That allegedly unserious candidate could soon join the Senate in large part thanks to the help of the alleged terrorism supporter.
Bolduc and Sununu have since made nice in the name of helping each other and their party. Bolduc explained recently that their former feud was “just politics” — politics apparently being the business in which you say nasty things that you don’t believe, and then go back on it when convenient, while asking people to trust you.
But that bit of unseemliness aside, Bolduc’s apparent momentum in New Hampshire highlights an X-factor that looms large on Election Day: “ticket splitting,” or the large gaps in the polls between some key governor races and Senate races.
If Republicans retake the Senate, it might be thanks to GOP governor candidates helping to drag unpopular and more extreme GOP Senate candidates like Bolduc across the line. Conversely, if the GOP comes up short (or it’s close), we could be talking a lot about how voters were willing to split their tickets in a decisive way.
The question is whether voters are actually willing to split their tickets as much as the polls suggest. Ticket splitting is unquestionably on the decline in American politics, hitting new lows in both 2018 and in 2020. But it’s more common when one race is federal (Senate) and the other is for state executive office (governor) — as is the case in 2022.
The gap is particularly pronounced in New Hampshire, where Sununu is an overwhelmingly popular governor currently sailing to reelection. He leads by 15.6 points in the FiveThirtyEight polling average, while Bolduc trails Sen. Maggie Hassan (D-N.H.) by two.
But that’s hardly the only key Senate race in which this question could prove crucial:
- In Georgia, Gov. Brian Kemp (R) is a solid bet for reelection (leading by an average of 7.7 points) even as the Senate race is a pretty pure toss-up.
- In Arizona, GOP gubernatorial candidate Kari Lake has a slight edge in the polls (plus-2.5) even as GOP Senate candidate Blake Masters trails (minus-1.9)
- In Ohio, Gov. Mike DeWine (R) has long held a huge lead, with GOP Senate candidate J.D. Vance ultimately asserting his own, much smaller lead.
- In Pennsylvania — perhaps the one race in which the governor’s race could help a Democratic Senate candidate — GOP gubernatorial candidate Doug Mastriano trails by double digits (10.9 points) while the Senate race is a toss-up.
It’s also possible that voters could split their tickets in Wisconsin, where Sen. Ron Johnson (R) leads in the polling average (by 3.3 points) but the governor’s race is within a point, and in Nevada, where state politics expert Jon Ralston predicts that Sen. Catherine Cortez Masto (D) will hang on but Gov. Steve Sisolak (D) will not.
And some competitive governor’s contests could look very different from the uncompetitive Senate contests taking place in the same state, including in Kansas, New York, Oklahoma and Oregon.
All told, there are nearly a dozen states in which there conceivably could be a split between the party that wins the governor’s race and the Senate race.
That, in all likelihood, won’t happen. But the degree to which it does happen — and the degree to which voters are willing to vote for two different parties at the top of their ballots — matters greatly. One thing you’ll notice as you look at the chart above: Most of these races feature the GOP doing better in the governor’s contest than the Senate race. If the gaps close, that probably helps Republicans.
There are reasons to believe people might not split their tickets much.
The 2020 election brought the lowest level of ticket splitting on record, with just 16 out of 435 members (less than 4 percent) coming from districts that voted for the other party’s presidential nominee — compared with an average of 70 in each election cycle since 1992. In only 7 of those 16 districts did the difference between the presidential vote margin and the House vote margin reach double digits.
That’s a marked contrast to what we see in the current 2022 polls. Six states currently feature double-digit gaps between the governor and Senate races in the FiveThirtyEight average. Five feature either the parties splitting the races or one race being well in-hand and the other being a toss-up.
But that comparison isn’t really apples to apples, because this is a midterm election. In fact, ticket splitting is much more common in midterms, in part because gubernatorial races are significantly less polarized (governors aren’t casting votes in a chamber in which the majority rules).
In the last midterm in 2018, about half of the states holding both a governor’s race and a Senate race featured a double-digit split between the two margins. The average split: about 15 points.
At the same time, those 2018 splits were less significant when the races were actually contested. In total, five states split their tickets, but the biggest ones featured unusual circumstances — highly popular GOP gubernatorial candidates running on the same tickets as uncompetitive Senate races in blue states: Maryland, Massachusetts and Vermont. Each featured a massive gap that skews the number above. The other two states that split their tickets were Arizona and Ohio, where voters chose a GOP governor and a Democratic senator.
About the only race in which a governor candidate might conceivably have dragged their party’s candidate across the line was in Texas, where Gov. Greg Abbott (R) won by 13 points but Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Tex.) won by fewer than three. Even there, though, it seems likely Cruz would’ve won regardless.
The potential impact of ticket splitting — or voters deciding against it — is significantly greater in 2022 because of the states in which it’s in play. Judging by what we saw in 2018, it seems quite possible voters in New Hampshire could deliver Sununu a double-digit victory but still turn aside Bolduc — and that a similar dynamic could play out in several other states.
But to the extent the top of the ticket can help Senate candidates on the margins in very close races, it’ll be among many factors that could decide which party controls the Senate. And it seems likeliest that this particular factor would accrue to the GOP’s benefit.
