Split-ticket voters were declared extinct. They may decide the Senate.

While parties and pundits may cast America as neatly lined up into tribal camps, competing in a zero-sum contest for the future of the republic, allow Richard Bink to break the mold.

The Savannah, Georgia, veterinarian voted early at Islands Library here on Georgia’s Whitemarsh Island as ibises veered through an ultramarine sky. He usually votes Republican, but has turned to the center lately, letting his party membership lapse.

On Wednesday, Mr. Bink pulled the lever for his Republican incumbent governor, Brian Kemp, and also for his sitting Democratic senator, Raphael Warnock.

His bifurcation is in large part a rejection. He says he cannot stomach Herschel Walker, the controversial Republican candidate and former football star endorsed by former President Donald Trump.

“Quality candidate, and all that,” says Mr. Bink, who also talks about wanting to protect democracy as a reason for his support for a Democratic senator.

Mr. Bink’s vote – and the votes of others like him – could be key. After all, Mr. Walker and Senator Warnock are locked in a dead heat.

Situated just east of Savannah, suburbs like this one are where political scientists say most of America’s political independents can be found: middle class, fairly racially diverse, center-right leaning, and, like Mr. Bink, possessing a keen sense of civic pride.

Many political analysts wrote obituaries for the split-ticket voter after the 2016 election, when every state that elected a Republican senator also voted for Mr. Trump, while every state that picked a Democratic senator voted for Hillary Clinton. But this year, polling suggests that voters in at least nine states – including Georgia and Pennsylvania – could wind up picking governors from a different party than their U.S. senator.

Reasons include candidate quality, the power of incumbency, and uneven fundraising. But for some voters, the mutineering may even go a little deeper – a pushback against today’s rigid partisanship in favor of personal agency and individual expression. Voting is “the only power we have left,” as Irvin Bryant, a Black voter from Atlanta, puts it.

“Voters who split their tickets tend to not follow politics as closely as the people who are strongly partisan, so I’m not sure we have a complete understanding of how they make up their mind,” says David Kimball, a University of Missouri political scientist who, as co-author, tried to answer that question in the book “Why Americans Split Their Tickets.” “In a way, ticket splitters represent some – I don’t know if ‘rationality’ is the right word. We want elections to respond to shifts in voter opinion, and split ticket voters, for better or worse, are [examples of] that.” 

Consider Ed LeCates. Clad in a gray hoodie, khakis, and sneakers, Mr. LeCates sat this week on a bench next to the courthouse in downtown York County in Pennsylvania. Open in front of him was a book on algebra. A police officer stood near a ballot drop box by the courthouse.

Mr. LeCates is a proud Republican. He used to sit on the state committee. But he finds himself contemplating something different this election: Voting for a Democrat for governor.

Specifically, he’s not sure he can bring himself to vote for gubernatorial candidate Doug Mastriano, a Republican who was present at the Jan. 6 insurrection, though he didn’t enter the Capitol and has been charged with no crime. “What happened on Jan. 6 was sickening, sad, atrocious,” says Mr. LeCates.

Conversely, he believes Attorney General Josh Shapiro, the Democratic candidate, projects competence. “I could live with Shapiro because at least he would be honest,” says Mr. LeCates. Mr. Shapiro is the only Democrat Mr. LeCates is contemplating voting for.

Polls show that many Pennsylvanians are mulling a similar choice: Mr. Mastriano lags 10% behind Mr. Shapiro, while the Senate race is neck and neck. Spoiler alert: Mr. LeCates has yet to finalize his decision.

In the 1980s, as many as 1 out of every 3 voters split their ballots. As parties grew more ideologically homogenous and politics became increasingly cloaked in identity, that declined to just over 1 out of 10 in 2016. And though Republicans gained seats in the House even though Mr. Trump lost in 2020, only Maine deviated from party uniformity on presidential and senate votes. Thirty-five House districts in 2016 saw “cross-over” results. By 2020, that number had dropped to 16, according to analysis by the University of Chicago.

“People vote out of habit, and it really does get to be like sports: You root for the laundry rather than the person wearing it,” says Andrew Smith, a political scientist at the University of New Hampshire in Durham.

Split-ticket dynamics are different from state to state, but Pennsylvania and Georgia could be seen as bookends.

As Rust Belt cities like Pittsburgh continue to shrink, parts of Pennsylvania have been drawn into a politics of scarcity. They vote differently than Philadelphia and its booming suburbs. Meanwhile, parts of fast-growing Georgia ponder the politics of prosperity, says political scientist Lara Brown.

Those dynamics are “changing the way politics are happening in those states,” says Ms. Brown, author of “Amateur Hour,” about presidential character and leadership. “Politics is really about who gets what, when, and how, so when you are growing ... then it is a politics of, how do we divide the pie? But when it’s shrinking, it becomes a zero-sum game.”

Pennsylvania – the nation’s center of political gravity and perhaps its ultimate battleground on Nov. 8 – has been ahead of the ticket-splitting trend.

In 2019, Pennsylvania removed the option to automatically vote straight ticket – or “all of the above” – joining 15 others that have done the same since 1994.

