In 2018, seven Ohio counties voted for Sherrod Brown and for the ticket of Mike DeWine and Jon Husted. This year Brown and Husted are running against each other, with a second close race directly below them. We went through every state that has filled both offices on one day since 1990, and all 88 Ohio counties.
By Call the Map Data Desk
Each mark is a state voting for senator and governor on the same day, 1990–2024: 277 of the 293 such elections. Marks in neither party’s color split the two offices.
In December 2017, after Mike DeWine and Jon Husted stopped running against each other for governor of Ohio and merged into one ticket, a statehouse reporter asked Sherrod Brown what he made of it.
Brown, the state’s Democratic senator, was up for re-election himself the next fall. He told Andy Chow of the Statehouse News Bureau that he suspected a deal, with DeWine at the top of the ticket on the condition that he serve one term. “Ohio has elections for a reason,” Brown said. Husted, asked about it, said there had been “no talk about that.”
Eleven months later Ohio held the election, and it gave all three men what they wanted. Brown won a third term by about seven points. A few lines below his name, the line that read “Mike DeWine and Jon Husted” won by about four.
It had been 44 years since Ohio last sent a senator of one party and a governor of the other into office on the same day, by the count of Eric Ostermeier of the University of Minnesota. That was 1974, when Jim Rhodes took the governorship back from John Gilligan by fewer than 11,500 votes while John Glenn won his Senate seat by 34 points.
Nobody counts how many people voted for both Brown and DeWine in 2018, because the vote is secret. The returns do set a floor. DeWine received 178,266 more votes than Jim Renacci, the Republican running against Brown. Suppose every Ohioan who skipped the Senate race, or voted against Brown, voted for DeWine. More than 91,000 ballots still have to carry both names, and the true figure is certainly higher. Seven counties gave pluralities to both: Ashtabula, Erie, Lake, Montgomery, Ottawa, Portage and Wood.
Husted is a senator now. DeWine appointed him in January 2025 to the seat JD Vance left for the vice presidency, and Husted has to win it on Nov. 3. The Democrat running against him is Brown, who lost his own seat two years ago to Bernie Moreno. Directly under their race is the one for governor, between Vivek Ramaswamy, a Republican, and Amy Acton, a Democrat. As this page was built, Call the Map’s forecast gave Brown 60 chances in 100 and Acton 54.
We went back through every November since 1990 in which a state filled a Senate seat and a governorship on the same day. There are 293 of them. Then we took Ohio’s own returns apart, county by county.
IThirteen states out of twenty-four
That is how many split in 1990. Illinois kept a Democratic senator, Paul Simon, by 30 points and elected a Republican governor, Jim Edgar, the same day. Minnesota sent Paul Wellstone to the Senate and put Arne Carlson, a Republican, in the governor’s office.
From 1990 through 2006, 72 of 149 such elections ended with one office in each party’s hands. The two results in a state had almost nothing to do with each other. The typical gap between the Senate margin and the governor’s margin was 20 points.
In 2008, five states voted for both offices and none split. Since then the count is 28 of 141, and the typical gap has shrunk to 10 points. In 2024 the only state of nine to do it was Vermont, which re-elected Bernie Sanders and Phil Scott, a Republican, together.
States used to split these two offices about half the time. Since 2008 it is one pair in five.
Each column is one November election: the share of states voting for a senator and a governor that day which gave the offices to different parties, and the typical distance between the two margins.
1990–2006: 72 of 149 pairs split (48%); median gap 20 points. 2008–2024: 28 of 141 (20%); median gap 10 points. Presidential years have few pairs, because most states elect governors at the midterm.
