republican and Democratic strategists closely watching the results said there were clear signs that ticket-splitting was alive and well this year.

“What’s really significant about it is, it’s been on a steady decline, No. 1, and No. 2, you don’t expect much ticket-splitting in a nonpresidential year,” said Celinda Lake, the veteran Democratic pollster. “Partisan polarization — which I think we had thought we were on a relentless death march on — that partisan polarization can actually be overcome by candidates who appeal directly to voters on character and leadership.”

Whit Ayres, a longtime Republican pollster, said “there was a very substantial amount of ticket-splitting” including in Pennsylvania, Georgia and Ohio.

Gov. Mike DeWine, an Ohio Republican, won his race by about 26 percentage points as of Wednesday, while J.D. Vance, a Trump critic turned hard-right candidate, prevailed by less than seven percentage points in his Senate race against Representative Tim Ryan, a moderate Democrat.

“The country is still very evenly divided, but what it means is that in some states, they’re still making distinctions based on the quality of the candidates and the record of the people who are running,” Mr. Ayres said.

Mr. Trump backed candidates including Dr. Oz and Mr. Walker as well as Mr. Vance in their primaries. The fate of his endorsed candidates in Nevada and Arizona was not yet clear. Control of the House and the Senate remained in the balance Wednesday afternoon as votes continued to be counted.

Before the election, New York Times/Siena College polling data showed that roughly 8 percent of likely midterm voters were considering splitting their ticket across Arizona, Georgia, Nevada and Pennsylvania.

The survey found that the types of voters who planned to split their tickets varied some by state, but had a few things in common: They were overwhelmingly younger than voters who planned to vote only for a single party, and they were much more likely to be Hispanic than straight-ticket voters.

In Georgia, split-ticket voters were much more likely to be men, while in Arizona, ticket splitters are more likely to be women, the survey found.

The highest share of these voters was in Pennsylvania. Roughly 13 percent of Oz voters said in the survey that they also supported Mr. Shapiro, a strikingly high number.

Mr. Shapiro’s opponent, Mr. Mastriano, repulsed a broad array of voters with his promotion of conspiracy theories, his strenuous election denialism and his opposition to abortion under all circumstances. He also stoked concerns about antisemitism as he ran against Mr. Shapiro, who is Jewish, and Mr. Shapiro won the support of a number of Jewish Republicans.

Mr. Shapiro, who benefited from an opponent who had little money to introduce himself or launch attacks on air — a luxury Mr. Fetterman lacked — ran as a relative moderate, receiving endorsements from a number of law enforcement groups that had also backed Dr. Oz.

Craig Snyder, the political director of the group Republicans for Shapiro, described Oz-Shapiro voters as “mainstream Republicans, in many cases, pre-MAGA Republicans.”

“They were people who really thought Mastriano was inappropriate as the nominee, they couldn’t vote for him,” Mr. Snyder said, adding that Mr. Shapiro worked to build a broad coalition campaign. “They wanted to send a protest against Biden, they wanted to send a protest against what they perceive to be economic conditions, social conditions that they believe are caused by the Democrats.”

There were also signs that Mr. Fetterman significantly improved on President Biden’s margins in some key counties compared with 2020.

In Georgia, the Senate race centered to a striking degree on personal character. Mr. Walker, who ran as a staunch social conservative, faced accusations of domestic violence from his ex-wife, and two women have said he paid for their abortions. He has denied the latter accusations.

Jeffrey Hackling, 72, said he voted for Mr. Kemp and Mr. Warnock. His decision to vote for Mr. Warnock was “tough,” he said, and he felt pressure from other Republicans in his life, including his wife, to vote for Mr. Walker — but he couldn’t get there, alarmed by Mr. Walker’s record.

“I did not like Herschel Walker, all the lies that he did and said,” said Mr. Hackling, a Republican from Milton, Ga. “A lot of people wanted to talk me into voting for a Republican but I did not like him, I did not like the person.”

In Ohio, Kevin Balogh, 34, had gone through a challenging process on the other side of the aisle, as he tried to support Nan Whaley, the Democratic nominee for governor. But even though he voted for Mr. Ryan, the Democrat, for Senate, Mr. Balogh was still appreciative of Mr. DeWine’s stewardship as governor during the height of the coronavirus crisis and ultimately backed him instead.

“That’s kind of what I envisioned, two and a half years ago, of what new conservatism could look like, aside from and outside of some of the Trump nonsense,” he said. “He did enough early on in his governorship that — maybe it cemented early in my mind, that I like Mike DeWine.”

In Kennesaw, Ga., Audrey Zohner, 39, identified as a Republican as recently as 2020, even though she supported Mr. Biden for president.

But, horrified by the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol and alarmed by the Supreme Court’s overturning of Roe v. Wade, she now firmly rejects the G.O.P. She voted a generally Democratic ticket this year, but said she made an exception for Brad Raffensperger, the Georgia secretary of state who resisted efforts by Mr. Trump to overturn Mr. Biden’s victory in his state.

“I didn’t like that he supported Trump during the elections,” she said. “But the fact that he stood up to him and said, ‘I’m sorry, that’s illegal, I’m not going to do it’ — that cemented him in my book. I’m like, ‘OK. You’re a good one.’”

Alyce McFadden, Lucia Walinchus and Kim Lyons contributed reporting.