“The Senate candidates are often well known to voters” because they run intense campaigns with a flood of advertisements, said Barry Burden, a professor of political science at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. And because turnout was similar for the presidential and the Senate races in most states, he argued, it is likely that some people are still splitting their ticket between the two parties.“So voters in some places are making real distinctions to say this is not somebody who is aligned with Trump or represents him in the same way, or this is someone who has the state’s interest in mind in a way that other candidates don’t,” he said. “And that really is a different story from one state to the next.”
Office of Strategic Communication