About 1 in 5 Baltimore County voters cast ballots for candidates from different parties for president and U.S. Senate this election cycle, putting back into play what some experts thought was a fading voting practice — ticket splitting — a University of Maryland, Baltimore County survey of voters found.

Republican former Gov. Larry Hogan benefited most from the trend in the U.S. Senate contest won by Democratic Sen.-elect Angela Alsobrooks. About 17% of Baltimore County residents who voted for Vice President Kamala Harris, the Democratic presidential nominee, voted for Hogan in the Senate race, the poll found. Just 4% of the county’s Donald J. Trump voters chose Alsobrooks for the Senate seat being vacated by Democrat Ben Cardin.

Of these Harris-Hogan voters, about 60% said they were politically moderate and over 35% said they were left-leaning. Less than 2% were conservative. Most of those Harris-Hogan ticket-splitters, 72%, were white, while Black and Hispanic people made up 15% and 3%, respectively.

Baltimore County has played an outsized role in shaping state politics, despite a roughly 2-to-1 registration advantage for Democrats. Since 2002, only one candidate has lost statewide office while winning Baltimore County — former Republican Gov. Robert Ehrlich in 2006. Baltimore County voters helped Hogan cruise to gubernatorial victories in 2014 and 2018, but Alsobrooks won the county this year by more than 5 percentage points.

The presidential and Senate races here were the tightest among Maryland’s largest counties.

While Harris-Hogan voters weren’t enough to carry him to victory, they demonstrated Hogan could still sway many Democrats even if they disagreed with him on key social issues. Voters have expressed concern that Hogan, who positioned himself as a Republican stalwart of progressive issues such as reproductive rights, would ultimately align himself with anti-abortion Republicans if he joined the Senate. Alsobrooks voiced similar concerns in an hourlong debate leading up to the election. About 90% of these Harris-Hogan voters, though, considered themselves to be pro-choice, the poll found.

“This shows the abortion issue is very important for electoral politics but it’s not actually at the top of their issue agenda,” said Ian G. Anson, an associate professor at UMBC who helmed the exit poll. “If abortion politics was at the top of the list for voters, Democrats would have won by an absurd landslide in all of the elections. So, it’s less predictive of voting behaviors than we think.” Alsobrooks ultimately garnered more than 54%, or about 1.6 million, of the state votes, while Hogan collected more than 43%, or about 1.3 million.

This year, Maryland’s first ballot question asked voters whether they wanted to enshrine abortion rights in the state constitution, an additional level of protection following a 2022 Supreme Court decision that said there was no federal constitutional right to abortion.

Slightly more than half of Baltimore County Hogan voters approved the amendment, while 39% voted against it. And over 90% of the county’s Alsobrooks voters chose to codify abortion rights into the state constitution.

“When abortion itself is on the ballot,” Anson said, “protecting abortion is extremely popular.”

This poll data also shows voter defections from their political parties were not a significant issue leading up to the presidential election, when some politicos suspected some “never Trump” Republicans would vote against Trump, Anson said. In the presidential race, county residents largely voted along party lines, the poll finds. About 4% of Democrats voted for Trump while 6% of Republicans voted for Harris, the data shows. Over 90% of self-identified partisans voted for their party’s presidential candidate.

Independent voters, however, markedly leaned toward Harris, the data shows. Almost 47% of them voted for Harris, while nearly 40% of them opted for Trump. This is in line with national exit polling data from Edison Research, which found independents largely favored Harris over Trump.

The poll was conducted by the University of Maryland, Baltimore County’s Institute of Politics. The survey was administered in person by a team of UMBC students on Oct. 31 and Nov. 5 among a random selection of 17 precincts, including four early voting sites and 13 Election Day polling places. The poll sampled 1,119 residents in Baltimore County. Respondents had an option to take an online version or paper copy of the survey.