Who are Pennsylvania's split-ticket voters? We talked to some

York voter John Knockey isn't especially happy with any of the options on his ballot in this fall's biggest races.

A devout Christian, Knockey said he would generally vote for candidates who align with his anti-abortion values and other conservative social beliefs. But GOP gubernatorial candidate Doug Mastriano’s alliance with former President Donald Trump and attempts to overturn the 2020 election results are troubling to Knockey.

“That whole mindset tells me he's not the kind of person I would trust to have in office,” Knockey, 75, recently said. 

So this election, Knockey is thinking of splitting his ticket by casting his vote for Republican Mehmet Oz in the Senate race and for Democrat Josh Shapiro as governor. 

“I don't like the whole thought of picking the lesser of two evils,” he said. “But I'm entertaining that.”

Knockey represents a fairly small number of voters who are planning on dividing their ballot this way in November; a USA TODAY/Suffolk University poll from late last month found about 3% of those surveyed expressed support for both Oz and Shapiro, while just over 1% said they were leaning toward Mastriano and Democratic Senate candidate John Fetterman. 

But Alison Dagnes, a political science professor from Shippensburg University, said this slice of the electorate is made up of people who are politically disengaged or on the fence. In other words, they’re theexact type of swing voters candidates typically want to target — especially in the neck-and-neck Senate race between Oz and Fetterman.

Recent polls suggest Oz is succeeding in appealing to a larger pool of Pennsylvania voters than Mastriano, and the Senate candidate has seemed to keep the gubernatorial candidate at arms' length on the campaign trail.

Split-ticket voting has been on the decline in recent years, amid a rise in hyper-partisanship. This midterm election, though, Dagnes is predicting that trend will reverse in Pennsylvania and other parts of the nation, as even conservative voters reject Republican nominees who are too polarizing or dogged by controversy. 

“We're in such a negative, partisan, polarized environment that I think frequently voters feel like, ‘No, I gotta stick with my own team,’” she said. “But if you're hearing that around the country, there's going to be split-ticket voting, suddenly, the idea appeals to you.”

Have abortion rights faded as an election issue?

Mastriano, who once advocated for charging women with murder if they violated a proposed abortion ban, was a hard-pass from the beginning for many female, suburban swing voters, Dagnes said. Oz is better positioned to pull support from this demographic, she said, especially with the cooling of public outrage over this year's Dobbs ruling eliminating the constitutional right to an abortion.

“Women voters in the suburbs forgot how angry they were about the Dobbs decision, because you can only be angry for so long about something that does not affect you constantly,” she said. “And abortion rights is one of those issues that really doesn’t affect you constantly.”

Pat Poprik, who chairs the Bucks County Republican Committee, said she’s noticed abortion has faded since the summer as a leading issue among voters in her area, a suburban swing county near Philadelphia. 

People in her community are much more focused on inflation and crime, with some now afraid to drive into the city and worried that violence from Philadelphia will spill into their neighborhoods, according to Poprik.

With that in mind, she said it can be hard even for left-leaning voters to support Fetterman, whom Republicans have attacked as weak on public safety issues. 

“When it comes to Senate, they’re absolutely not going to support someone who is so, so soft on crime,” she said. 

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But Bucks County Democratic Committee Chair Steve Santarsiero said the Supreme Court’s decision on Dobbs is very much alive in the minds of local voters, who he said are alarmed by the erosion of reproductive rights and worried the ruling could portend the loss of other personal freedoms.

“I think that really sent a shockwave through the local electorate,” he said. 

Santarsiero said nearly everyone he’s spoken with is planning on voting a straight Democratic ticket, recognizing that “the Republican candidates are just not acceptable.” 

However, as the Senate race has worn on, Oz and his supporters have tried and often succeeded at shifting attention from reproductive rights to crime or the economy, Dagnes said. And voters who are closed off to Mastriano might be open to hearing from Oz on these issues, she said.

The attack ads this cycle even seem to be appealing to split voters, Dagnes said. She was on her phone recently when a super PAC ad popped up that bashed Fetterman by suggesting he was too far-left for Shapiro.

“Even the dark money groups on the Republican side are saying, ‘Yeah, we get it. You’re going to vote for Josh Shapiro,’” Dagnes said. “I think that tells you a lot about Mastriano. But I think it also tells you how desperate they are to hold onto this [Senate seat].”

Pennsylvanians who plan to split their vote

Pat Stringent, an 80-year-old Johnstown native, said she'll likely vote split ticket.

According to Stringent, Fetterman doesn't present himself as intelligent enough to be a U.S. Senator. She doesn't plan to vote for Mastriano either, citing his positions as anti-gay.

"I don't think I've heard anything bad about him," she said of Shapiro.

Stringent added that too many politicians are in it for themselves instead of their constituents. She's a lifelong Democrat who changed her registration to Republican just a few years ago because she felt the Democratic Party abandoned the working class.

"We need younger candidates for public office," she said, adding that she feels more quality people would enter politics if the campaigning wasn't so negative.

"A lot of good people don't want to run because they don't want to be mudslinging. Everyone has a past."

Knockey, the voter from York, also changed parties in recent years after growing disenfranchised with the GOP. He’s now registered as an independent, and he’s been so torn in the last two elections that he ended up voting for a write-in candidate rather than choosing one of the listed names. 

Though he’s thinking of voting for Oz this time around, he doesn’t like the Republican’s ties with Trump. And he objects to Fetterman’s call for legalization of marijuana, a substance Knockey views as a “gateway drug.” 

Shapiro would be an easy vote for him, if the Democrat shared his anti-abortion views, he said. But he struggles to imagine himself supporting Mastriano, who has pledged that as governor he would decertify voting machines in areas where he suspects election fraud occurred.  

“He’s a wild guy, and this whole thing that I hear him saying about seizing election machines … well, that sounds like a dictator to me,” Knockey said. 

USA Today Network Pennsylvania reporter Bruce Siwy contributed to this article.