On matters of substance and style, there is little distance between former President Donald J. Trump and Kari Lake, the bombastic former news anchor running for Senate in Arizona.
Both rose to fame on television. Both have refused to concede their last election. And both favor the incendiary rhetoric that delights supporters in the base of the Republican Party.
But there is a vast distance between them in the polls in the Grand Canyon state. Mr. Trump has consistently put up competitive polling numbers, while Ms. Lake has routinely lagged behind her Democratic opponent, Representative Ruben Gallego.
A similar phenomenon is playing out in at least two other battleground states where polling shows that despite Mr. Trump’s competitive standing, Republican challengers in pivotal Senate races are trailing the Democratic incumbents. In Nevada, Sam Brown, an Army veteran whom Mr. Trump helped elevate out of a crowded primary race, is trailing Senator Jacky Rosen, the mild-mannered, low-profile freshman Democrat. In Pennsylvania, David McCormick, a businessman, has begun to close what polling showed last month was a nine-point deficit with Senator Bob Casey.
Ticket-splitting, in which voters choose candidates of different parties for different offices up and down the ballot, has for years been on the wane in the United States, as partisan polarization has consumed American politics. But polling this year, which suggests that some conservative-leaning voters in critical states are rejecting Republican candidates for Senate even as they support the party’s presidential nominee, seems to indicate important pockets of the country where it is very much alive and could boost Democrats’ uphill battle to hold their majority in the Senate.
It also underscores what has emerged as a recurring theme: Even candidates who closely mirror Mr. Trump rarely are able to duplicate his political success.
“Many are trying to emulate Donald Trump; the problem is none of them are Donald Trump, and as a result they’re underperforming in races that categorically should be competitive,” said Mike Noble, an Arizona-based independent pollster. “And it’s hamstringing the G.O.P. on the Senate map this cycle.”
Republicans are still heavily favored to win the Senate, with polls showing their candidates ahead in states they must hold, including Florida and Texas, as well as in the critical state of Montana, where Senator Jon Tester, a Democrat, is lagging. And the G.O.P. candidates who have consistently trailed Mr. Trump argue that their races are closer than polling shows, giving them a path to victory.
Still, voters willing to divide their loyalties between the two parties could pose a steep challenge.
In Pennsylvania, these ticket splitters are largely working-class white voters who think of Mr. Casey, a three-term Democrat who hails from a prominent political family in the state, as being pro-labor. Mr. Casey has attacked his opponent, a former hedge fund executive who grew up in Pennsylvania but only recently moved back to run for Senate there, on his vast personal wealth and questioned his ties to the state.
In Nevada, Mr. Brown has leaned heavily on his biography, telling the story of how he was inspired to run for office after he survived a blast from a roadside bomb while serving as a U.S. Army lieutenant in Afghanistan. But until recently, he has run a largely cloistered campaign, allowing an onslaught of ads by Ms. Rosen, including referencing his move to Nevada from Texas, to define him.
“In previous elections, Sam Brown has come to our community,” said Nathan Robertson, the Republican mayor of Ely who has endorsed Ms. Rosen. “I’ve met him and his family; they’re very nice people. That being said, he’s just been running for office since he’s left the military. He doesn’t really have a track record to run on.”
Here in Arizona, Ms. Lake, who ran unsuccessfully for governor in 2022, is arguably the Senate Republican candidate this cycle who has styled herself most closely in Mr. Trump’s image. Pictures of the two side by side are plastered on her campaign’s bus and feature prominently on signs everywhere in the state.
But recent polling by The New York Times and Siena College indicated that 10 percent of Mr. Trump’s supporters said they would vote for Mr. Gallego in the Senate contest. The findings show that Mr. Gallego’s lead has been boosted largely by ticket splitters who are disproportionately young and Latino; representatives of his campaign say that they have also noticed a surge of crossover voters who are working-class men.
“A lot of them are people that look at Trump as a businessman, not as a politician,” Mr. Gallego said in an interview, describing voters who are supporting both him and the former president. “For me, it’ll be like, ‘You’re a veteran. I like that,’ ‘You come from the working class’ or ‘You understand what it means to be a worker.’ I think a lot of them feel like I meet their vibe, that they can trust me.”
On a recent Sunday night in Phoenix, Mr. Gallego, a former Marine who served in Iraq, was ordering dinner at a restaurant when he was approached by a man wearing a MAGA hat and a Trump T-shirt who asked him for a photo. Mr. Gallego agreed, and the man shortly returned with a challenge. He and some of his friends who are veterans were interested in voting for Mr. Gallego, the man said, but wanted the congressman to give him a reason to support him.
Mr. Gallego replied that he wouldn’t ever be 100 percent aligned with the man or his friends, but that he would work for them and be willing to listen to their views. “Good enough,” the man replied.
The interaction, Mr. Gallego said, reflected a dynamic he has noticed among some Trump voters — mostly men — who he believes are supporting the former president as a way of asserting independence.
“It’s hard to put my finger on it,” he said. “At the end of the day, they just want to be different. Being different means being for Trump.”
Mr. Gallego has worked to cultivate support among less politically engaged voters, casting the approach as a “continuous effort” rather than a one-time shot. That has included hosting events at a local boxing club where voters can come watch pay-per-view prize fights for free and meet him, and canvassing outside concerts featuring Latino artists, including when Bad Bunny played Phoenix.
The son of Mexican and Colombian immigrants, Mr. Gallego leans heavily on his Latino roots, addressing crowds in a mix of Spanish and English. His campaign passes out signs and fliers modeled after lotería cards, the centerpiece of a traditional Mexican game akin to Bingo that features a standard set of characters, like “La sirena,” or the mermaid.
In one postcard distributed by Mr. Gallego’s campaign, he is depicted as “El senador” — the senator. Ms. Lake is depicted as “La peligrosa” — the dangerous one.
Mr. Gallego has also been boosted by what voters and political operatives describe as a deep resistance within the state to Ms. Lake.
Gino Ortiz plans to vote for both Vice President Kamala Harris, the Democratic presidential candidate, and Mr. Gallego in November. During an interview at a backyard meet-and-greet for Mr. Gallego where attendees dined on homemade breakfast burritos and pan dulce, Mr. Ortiz recounted how he had found it easier to convince his conservative-leaning friends to turn away from Ms. Lake than from Mr. Trump.
His friends who are supporting Mr. Trump, he said, frequently argued that the economy was better under the former president and believe that he would rein in inflation.
“He’s done a really good job of marketing himself and to be this man that, going back four years, had a better economy, was more, ‘American,’” he said.
When Mr. Ortiz tried to convince them otherwise, he said, “They just don’t seem to buy it. But at the same time, when you bring up Kari Lake, she just comes off so negative and not likable.”
Mr. Noble said that his polling showed that Ms. Lake was underperforming Mr. Trump among key constituencies including Republicans, suburbanites, women and older voters.
“When people talk about Kari Lake, they refer to her as the Donald Trump of Arizona, and it’s true and it’s not,” he said. “It’s true she has all of the baggage Trump has. But she doesn’t have any of the policy wins.”
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