Ticket Splitting in a Nationalized Era

Party loyalty in US congressional elections has reached heights unprecedented in decades. Some theories of partisanship would predict that deviation from national partisanship is even more rare in low-information, down-ballot offices with a party label. Yet, here I show that ticket splitting is often higher in state and local offices than in Congress. I use cast vote records from voting machines that overcome measurement challenges and develop a clustering algorithm to summarize such ballot data. For example, about one in three South Carolina Trump voters were a part of a bloc whose probability of ticket splitting is 5% for Congress but 23% for county council and 48% for sheriff. A model with candidate valence differentials can explain these patterns. These results show that even with nationalized politics, some voters cross party lines to vote for the more experienced and higher quality candidate in state and local elections.