Source: Call the Map analysis of 293 pairs. Senate returns from the MIT Election Data and Science Lab; governor returns from state returns as compiled by FiveThirtyEight (1996–2024) and Algara and Amlani (1990–1994). The gap counts only pairs where both contests were a Democrat against a Republican. Download the data
Scott has now done this four times. Chris Sununu did it three times in New Hampshire, Charlie Baker twice in Massachusetts, Larry Hogan once in Maryland. Those four Republican governors account for half of the 20 recent cases in which a state chose a Democratic senator and a Republican governor at once. Only eight states went the other way, among them Kansas in 2022, when Laura Kelly held the governorship while Jerry Moran won his Senate race by 23 points.
Baker’s 2018 is the dot near the bottom right corner of the chart below: Elizabeth Warren up 24 points, Baker up 34.
One dot per state, per election day. The shaded corners are splits.
Across: the Senate margin. Up: the governor’s margin, same state, same day. A state that voted identically for both would sit on the dotted line. Tap or point near a dot to read it; choose a state to follow it through the years.
SplitBoth DemocraticBoth RepublicanOhio
Ohio, 2018
Senate
D+6.8Sherrod Brown
Governor
R+3.7Mike DeWine
Apart
10.6points; the offices split
Ohio’s pairs
Senate first, then governor.
Source: Call the Map analysis; sources as in the chart above. 277 of the 293 pairs are plotted. The other 16 are counted as split or not but have no Democrat-against-Republican margin to plot: one contest was unopposed, or its top two were not a Democrat and a Republican. Margins beyond 60 points are drawn at the edge. Independents who caucused with a party (Sanders, King) are counted with it.
IINevada, by a point and a half
Vermont and Massachusetts are lopsided states with one governor who is an exception. Ohio this year resembles a different set of elections, the ones in which both contests were decided by five points or fewer.
There have been ten since 2008. Six split. Nevada, in 2022, re-elected Senator Catherine Cortez Masto by less than a point and replaced its Democratic governor with Joe Lombardo, a Republican, by a point and a half. Wisconsin that night kept both Ron Johnson, its Republican senator, and Tony Evers, its Democratic governor. North Carolina in 2020 chose Thom Tillis for the Senate and Roy Cooper for governor. The others were Illinois in 2010, Colorado in 2014 and New Hampshire in 2016. The four states that stayed with one party were Montana in 2012, New Hampshire in 2014, Florida in 2018 and Arizona in 2022.
Ten elections is a short list. Still, in a state where a party wins 60 percent, a candidate has to run 20 points ahead of it to change the result. In Nevada, about two were enough.
Kyle Kondik, an Ohio native and the managing editor of Sabato’s Crystal Ball, was asked about Ohio’s 2018 result four years afterward by Karen Kasler of the Statehouse News Bureau. He called it “basically a 10% difference in margin between the governor’s race and the Senate race.”
Ohio has voted for both offices on one ballot six times since 1990. Once, it split them.
Each row is one November ballot: where the Senate race and the governor’s race finished, on one scale.
SenateGovernor
1994
R+14R+47Same party
1998
R+13R+5.4Same party
2006
D+12D+24Same party
2010
R+17R+2.0Same party
2018
D+6.8R+3.7Split
2022
R+6.1R+25Same party
2026forecast
D+1.5D+0.6
R+50EvenD+50
Source: 1994–2022, official returns (2018 from the Ohio Secretary of State’s amended county results; other years from the MIT Election Data and Science Lab, FiveThirtyEight’s results archive and Algara and Amlani). 2026 is Call the Map’s forecast margin, read from the edition this page was built from (as of 2026-10-05); it is the middle of a wide range, shown on the Senate and governor pages.
IIIWoodsfield
Monroe County sits on the Ohio River across from West Virginia. Its courthouse, in Woodsfield, has a green dome. In 2018 the county voted for DeWine by 28 points and against Brown by 5. No county in the state put more distance between Brown and the Democrat running for governor.
The Monroe County Courthouse in Woodsfield. Photo: Bwsmith84, CC BY 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons.
