The Pennsylvania suburbs might be ripe for the taking for the Republican Party this year. They’re reportedly sick of the Biden agenda, the high inflation, the economic torpor, and the overall dismal state of the economy. These areas were supposed to be abortion hotbeds from which Democrats thought a buffer could be built to save them from electoral annihilation. Instead, the economy, jobs, schools, and education are the top concerns for voters here—which should put a smile on the faces of the campaign of Republican Senate candidate Dr. Mehmet Oz who is running in a tight race with Democratic Lt. Gov. John Fetterman. Yet, while Oz may be smiling, the Doug Mastriano camp is probably sweating bullets. Mastriano, the Republican gubernatorial candidate in Pennsylvania, was polling within the margin of error of Democrat Josh Shapiro but has since lost ground. The PA suburbs being fertile ground for Oz but radioactive for Mastriano could be explained by the reported return of a brand of voter thought to be extinct: the split-ticketer.
It’s not just in Pennsylvania. It’s across the country, where Republican Ohio Gov. Mike DeWine is cruising to re-election, but J.D. Vance—the GOP Senate candidate—is in a dead heat with Democratic Rep. Tim Ryan. NBC News has more:
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.
For decades, it was not uncommon for voters to cast ballots that were far from uniform in the party affiliation of the candidates they selected. But as both parties became more and more ideologically cohesive in the 21st century, such ticket-splitting voters increasingly became an endangered species. Yet this cycle, these voters may hold the key to victory in the most high-profile of races — if a swath of recent polls reflect the outcome.
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Some observers point to a moderate voter uprising. I don’t think that’s the case. The centrist voter is feeble and usually avoids the partisan dogfights that define each party. It’s why there are none on the Hill. When things get too hot—they flee, just like Olympia Snowe and Evan Bayh. Doug Mastriano is decidedly not a politician. He’s unpolished in many areas, and he’s not what you would consider top tier based on how DC gauges candidate fundamentals—but he also won the primary. I’d lean more on the Shapiro-Oz voters eschewing Mastriano because they don’t like his personality, which is different from voting against someone based on their political views. The Trump agenda is riddled with popular policy initiatives, but the climate gets complicated when the former president’s name is attached to the agenda. It was a political pickle that Trump’s team, along with the national Republican Party, never figured out regarding messaging, though that is a herculean task: splicing the policy away from the man who is peddling it.
No doubt that split-ticket voting occurs, and in some states, like New Hampshire, it’s not entirely shocking but to frame this as a return, or revenge, of the moderate voter, is a bit overblown. These people don’t have the spine to stay in this game, which is nasty, brutal, and devoid of mercy.
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