Even as Democrats see new opportunity for the four-seat gain that will give them Senate control, some down-ballot Republicans are hoping Trump’s troubles increase so-called “balance voting,” in which people vote for down-ballot candidates they believe will provide a check on the party viewed as most likely to win the White House. This could be what’s happening in Wisconsin, where Clinton’s lead appears to be growing at the same time Democratic Senate candidate Russ Feingold has seen his edge shrink to within the margin of error against incumbent Republican Ron Johnson, who still supports Trump.
With our partners at Clarity Campaign Labs, we identified potential ticket-splitters this year by starting with a count of individual voters in each battleground state likely to identify as a Democrat or Republican. We then compared those results to a different model that predicts the likelihood that the same voter will pick either Clinton or Trump. (The model uses data collected in some 82,000 interviews in order develop a granular statistical profile of a candidate’s backers. It uses algorithms—weighing hundreds of variables from individual voting histories, past consumer activity, and neighborhood-level Census records—to determine how much voters resemble typical Clinton or Trump supporters.)
By looking at the gap between these two projections, we can identify voters less likely to support the party’s nominee than his or her partisanship would indicate. (We used a gap of at least 15 percentage points as our standard.) In Arizona, for instance, 8 percent of registered voters are significantly less likely to vote for Trump than they are to vote for other Republicans on the ballot. In other states, that number ranges, from 3 percent in Nevada to 10 percent in New Hampshire.
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