Brown ran ahead of that Democrat, Richard Cordray, in all 88 counties that year. The big counties supplied most of the extra votes: about 27,000 in Cuyahoga, 23,000 in Franklin. The widest gaps in percentage terms were in places like Monroe: Belmont and Harrison nearby, and Henry, Williams, Putnam and Seneca in the farm country of the northwest. The gap was smallest in Paulding County and in the Cincinnati suburbs.
How far the Democrat for Senate ran ahead of the other Democrat, county by county
Three Ohio elections with a Senate race and another statewide contest on the same day. “The gap” is the Senate Democrat’s margin minus the other Democrat’s, in points, in the same county. Darker means a wider gap. Tap a county.
Brown ran ahead of Cordray in all 88 counties
EvenBrown +25 ahead
Outlined: voted for Brown and for DeWine (7 counties)
Monroe County
U.S. Senate
Renacci +4.72,518 to 2,765
Governor
DeWine +28.41,760 to 3,219
The gap
23.7points; 758 more votes for Brown than Cordray
Widest gaps
Narrowest
Statewide, 2018: U.S. Senate D+6.8 (Brown 2,358,508, Renacci 2,057,559); governor R+3.7 (Cordray 2,070,046, DeWine 2,235,825). Counties that voted for Brown and for DeWine: Ashtabula, Erie, Lake, Montgomery, Ottawa, Portage, Wood.
Source: Ohio Secretary of State, official county results for the general elections of Nov. 6, 2018 (amended), Nov. 8, 2022, and Nov. 5, 2024. Margins are shares of all votes cast for candidates in that contest. County comparisons describe electorates, not individual voters.
Six years later Monroe County voted for Donald Trump by 60 points. Brown lost it by 45, which was again the widest gap in Ohio. He ran ahead of Kamala Harris in every county in the state and lost his seat by 3.6 points.
In August 2024 Brown went to Weirton, W.Va., across the river, for the reopening of a plant. Doug Zamborski, a safety engineer there, told NPR’s Ximena Bustillo he was “100%” voting for Brown and also voting for Trump. Joe Plott, a TimkenSteel worker who had driven over from Canton after a midnight shift, explained how the men he works with keep the two apart: “what Brown could do for Ohio and what Trump will do for the nation.”
Of the seven counties that voted for both Brown and DeWine, six had left Brown by 2024: Ashtabula, Erie, Lake, Ottawa, Portage and Wood. He lost eight counties in all between those two elections. One was Mahoning, which holds Youngstown and which he had carried by 21 points; he lost it by 220 votes out of about 111,000. “You saw me almost once a month for 18 years,” he told David Skolnick of the Tribune Chronicle in January, and he said he would not assume those voters were coming back.
Youngstown, the seat of Mahoning County, in March 2025. Photo: Designism, CC0, via Wikimedia Commons.
DeWine’s crossover vote came from other places. In 2022 he was re-elected by 25 points while JD Vance, the same day, beat Tim Ryan by 6. Five counties voted for DeWine and for Ryan: Hamilton, Lorain, Lucas, Montgomery and Summit, which hold Cincinnati, Toledo, Dayton and Akron. The difference between the two contests was widest in Lucas County, around Toledo, and in the Mahoning Valley, which Ryan represented in Congress.
DeWine is not running this year. Brown is. A county map cannot say whether the voter in Woodsfield who chose Brown and DeWine in 2018 is the same person who chose Brown and Trump in 2024.
The Ohio Statehouse in Columbus, where the governor works. Photo: Ɱ, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons.
IVThe plumbers’ endorsement
Last fall the Ohio State Association of Plumbers and Pipefitters endorsed Vivek Ramaswamy for governor. It also endorsed Sherrod Brown for Senate. So did the Central Midwest Regional Council of Carpenters, NOTUS and Signal Ohio reported. Husted has taken some of Brown’s old labor support for himself: the Operating Engineers local that covers the Mahoning Valley backed Brown in 2024 and backs Husted now. “He lost by 200,000 votes,” Husted told NOTUS. The official margin was 206,434.
