(LifeSiteNews) – No political figure in modern American history is more synonymous with his or her home state than Sarah Palin is with Alaska.
Having risen from mayor of the small town of Wasilla to the governorship of the Last Frontier, Palin was plucked from relative obscurity to run with the late U.S. Senator John McCain as Republicans’ vice presidential nominee in 2008. With her folksy “hockey mom” persona and notorious anti-establishment credentials, Palin easily outshined her running mate and became the most conservative name on to appear on a GOP ticket since Jack Kemp in 1996, earning her adoration from those on the right who’d been weary of McCain and plenty of blowback from liberals foaming at the mouth to win back the White House.
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Following McCain-Palin’s loss to Obama-Biden, she resigned her post as governor and spent the ensuing years making a name herself independently, as a driving force behind the Tea Party movement, author of the bestselling autobiography Going Rogue, and kingmaker in competitive Republican primaries throughout the country during the 2010 midterms (had it not been for Palin’s endorsement, names like Rand Paul and Nikki Haley may hardly carry any weight at all, let alone ring even the faintest bell).
In doing so, Palin built a reputation that seemed to lock in her status as a clear frontrunner for the 2012 GOP nomination if, of course, she wanted it. As it turned out, she didn’t, leaving active and casual political observers alike on both sides of the aisle to wonder: What, exactly, will Sarah Palin do next?
When it came to her political ambitions, specifically, it would be quite some time until they finally got their answer: Nearly 14 years after her name appeared on Americans’ ballot for vice president, Palin announced that Alaskans would see her name there once again, this time for the open congressional seat left by Congressman Don Young, who served in the House from 1973 until his death in March, cementing his place in history as the longest-serving Republican in congressional history.
With her universal name ID, inarguable MAGA credentials (Palin was an early supporter of Trump’s in 2016, and he returned the favor in 2022) in a state that went red by double-digit margins in both 2016 and 2020, and the political climate favoring Republicans nationwide, things were looking good for Alaska’s former governor in the race to replace Young.
Had a traditional election been held in Alaska, Palin may well be on her way to Washington as we speak. Instead, she’s preparing for the regularly scheduled election in November, where she’ll face not only Alaska’s new congresswoman-elect (a Democrat) for a full-term that begins in January, but a second Republican and even a Libertarian, for good measure.
If this sounds unusual, convoluted, or just downright confusing, thank Alaska’s new ranked-choice voting system, which, despite its specious sales pitch, is patently designed to complicate elections and prop up certain candidates over others, delivering on its promise to foster “better elections” but leaving to question just exactly who they’re better for.
The system was formally adopted when voters approved Ballot Measure 2 (or the Alaska Top-Four Ranked-Choice Voting and Campaign Finance Laws Initiative), whose financial backers poured millions of dollars into its “Yes” campaign, 99.7% of which came from outside the state, and resulted in the narrowest of victories (50.55% – 49.45%) back in 2020 – which will forever live in infamy as the year the United States absolutely mutilated its elections.
Now in effect, Alaska’s ranked-choice voting (RCV) law eliminates the state’s individual Republican and Democratic Party primaries and replaces them with what’s called a non-partisan blanket primary, wherein all candidates seeking the same office run on the same ballot, regardless of party affiliation.
From there, the top four vote-getters advance to the general election. As a result, this could foreseeably mean that multiple members of one party (i.e. two Republicans and two Democrats), four members of one party (i.e. all Democrats), or a mix (i.e. one Republican, one Democrat, and two independents) may potentially face off in November – it all boils down to how many candidates toss their hat in the ring during the aforementioned blanket primary, and which four Alaskans throw the bulk of their votes towards.
The possibilities are dauntingly endless, adding yet another layer of complexity to what’s already an exhaustively Byzantine structure.
But as if that wasn’t complicated enough, Alaskans don’t vote for just one of the candidates on the general election ballot: They can cast votes for all four, if they so choose. What matters, however, is the order in which they vote for them.
Under RCV, a candidate cannot legally be considered the winner of an election without receiving a majority of all votes cast; when confronted with a previously set field of four candidates, the odds of any one attaining more than 50% of the vote remains considerably lower than they would be if, say, both major parties held their own individual primaries to select a single standard bearer, as they had in the past.
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In turn, voters are expected (though not required) to award up to three more votes to the other candidates on the ballot based on personal preference. This is accomplished by filling out a bewildering bubble chart that provides four possible options next to each candidate’s name: 1st Choice, 2nd Choice, 3rd Choice, and 4th Choice.
