The number of voters willing to balance their ballots in battleground New Hampshire helped Maggie Hassan win reelection by 10 points in a contest that public polling had suggested was one of the tougher Senate races of the election cycle. | Charles Krupa/AP Photo
By Lisa Kashinsky and Jessica Piper
11/19/2022 07:00 AM EST
Democrats have ticket-splitters to thank for maintaining their hold on the Senate.
New Hampshire Democratic Sen. Maggie Hassan trampled her Republican rival, even as the state’s Republican governor, Chris Sununu, did the same to his opponent.
In Nevada, voters helped Democrats seal the Senate majority by reelecting Sen. Catherine Cortez Masto even as they tossed out the sitting Democratic governor.
And in Georgia, Democratic Sen. Raphael Warnock’s razor-thin race is heading into a December runoff after GOP Gov. Brian Kemp coasted to reelection.
The results are enough to make it look like this year’s midterms represented a return to the old days of de-polarized statewide politics, when large numbers of voters would support one party’s candidate for Senate and the other party for governor.
But it was actually the opposite. A POLITICO analysis of the results shows that ticket-splitting in those races declined to the lowest point of any midterm since at least 1990.
Yet the relatively few voters who did split their tickets helped tip the Senate. Their decisions are a collective rebuke of Republicans’ Senate nominees, particularly those endorsed by former...
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