Swing voters aren’t necessarily ticket-splitters

Like it or not, the 2026 election cycle is in full swing. For North Carolina’s March 3 primary, voters are already mailing in absentee ballots to help determine party nominees for US Senate, US House, the state legislature, state courts, and many local offices. The deadline for registering to vote in the primary is Feb. 6. Early in-person voting begins on Feb. 12 and lasts until Feb. 28.

I have my personal preferences for many of these races, of course, as well as electoral predictions. I’ll share some of them in future columns. Today, though, I’ll offer my preferred definitions of three political terms that will figure prominently in news coverage of North Carolina’s 2026 midterms.

Here’s the first one: base voters. While not necessarily registered as Democrats or Republicans, these loyalists have a long track record of supporting a party’s nominees always or nearly always. For candidates, consultants, and independent political actors, the relevant question here is whether base voters will turn out — not what they’ll do if they cast ballots.

How large are these partisan bases? Political professionals and organizations maintain (and regularly) update their own electoral models, but nearly all assume more than 40% of likely North Carolina voters are in the Republican base and a comparable share are in the Democratic one. Again, this isn’t just about the official stats. Both parties now sit at slightly above 30% in voter registration. Among the remaining 40% of voters, however, are quite a few who either dislike branding themselves or prefer to maximize their options during primaries, and yet in the fall vote more-or-less like other partisans.

The 2024 election cycle, for example, featured one of the worst nominees for statewide office in my lifetime: Mark Robinson, the GOP candidate for governor. His manifest weaknesses were evident even before his bizarre personal behavior came to light. Still, Robinson received 40.1% of the general-election vote. He got the intensely loyal GOP core, and no one else.

Here’s a second term of art: swing voters. The way I prefer to use the term, at least, the category encompasses all registrants who aren’t in a partisan base. Some of these voters lean left or right, Democratic or Republican, but can sometimes be persuaded to go a different way. Others are true swings, with no partisan leanings and few fixed opinions on policy issues or leadership styles. Still others are only tenuously connected to electoral politics, voting rarely if at all.

The final term, split-ticket voters, denotes a subset of swing voters who, in any given election don’t just choose between the red team and the blue team but treat each race as an independent contest. Before the ideological consolidations of the 1990s, a fifth or more of voters in North Carolina and other Southern states split their tickets between Republicans for president and “boll-weevil” Democrats for state and local office. In some coastal states such as Connecticut and Oregon, the ticket-splitters were nearly as numerous but did the reverse, picking Democrats for president and “gypsy moth” Republicans in other races.

Today, ticket-splitters are rarer, in the single digits, but can still prove decisive. In 2016, Donald Trump won North Carolina with 49.8% of the vote while Democrat Roy Cooper beat incumbent Republican Gov. Pat McCrory by 49.02% to 48.8%. Among the other nine Council of State races, Republicans won six and Democrats won three, with margins ranging from less than a point to 11 points. While some voters chose to leave some races blank, the primary driver of these results was active ticket-splitting.

We shouldn’t equate frequent ticket-splitters with the entire universe of swing voters. The latter category is somewhere between 15% and 20% of North Carolina’s likely voters in a general election, and up to 10% in a midterm. When they swing, most go all in for one party or the other. What they don’t do is join their new party’s base. They remain up for grabs next time.

John Hood is a John Locke Foundation board member. His books Mountain Folk, Forest Folk, and Water Folk combine epic fantasy and American history.

“Swing voters aren’t necessarily ticket-splitters” was originally published on www.carolinajournal.com.