(In the more probable than possible event that this chart is filled out incorrectly, it is likely, under the new law, that those ballots will not be counted at all).
However, the 2nd, 3rd, and 4th Choice votes will only be tabulated in subsequent rounds of vote-counting should no one surpass the 50% threshold based on just 1st Choice votes, which are the only ones counted in the first round.
For example, if no candidate receives more than 50% of the vote after all 1st Choice votes are counted, the candidate with the lowest number of votes in that round is eliminated, and his/her voters’ 2nd Choice votes are awarded accordingly.
If, after those votes are added to the first round’s totals, there’s still no majority winner, whoever finds themselves in third place afterwards will also be eliminated, and the two remaining candidates will be awarded votes based on the number of times each one was ranked higher than the other by those whose 1st Choice vote went to the now-eliminated third place finisher.
Simple, right?
The special election to fill the remainder of Don Young’s term, which expires on January 3, 2023, saw the new system put to use for the first time on June 11, when a field of 48 candidates from all parties faced off in the blanket primary to determine which four would move on to the general.
In addition to Palin, who received the most votes, three more progressed to the RCV phase:
- Nick Begich, another Republican, and member of one of Alaska’s most prominent political dynasties, all of whose members have, in the past, been Democratic officeholders, from former U.S. Senator Mark Begich (Nick’s uncle) to the late Congressman Nick Begich (Nick’s grandfather and namesake)
- Al Gross, an Independent and orthopedic surgeon who was Democrats’ consensus candidate to take on incumbent U.S. Senator Dan Sullivan in 2020 (Gross lost that race by a 13-point margin)
- Mary Peltola, a Democrat who served in the State House of Representatives from 1999 to 2009
However, the state of the race was turned on its head when Gross abruptly withdrew on June 20 – just over a week after he secured a spot on the general election ballot – claiming “it is just too hard to run as a nonpartisan candidate in this race.”
He threw his support behind Peltola and Tara Sweeney, a moderate Republican who finished fifth in the primary and, even with Gross gone, remained ineligible to take his place, making Alaska’s inaugural RCV election a choice between three (instead of four) candidates, and leaving Palin and Begich to face off against one Democrat opponent in Peltola.
Convenient.
Even so, Alaska’s historically red tint may have conceivably led some to believe that the real race here wasn’t Republican vs. Democrat, but rather Republican vs. Republican, with both Palin and Begich boasting two of the most recognizable names in Alaska politics whereas Peltola, the executive director of the Kuskokwim River Inter-Tribal Fish Commission who also served on the Orutsararmiut Native Council Tribal Court and the Bethel City Council, remained largely unknown to the much of the electorate.
However, conventional wisdom proved the undoing of both Republicans: While Palin and Begich spent the bulk of the campaign firing shots at each other (Palin, with Trump’s key endorsement in tow, accused Begich of being a RINO, while Begich attacked Palin for resigning the governorship over a decade ago), Peltola was able to hone in on August 16 rather than any one opponent, remaining fairly positive without having to defend or deflect from any heavy mud being slung in her direction.
The only controversial, nationalized issue the “pro-choice” Peltola made an essential component of her messaging was abortion, which, regardless of their state’s Republican bent, still enjoys the backing of 60% of Alaskans, according to recent data.
In the immediate aftermath of the Supreme Court’s overturning of Roe, this was the right political decision for Peltola to make in order to (1) consolidate Alaska’s smaller Democrat base (much of which likely intended to support, or at least “rank first,” Al Gross, who placed ahead of her in the primary), and (2) make significant enough inroads with moderate Republicans who planned to support Begich but were hesitant to rank the far more conservative, unapologetically pro-Trump Palin as their second choice in the general election.
This strategy was enough to secure Peltola just 40% of all 1st Choice votes cast on August 16th, but with the two Republicans splitting the remaining 60%, she still managed to be the top vote-getter in the first round of voting. And with Palin leading Begich by 5,163 votes, the latter was eliminated and, as a result, his supporters’ 2nd choice votes were distributed between the two remaining candidates.
Where they would go, however, was not publicly known until August 31 – more than two weeks after the special election was held! – when the final results were announced by the Alaska Division of Elections.
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Among Begich’s participating 1st Choice voters, Palin was ranked second by 27,053 (or approximately 64%) of them, while Peltola gained an extra 15,467 – enough to significantly close the gap between the two, but not enough for Palin to overcome Peltola’s lead.
