Split-Ticket Voters Buoy Democrats in Key Senate Races

In the battleground state of Arizona and other important pockets of the country, polling suggests that voters backing the former president are eschewing Republican Senate candidates.

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Kari Lake, who is running for Senate in Arizona, has routinely lagged behind her Democratic opponent, Representative Ruben Gallego.

On matters of substance and style, there is little distance between former President Donald J. Trump and Kari Lake, the bombastic former news anchor running for Senate in Arizona.

Both rose to fame on television. Both have refused to concede their last election. And both favor the incendiary rhetoric that delights supporters in the base of the Republican Party.

But there is a vast distance between them in the polls in the Grand Canyon state. Mr. Trump has consistently put up competitive polling numbers, while Ms. Lake has routinely lagged behind her Democratic opponent, Representative Ruben Gallego.

A similar phenomenon is playing out in at least two other battleground states where polling shows that despite Mr. Trump’s competitive standing, Republican challengers in pivotal Senate races are trailing the Democratic incumbents. In Nevada, Sam Brown, an Army veteran whom Mr. Trump helped elevate out of a crowded primary race, is trailing Senator Jacky Rosen, the mild-mannered, low-profile freshman Democrat. In Pennsylvania, David McCormick, a businessman, has begun to close what polling showed last month was a nine-point deficit with Senator Bob Casey.

Ticket-splitting, in which voters choose candidates of different parties for different offices up and down the ballot, has for years been on the wane in the United States, as partisan polarization has consumed American politics. But polling this year, which suggests that some conservative-leaning voters in critical states are rejecting Republican candidates for Senate even as they support the party’s presidential nominee, seems to indicate important pockets of the country where it is very much alive and could boost Democrats’ uphill battle to hold their majority in the Senate.

Image “Many are trying to emulate Donald Trump; the problem is none of them are Donald Trump,” said one independent pollster.Credit…Nicole Craine for The New York Times

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