The certified ballot lists three candidates for the Senate seat, which carries the two years left in Vance’s term: Brown; Husted; and William B. Redpath, a Libertarian. For governor it lists Acton with David Pepper, Ramaswamy with Robert A. McColley, and the Libertarians Don Kissick and James L. Mills. Acton, a physician, ran the state health department under DeWine in 2019 and 2020. Ramaswamy, a businessman, ran for president in 2024. Early voting begins Oct. 6.
The forecast puts the Senate race at D+1.5 and the governor’s race at D+0.6, each inside a range more than a dozen points wide. It produces those figures by simulating the whole election 100,000 times, and in every simulation each race in the country gets a winner. A good night for Democrats nationally lifts Brown and Acton together. Each race also moves on its own.
Counted that way, the likeliest result is Brown and Acton, 38 times in 100, then Husted and Ramaswamy, 25 times. Ohio splits in 37: Brown and Ramaswamy in 22, Husted and Acton in 15.
The four ways November can go
Chances in 100 for each pair of winners, counted from the forecast’s simulated election nights. The four add to 100. Move the national mood and all four move at once.
BrownActon
38in 100
Both Democrats
BrownRamaswamy
22in 100
Split
HustedActon
15in 100
Split
HustedRamaswamy
25in 100
Both Republicans
A split, either way
37 in 100
Brown wins
60 in 100 (D+1.5)
Acton wins
54 in 100 (D+0.6)
How linked are the two races?
Forecast: 37
6: lockstep49: unrelated
Chance of a split in 100, at today’s forecast, under three assumptions about the same two races.
Chance of each outcome by national environment shift
Shift
Brown and Acton
Brown and Ramaswamy
Husted and Acton
Husted and Ramaswamy
10 more Republican
5
9
11
75
9 more Republican
7
11
12
70
8 more Republican
9
12
13
66
7 more Republican
11
14
14
61
6 more Republican
13
15
16
56
5 more Republican
17
17
16
50
4 more Republican
21
18
16
45
3 more Republican
25
19
16
40
2 more Republican
29
20
16
35
1 more Republican
33
21
16
30
Forecast
38
22
15
25
1 more Democratic
44
21
14
21
2 more Democratic
50
20
12
18
3 more Democratic
55
19
11
15
4 more Democratic
60
18
10
12
5 more Democratic
65
17
9
9
6 more Democratic
69
16
8
7
7 more Democratic
73
15
7
5
8 more Democratic
77
13
6
4
9 more Democratic
80
12
5
3
10 more Democratic
83
11
4
2
Source: Call the Map forecast, edition ctm-2.2-20261005-b2ee7f1a28f9, as of 2026-10-05; this figure updates with the forecast. The four chances are counted over the 2,000 simulated election nights the edition publishes and fitted so each race’s total equals its published chance. A shift moves the Senate race by 0.8 of a point and the governor’s race by 0.7 for each point of national movement, the response the forecast’s own scenarios use. A shifted mood is a what-if, not a forecast.
That is fewer than the six in ten among the close elections since 2008, and more than the one in five among all of them. The forecast ties the two Ohio races together loosely. Across its simulations their margins have a correlation of 0.31, on a scale where 1 is lockstep and 0 is no connection. A split is likeliest, at 37 in 100, in a year one point more Republican than the forecast expects.
The forecast has Brown running 0.9 points ahead of Acton. In 2018 he finished 10.6 points ahead of Cordray, and in 2024 7.6 ahead of Harris. In neither year did the other Democrat outrun him in a single county.
The plumbers’ union is on record for Brown and Ramaswamy. In Ashtabula, Erie, Lake, Montgomery, Ottawa, Portage and Wood counties, the voters who chose Brown and the DeWine–Husted ticket in 2018 will find Brown and Husted on the same line.
