Ticket-splitting in Georgia

Despite the nationalization of American elections, ticket-splitting still persists. The long-term decline in ticket-splitting, though, can make it more difficult to detect and harder to explain when it does occur. We examine ticket-splitting in five Georgia statewide contests in the 2022 midterm. With access to approximately 94% of marked Georgia ballots, we have a high degree of certainty of how tickets are split in each of the five pairings. However, a dearth of available contextual data associated with these cast vote records (CVRs) motivates us to analyze survey data to further understand what drives ticket-splitting in these elections. Controlling for demographic and political variables, we find notable variation in the likelihood of split ballots depending on the specific office pairing, including the Democratic U.S. Senate/Republican Governor, and Democratic U.S. Senate/Republican Secretary of State. These two variants of ticket-splitting warrant assessment because of the higher profile of the incumbent candidates and the consequential outcome of the U.S. Senate race. Our findings uncover several factors related to ticket-splitting that would have been speculative in the absence of empirical analysis, and we contend that ticket-splitting is more prevalent than scholars generally realize.