How the Races for Governor Could Determine Who Controls the Senate

WASHINGTON — John Fetterman, the Democratic Senate candidate in Pennsylvania, wants voters to think of his G.O.P. rival and the Republican running for governor in the Keystone State as one and the same.

“They are MOZtriano,” Mr. Fetterman says in a You Tube campaign video, melding the names of Mehmet Oz, his opponent, and Doug Mastriano, the far-right Republican candidate for governor whose campaign is sputtering, anointing them the state’s newest “power couple.”

Supporters of Mr. Oz, on the other hand, are working to emphasize differences between Mr. Fetterman, the current progressive lieutenant governor with whom he is in a tight race, and Josh Shapiro, the more centrist Democratic attorney general and the heavy favorite to win the governorship.

“Fetterman is way more radical than Shapiro,” says a woman in a new ad from American Crossroads, a Republican political action committee, which compares Mr. Fetterman’s record on the treatment of criminals unfavorably with that of Mr. Shapiro. The names of their Republican opponents don’t even come up.

The dueling approaches in one of the nation’s marquee Senate races illustrate how, as midterm congressional races have tightened, contests at the top of the ticket are looming as a potentially decisive factor in the outcomes. Republicans and Democrats alike are trying to game out the crosscurrents, working to position their candidates either to ride the wave of a favored gubernatorial candidate or to distance themselves to avoid being pulled under by the drag of a fellow party member.

In some of the chief battlegrounds this year — Pennsylvania, Georgia, Ohio, Arizona, Wisconsin, Nevada, Colorado and New Hampshire, among others — voters will choose both a governor and a senator. How they divide their votes between those two could determine control of the Senate and show whether ticket splitting, which has been on the decline for decades in polarized America, has new life.

“There is considerable overlap between the governor’s races and the Senate battlegrounds,” said Nathan Gonzales, the editor and publisher of the nonpartisan newsletter Inside Elections.

But how the races intersect varies.

In some states, including Pennsylvania, the candidate for governor of one party is comfortably ahead of their opponent, while the Senate race is much closer. In others, the polling shows the contests for both offices is very close.

Georgia is a third category altogether. The Republican candidate for governor, Brian Kemp, is running ahead of Democrat Stacey Abrams. But Senator Raphael Warnock, the Democratic incumbent, has consistently but narrowly led his Republican challenger Herschel Walker. Ms. Abrams’s difficulties could weigh down Mr. Warnock’s chances in that race, unless voters split their ballots, choosing the Republican for governor and the Democrat for Senate.

Then there are spots like New Hampshire, where voters appear to be regarding the two races as entirely separate. Gov. Chris Sununu, a popular Republican, is far ahead in the polls and expected to romp to victory over state Senator Tom Sherman, the Democrat. Yet Senator Maggie Hassan, the Democratic incumbent, is also favored over Republican Donald Bolduc, a far-right candidate who prevailed in the primary after Mr. Sununu declined to jump into the contest, where he would likely have been favored.

Campaign officials say the potential New Hampshire outcome is not all that confounding given the state’s voting traditions and the effort candidates in both parties have put into showing that they are not tied down by party.

“It is extremely common here,” said Kevin Donohoe, a spokesman for Ms. Hassan, of voters splitting their ticket between the two parties. “If you want to win here, you have to have an independent record and you have to have an independent profile, and that is what voters expect.”

In Ohio, Gov. Mike DeWine, the Republican incumbent, holds a double-digit lead in his race against former Dayton mayor Nan Whaley. But Representative Tim Ryan, the Democratic Senate contender, is running neck-and-neck with J.D. Vance, the Republican candidate and author endorsed by former President Donald J. Trump.

A recent poll by the Siena College Research Institute found that 20 percent of Ohio voters who said they were pulling the lever for Mr. DeWine said they also intended to vote for Mr. Ryan, a showing that could give him a shot in a state that was expected to choose another Republican to replace retiring Senator Rob Portman.

The poll provided an opening for Mr. Ryan and his allies. NBC News reported that WelcomePAC, a Democratic group backing Mr. Ryan, took out newspaper ads asking voters, “Why are 1 in 5 Republican voters saying no to J.D. Vance?” and hitting Mr. Vance for his ties to Mr. Trump.

But it is one thing to express an intent to split a ticket and another to do it. Voters can change their minds on Election Day based on myriad factors, including a desire to show party loyalty, the importance placed on each individual race and even the format of the ballot.

“Are these tickets really going to split?” asked Don Levy, the director of the Siena College poll. “It is one thing in a poll to say, ‘Yeah, Tim Ryan, I like him and I’m not so sure about this J.D. Vance guy.’ But when you cast your ballot, then some people are going to pause and vote the team.”

Given Mr. DeWine’s strength, a failure of potential ticket splitters to follow through could be very damaging to Mr. Ryan’s chances of winning.

That has been the case in recent presidential election cycles, as American politics has become more tribal and voters have grown more likely to stay in their partisan lanes. In 2016, for the first time, every state with a Senate election backed both a senator and a president of the same party. It was not much different in 2020, with only Maine deviating.

But research by the Center for Politics at the University of Virginia found that midterm elections still produce more ticket-splitting when the White House is not up for grabs. In 2018, six states split their results between governor and senator, with five of them of backing a Republican governor and a Democratic senator. The report by J. Miles Coleman, an editor at the center, found that six states also delivered mixed results in 2014 and five in 2010.

“If 2022 falls in line with the three most recent midterms, we can still expect five or six split-ticket cases,” Mr. Coleman wrote.

Democrats hope Pennsylvania, which is crucial to determining control of the Senate, is not one of them, though Republicans say they are finding evidence of Shapiro-Oz voters who could decide the outcome.

“Republican polling shows a substantial number of Shapiro voters actually favor Dr. Oz for the Senate based on the hot button issues of crime and the economy,” said John Ashbrook, a Republican strategist working on Senate campaigns and a former aide to Senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, the Republican leader.

Other analysts say a blowout win by Mr. Shapiro would seem to accrue to the benefit of Mr. Fetterman. The Fetterman campaign sees a healthy synergy between the two candidates and the two are expected to appear together as the campaign season draws to a close.

“Josh Shapiro and John Fetterman are very different types of candidates,” said Rebecca Katz, senior adviser to Mr. Fetterman. “But together they appeal to a broad swath of Pennsylvania voters and offer a very strong contrast to extreme, Trump-backed candidates like Dr. Oz and Doug Mastriano.”