Ticket-splitting voters were going extinct. Now they may decide 2022's biggest races.
Ticket-splitters are back, and they’re playing a starring role in the chaotic 2022 campaign.
Ticket-splitters are back, and they’re playing a starring role in the chaotic 2022 campaign.
In battleground states from Georgia to New Hampshire to Ohio, a potentially decisive slice of voters tell pollsters they’re supporting a Democrat for one high-profile office and a Republican for another.
Nowhere is the dynamic clearer than in Pennsylvania.
“What you’re seeing is a repudiation of extremism,” Morgan Boyd, a Republican and a Lawrence County commissioner who endorsed the Democratic nominee for governor, Josh Shapiro, but is backing GOP Senate nominee Mehmet Oz, said in an interview. “Across the board, moderates are rising up and saying, 'Enough is enough.'”
Shapiro, the state attorney general, leads Republican Doug Mastriano by a commanding 11 points in a recent Fox News poll, while Democratic Senate nominee John Fetterman’s edge over Oz is just 4 points — slightly outside the margin of error. Oz allies say “Oz-Shapiro” voters are crucial to his chances of beating Fetterman. Within the past two weeks, an Oz campaign co-chair was spotted at a Shapiro fundraiser while two major police unions, one representing Philadelphia officers and the other Pennsylvania state troopers, offered endorsements of Oz and Shapiro.
Rating: 5