What is split-ticket voting? How it might affect close Central Valley congressional races
Central Valley GOP incumbents will likely need support from split-ticket voters — those who vote for some Republicans and some Democrats — to win in November, experts say.
How many split tickets the candidates need depends on how well Vice President Kamala Harris or former President Donald Trump do in this agricultural stretch of California that’s home to unpredictable blocs of conservative Democrats and moderate Republicans.
“The potential for split-ticket voting is high,” said Eric McGhee, a senior fellow at the nonpartisan Public Policy Institute of California.
California’s 13th and 22nd Congressional Districts are tossups that could decide whether Democrats or Republicans control the House of Representatives in 2025. The elections are rematches of close 2022 races: In the 13th, freshman Rep. John Duarte, R-Modesto, faces former Assemblyman Adam Gray, D-Merced. In the 22nd, Rep. David Valadao, R-Hanford, competes with former Assemblyman Rudy Salas, D-Bakersfield.
Split-ticket voting involves a voter selecting candidates of different political parties for different offices on the same ballot, such as choosing the Democratic presidential nominee and a GOP congressman.
Mike Madrid, a GOP political consultant and Latino voting trends expert, said part of the rationale to split tickets comes from wanting to put in checks and balances and stop extremism in either party.
“It’s not because people put (elected officials) in there to promote their ideas,” Madrid said in an interview. “People put them in there to stop the bad ideas of the other party.”
Valadao, who has been a member of Congress since 2013 with the exception of one term, has demonstrated an ability to get voters to split tickets in the past despite a national decline in voters doing so, experts noted. Valadao lost his seat in the 2018 “blue wave” midterms by very thin margins. He won it back in 2020 by very thin margins.
Legislative lines were different in 2020, but Valadao won his election by less than 1 percentage point while former President Joe Biden won this now-defunct district by almost 11 percentage points. Congressional districts were redrawn based on 2020 census data, and 2022 was the first election with these maps.
Erin Covey, a House analyst and editor of The Cook Political Report, found “someone like Valadao has always been one of Republicans’ strongest incumbents because he has a record of outrunning the top of the ticket and getting voters to split their ballots. Someone like Duarte can’t say the same.”
Last month, Duarte and Valadao both gathered more support than Trump and Republican Senate candidate Steve Garvey in surveys of these districts. Democratic challengers were slightly beating the GOP incumbents — with Salas up more than 4 percentage points and Gray up 2 — but their leads were within the September polls’ margin of error, affirming the races could go either way.
Harris led Trump in the 22nd by more than 7 percentage points in these California Elections and Policy Polls. She led by just over 3 percentage points in the 13th.
Harris’ support in these polls was lower than the margins Biden won beating Trump in these Central Valley districts in 2020. Biden would have carried the 13th and 22nd by double digits if current congressional maps had been in place.
Harris had a healthy statewide lead over Trump in California in a Berkeley Institute of Governmental Studies poll published last week. But their contest was neck-and-neck in the Central Valley, where 47% of respondents preferred Harris and 46% picked Trump. The poll was conducted the last week of September among 3,045 Californians.
Duarte, a freshman, has never run in a presidential cycle. He did worse than the Republican at the top of the 2022 ballot.
GOP gubernatorial candidate Sen. Brian Dahle, R-Bieber, beat Gov. Gavin Newsom by more than 8 percentage points in the 13th. Duarte and Republican Senate candidate Mark Meuser each carried the district by just four-tenths of a percentage point that year.
Valadao defeated Salas by 3 percentage points in 2022. Dahle beat Newsom in the 22nd by a little over 4 percentage points, and Democratic Sen. Alex Padilla bested Meuser by more than 2 percentage points.
The 13th and 22nd have more registered Democrats than Republicans and a growing no-party-preference bloc. The majority of the voting-age population in each district is Latino and they both have a growing number of voters under 35 — two groups that have historically leaned Democratic in California. Turnout, or lack thereof, especially among those groups plays a key role in elections here. Registration shifts since 2022 have boosted Republicans slightly, experts said.
“It’s still tough for both of them,” Covey said in an interview of Duarte and Valadao differentiating themselves from national Republicans. “Ultimately, there’s only so much you can do to separate yourself. And I do think the fact that the districts appear to look less promising for Democrats at the presidential level than they did in 2020 puts Republicans in a better spot because they don’t have to convince as many voters to split their tickets.”