Back last week I mentioned, in one of my Senate campaign updates, that Mary Peltola (D-AK) was leading in the race to replace the late Don Young (R-AK) in the lone Alaskan seat to the House of Representatives, but election officials were waiting for absentee votes to be counted. Recall Alaska is using ranked choice voting (RCV), which I consider favorable to moderates.
The winner has been announced, and it’s Democrat Mary Peltola, says CBS News:
On Wednesday, the Alaska Division of Elections tabulated the final results during a public livestream, which showed Peltoa coming out on top with 51.47% after Begich’s votes were redistributed to his voters’ second choice candidate.
According to election officials in Alaska, 15,445 of Begich’s voters listed Peltola as their second choice while 27,042 put down Palin as their second option. The final tally showed Peltola with 91,206 votes to Palin’s 85,987 votes.
This is the latest in “Democratic overperformance” (they did better than expected) in special elections, and once again refutes the red wave theory, aka Republicans taking back the House and Senate in November, as touted by pundits up until a couple of weeks ago. What does it portend?
No red wave.
While Palin did pick up a majority of the second votes for Begich, who is presumably less extremist than the former Alaska governor known for her extremism, more than 1/3 of his voters chose to go with Peltola, which put her over the top.
To me, that indicates a sizable minority of Republicans do not buy into the long-held extremist proposition that Democrats are evil (“babykillers!”), as Peltola announces on her website that she is pro-choice. They recognize that the threat to the United States is not from Democrats like Peltola, who appears to be fairly middle of the road and focused on Alaskan issues, but from extremists like Palin.
Palin is running again in November for the same seat, as is Begich and Peltola. If Palin loses again, she’ll fade into the Republican extremist woodwork, showing up as a celebrity politician who makes extremist speeches and collects paychecks for doing so. Extremist politics is a grift.
Begich has something of a political background, and may be back.
And the Alaska Republican Party (ARP)? This loss is a step towards their own political hell of irrelevance, as I said before. If Peltola turns this into a streak, there will be some serious upset in the ARP, and if archetypal moderate Senator Murkowski (R-AK) wins her reelection campaign, as I, and everyone else, expects, the ARP may just fly apart as moderates fight to regain control of a party that is becoming an extremist sandbox, to judge by their actions and not by any special knowledge on my part.
And, finally, if it wasn’t for the Trumpian debacle in Mar-a-Lago, RCV would be the target du jour of the Republican Party. RCV has the potential to be the bane of extremists on both sides of the aisle, so they’ll hate on it.
Until something distracts them.
