The conservative group Citizens United, 16 state Republican parties and one territorial GOP party filed a complaint with the FEC on Thursday over the transfer of campaign funds from the Biden campaign to the Harris campaign. Getty Images.
Split-ticket voting – supporting candidates from different parties for different offices – is no longer common in U.S. elections.
But in close contests that can be decided by just a few dozen votes, every partisan defection counts.
We don’t know exactly how many ticket-splitters there are in Minnesota this year, because individual ballots aren’t made public (for good reason). But differences between the winning margins in various contests give a good sense of voters’ willingness to cross party lines for the right candidate.
Kamala Harris, for instance, beat Donald Trump by about 4 points overall. But GOP Senate candidate Royce White got hundreds of thousands fewer votes than Trump, leaving Democrat Amy Klobuchar with a 16-point margin in the end. It’s likely that the majority of Trump voters who didn’t support White either voted for Klobuchar or skipped the Senate race entirely. (Interviews with voters back this theory up.)
But comparing the presidential race to the legislative contests yields the opposite story: The Democratic-Farmer-Labor margin across all House races was just one half of one percent, meaning Minnesota’s Republican legislative candidates ran well ahead of Trump. Those defects were enough to tie the House 67-67 at the very least, depending on the outcomes of several pending recounts.
One caveat: There were a handful of safe House districts where one party or the other didn’t run a candidate, so comparing those races to the presidency isn’t exactly apples-to-apples.
But if we exclude those one-sided races, we can map where in the state voters were most likely to split their presidential and legislative votes.
Across virtually all of Minnesota, Republican House candidates received more support than Trump. Broadly speaking those differences were greatest — 5 points or more — in two regions: the rural western part of the state, which is reliably conservative, and the suburban Twin Cities battlegrounds, which effectively determined the control of the House.
DFL candidates, on the other hand, were only able to run ahead of Harris in a handful of deep blue Twin Cities districts, with one critical exception: Rep. Dan Wolgamott of St. Cloud, who managed to pull in a few dozen votes more than Harris, enough to just barely edge out his Republican competitor.
Overall, the average Minnesota House Republican candidate performed about 3 points better than Donald Trump, while the average DFLer ran about one point behind Kamala Harris. Put those numbers together and you’ve got a recipe for turning a D+4 presidential election into an effectively deadlocked statehouse.