The state in some ways kicked off the split-ticket era in 1956 when Republican Dwight Eisenhower carried the Keystone State while a sliver of voters – about 6 percentage points – crossed over to vote for U.S. Senate candidate Joseph Clark, a Democrat.

Pennsylvania has its share of solid-red and solid-blue areas. Its ticket splitters are bunched in large part into the Lehigh Valley. Northampton County, the Allentown suburbs, voted for Joe Biden for president and Mr. Shapiro for attorney general in 2020, but elected Republicans for treasurer and auditor, seats that have only been Republican once in the past 60 years.

Those districts are not a huge chunk of Pennsylvania’s total electorate, says Republican strategist Sam Chen, in Allentown, “but it’s enough that those areas are what make up the final determination of how the state is going to go.”

Mr. Chen, also a political scientist at Northampton Community College, has a keen personal sense of the crossover tensions. He is voting for Mr. Shapiro for governor and Mehmet Oz, a Republican, for Senate. His main reason is aversion to their opponents: Mr. Mastriano, the Republican, for governor and John Fetterman, a Democrat, for senator.

“I don’t think people have migrated. I think party apparatuses have,” says Mr. Chen. “Candidates always matter.”

In a phone interview, Chad Robson, a Pennsylvania human resources consultant, largely agrees. Candidates who vote the party line are a turnoff for him, he says.

“Traditionally, I’ve been more on the conservative side of social issues, but those are becoming less important to me, especially as we’ve seen the economy tank lately,” he says. “So the economy is probably my top issue currently.”

Tara Deihm, a registered Republican, has lived in Pennsylvania her whole life. Wearing a cardigan and slacks, she’s taking a break from her job at a community development financial institution in Lancaster.

Though she has voted Republican across the board for years – except in 2016, when she didn’t vote for president, and 2020, when she voted for Mr. Biden – her concerns about abortion rights and middle-class economic opportunity are spurring her to vote Democratic for both governor and senator. But she still plans to vote for Republican candidates down-ballot.

“I pay a lot of attention to the candidates and what they stand for,” says Ms. Deihm. “I also base [my decision] on the past and what they show themselves to be.”

Nearly 700 miles to the South, Baoky Vu has traveled a difficult road away from being a GOP voter right down the ticket.

Mr. Vu, a former Dekalb County election official in Georgia, was censured in 2021 by the local GOP for pushing back against claims of massive voter fraud in 2020. It wasn’t his first tussle with his party. A Vietnamese immigrant, Mr. Vu also resigned as a presidential elector in 2016, saying he couldn’t cast a ballot for Mr. Trump.

This year, Mr. Vu will cast his vote for Mr. Kemp as governor and Senator Warnock to retain his Capitol seat. He sees it as too risky for American democracy to cast his ballot for Mr. Walker, who has faced allegations of spousal abuse and, more recently, claims from two women that they had affairs with Mr. Walker and the anti-abortion candidate paid for their abortions. Mr. Walker has also said he had been diagnosed with dissociative personality disorder, though he says he has overcome it.

In the days before the election, polls show Governor Kemp has a commanding lead in his race, while Mr. Walker is neck and neck with Senator Warnock, despite being dramatically outspent.

For most Republican voters, what Mr. Walker says or does seems to matter less than what he represents: a reliable vote for conservative policies they see as America’s salvation. But even a small number of defections could make the difference in a tight race.

“The election is a story of a small sliver of moderate, mostly white, lean-Republican voters who have shown they are willing to vote for a Democrat,” says Bernard Fraga, a voter preference expert at Emory University in Atlanta.

But some Black voters, too, may be splitting their tickets on Tuesday.

Clarence McCloud, a Black voter from Savannah, may help offset some of Mr. Walker’s difficulties among white suburbanites by splitting his ticket the other way. He is voting for Stacey Abrams, a Democrat, for governor and Mr. Walker for Senator. “Walker is just my kind of guy,” explains Mr. McCloud.

Even as Black voting power has increased in Georgia faster than in any other state, voting patters are becoming less monolithic. A mid-October poll by Data for Progress found that 15% of Black voters planned to vote for Mr. Kemp, up from 13% in 2018.

Still, some Black independents say they would have been more open to voting Republican had the party nominated someone other than Mr. Walker.

“I look at fiscal and economical issues, which is why I’ve voted for Republicans in the past,” says Pashuen Thompson, an African-American psychiatrist in Atlanta. “But if you put someone unqualified up it comes off as a cynical ploy, and it insults a lot of voters like me.”

Back on Whitemarsh Island, Mr. Bink, knows that his choices may be critical to the outcome in an evenly divided state and country.

But he admits to having a deeper concern. He is well aware of Georgia’s central role in the 2020 election and an ongoing investigation in Fulton County into whether former President Trump illegally interfered in the administration of the election.

Voting, to him, isn’t just about participation in democracy, but protecting it.

“That’s why we’re here, right?” says Mr. Bink, nodding toward the long line forming outside Islands Library.

Staff writer Christa Case Bryant contributed to this report.