For the first time in 50 years, a Republican – the most widely recognizable in the state’s 63-year history – lost Alaska’s at-large congressional seat, handing Mary Peltola an unexpected victory and Democrats nationwide a surge of momentum as America lunges towards the November midterm elections.
The final margin – devastatingly close – after the second round of votes were counted saw Peltola eke out a 51%-49% victory over Palin, with just 5,240 votes separating the two – a quantity stunningly similar to the number of votes between Palin and Begich in the first round of voting – but just enough to win the seat, making her the first Alaskan Native to ever be elected to Congress.
Now, Peltola, Palin, and Begich, along with a fourth Libertarian candidate, will face off against each other for a second time in November, with that being the normally scheduled election for a full-two year term in the U.S. House of Representatives.
The only difference now? Peltola enjoys the advantage of incumbency.
In the time since the results were certified, both Republicans have pointed the finger at each other, much like they did during the special election, with Begich accusing Palin of instructing her voters not to rank the candidates and Palin calling on Begich, who finished below her in both the primary and general, to drop out of the race completely in order to clear the way for one Republican.
The deadline to do so was Monday, and Begich declined.
So is there a lesson to be learned here?
To be clear: Ranked-choice voting is far from commonplace in the United States on the whole: Outside of Alaska, Maine is the only other state in the country to use an ranked-choice voting (RCV) system. But it would be a grave political mistake not to acknowledge that, even in small territories, it isn’t serving its preordained purpose.
Democrats would like us to believe that the wind is at their back, and that Alaska’s special election was more causational than it was correlational. Indeed, Mary Peltola was able to break through generations of Republican dominance in the Last Frontier to reclaim Don Young’s House seat in a year that’s supposed to be anything but encouraging for her party, and, yes, Republicans would be wrong to dismiss it as a simple fluke, but the fact still remains that the system that produced this result, unlike any ever used before in the state, accomplished exactly what it set out to do, and, consequently, may soon become a fervent demand of the left as it continues to look for ways to dismantle our elections and reconstruct them in their image.
Proponents of ranked-choice voting make the case that it enhances democracy (a grossly over- and misused term in politics today) by giving voters more than one choice, and, in theory, a greater say in determining who wins elections, even if their preferred candidate falls out of the running.
In reality, RCV demands that voters cast additional ballots (be they 2nd, 3rd, or 4th Choice) for candidates that likely do not emulate their values or address their concerns, or be effectively disenfranchised from the process by giving the votes that belong to those who comply with the system in its entirety as much as four times the power of those who prefer to vote traditionally, casting aside any semblance of equal protection and the time-honored “one person, one vote” principle.
In addition to boosting Democrats like Peltola, RCV may well be what saves RINO Lisa Murkowski, Alaska’s longtime U.S. Senator who, in recent years alone, voted to impeach Trump and even opposed the nomination of conservative Justice Brett Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court.
Her low favorability ratings among members of her own party would’ve likely cost her renomination in a traditional Republican primary, but thanks to RCV, she’ll now face her leading challenger, Trump-endorsed Kelly Tshibaka, in November instead, along with two virtual unknowns: a retired mechanic (the third Republican) and a teacher (the lone Democrat).
So while the four-way general election may seem like an obvious Republican vs. Republican affair, the fact that Democrats felt it unnecessary to run a viable candidate of their own tells you everything you need to know about how their voters plan to rank their choices in November.
In addition to congressional, gubernatorial, and state legislative races, RCV will even be used to award Alaska’s few but potentially powerful three electoral votes in future presidential elections. (What could possibly go wrong?)
In the case of last month’s special election, though, the most notable advantage RCV produced for Democrats was how it left one of Republicans’ greatest weaknesses on the table in the general election: Brutal party infighting, which is generally reserved for and ends with a primary, when a singular nominee is chosen.
Instead, deep divisions were merely exacerbated, and the GOP found itself split right down the middle when the time came for choosing – so much so that more than a third of one candidate’s supporters were willing to rank a Democrat ahead of his fellow Republican rival as their 2nd choice (since Palin finished in the top two, we don’t know how many of her voters ranked Begich second) – costing their party the edge it needed to declare victory over a candidate who was the choice of just 40% of voters in the first round.
Personally, I can’t help but notice the irony of Begich’s post-election criticism of Palin when, if just over 5,000 of his own 10,016 voters who refused to rank anyone else picked Palin as their #2, Alaska would still be red.
And left-wingers and RINOs alike wouldn’t have as full-proof a strategy to subvert our elections even further in the future, let alone a reason to celebrate with just two months to go until this year’s midterms.