By admin 
For years Republicans have dominated the straight party ticket option for voters and its elected officials have gladly promoted the option.
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Push one button, and it votes for all the Republicans running for office on a person’s ballot. It helps reduce the amount of drop-off for down ballot races. Voting a straight partisan ticket still allows people to vote separately for the nonpartisan races that are on the ballot.
However, the state’s Democratic Party is promoting the practice too in this cycle. It’s easier this year as Democrats have nominated a candidate in all 124 House seats, all seven constitutional officer positions, the U.S. Senate and all seven congressional seats, when they’ve had trouble in the past fielding candidates.
With Democrats running for all the high-profile seats, state Democratic Party Chairwoman Christale Spain has added a line to her messaging.
“You got a whole ballot to fill out this year, you got it from the top to the bottom,” Spain said at an event in St. Matthews with former Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel. “They’ve got ballots to fill out, and as Democrats in Calhoun County, you need to encourage them to vote a straight Democratic ticket. They don’t need to be picking and choosing. A straight Democratic ticket from Jermaine (Johnson) all the way down.”
Spain insisted that promoting straight-ticket voting is not a new message, but rather one that needed to be said louder on the Democratic side.
“It gets suppressed every election cycle on our side and what we people need to realize is that Republicans take advantage of that every cycle, and they use straight ticket voting, and that’s how they’ve been beating us,” Spain said at a Richland County polling place on the first day of early voting.
Straight-ticket voting reduces the amount of drop off from the top of the ticket to the down ballot races.
“Folks who don’t have the money that they would like to have, don’t have the name idea they would like to have, they get on our ticket, they get nominated, they get to benefit from that straight ticket support,” SC GOP Chairman Drew McKissick said in an interview in Pendleton after a rally with President Donald Trump.
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According to the SC Democratic Party, 64,000 South Carolinians in 2024 voted for former Democratic presidential nominee Vice President Kamala Harris, but left the rest of the ballot blank.
However, only 10,000 South Carolina voters voted for Trump and left the rest of their ballot blank.
“We’ve got to make sure that we’re using the same tools available for us that they’re using,” Spain said.
In 2020, polling indicated that the late U.S. Sen. Lindsey Graham was in a close election against Democratic nominee Jaime Harrison. Graham won that election by about 10 percentage points. It helped Graham, who received 54% of the vote in his race, was on a ticket in reliably Republican South Carolina with Trump, who received 55% of the vote in South Carolina. Graham often said during that cycle he expected to have similar level of support as Trump in that election.
In South Carolina, Republicans won all the statewide constitutional offices in 2022. They hold six out of the seven congressional seats and a supermajority in both chambers of the General Assembly.
The SC Democratic Party used to beat the Republican Party in straight ticket voting. From 2006 through 2014, more voters punched a straight Democratic ticket than Republican ticket.
That switched in 2016. In each of the last three partisan general elections, Republicans have garnered at least 243,000 more straight ticket votes than Democrats.
“I expect to see big double digits margins for Republicans all across the state on a straight ticket, because quite frankly, there are more Republicans in South Carolina than there are Democrats,” McKissick said. “Straight ticket voting helps us everywhere, up and down the ballot.”
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