Whew. Election Day is over. 

It looks like Gov. Mike Dunleavy has won outright. But the congressional races will go through the ranked choice tabulation later this month. 

You’re an Alaska politics wonk, so you probably already know why the numbers suggest Mary Peltola and Lisa Murkowski will be reelected. 

What I keep thinking about is what one Democratic voter told me about why she voted for Democrat Pat Chesbro first and ranked Murkowski second.

“I want Lisa to win,” she told me, “but I want her to see that it was Democrats and moderates who put her there.”

Murkowski has already proven that she doesn’t need the Republican Party’s help. (See 2010 election, with her stunning write-in win, when the national party worked for her defeat.) She, more than most senators, is free to vote her conscience.

Maybe winning reelection with the help of Chesbro voters will further set Murkowski free to vote with Democrats more often than she already does.

But it’s hard to ignore another factor that has helped Murkowski in this election: A super PAC affiliated with Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell that poured more than $5 million into ads attacking Tshibaka.

Murkowski feels in her bones that she’s a Republican, even if most of the party has veered into MAGA territory. McConnell still sees a spot for her in the Republican fold. We can expect to see more of her independent streak, but more often than not, she’ll continue to vote with her party, especially when it comes to procedural votes and judicial nominees.

Assuming she’s won reelection. That won’t be revealed until Nov. 23, when the ranked choice part of this election kicks in. On that day – and by now we RCV wonks can recite this part in our sleep — the Division of Elections will eliminate the third- and fourth-place candidates and transfer their ballots according to the voters’ rankings

It’s worth noting that Sarah Palin isn’t conceding the House race. 

“We anticipate victory,” she said in social media posts yesterday. 

Palin named advisor Jerry Ward as her “acting chief of staff.” She also recited a litany of her greatest hits, promising to “reload” and “go rogue.” She railed against the “GOP establishment.”

Caught this moment while reporting Tuesday from the Mary Peltola election watch party.

Palin also seems to be trying to undermine faith in the election results with broadsides against “Dominion vote counting” and the “new un-American Ranked Choice Voting fiasco.” 

(Alaska uses paper ballots which are scanned using ImageCast scanners that are made by Dominion. The multiple safeguards include hand-count verifications of random precincts that use the scanners. Palin has no cause to blame the machines.)

Palin can dislike RCV all she wants, but she knows it’s the law for this election. And she knows it’s un-American to reject the will of the voters.

“I will never backtrack on my, you know, what I preach over the years about the will of the people. You adhere to the will of the people,” Palin said on Aug. 31, the night she learned that she’d lost the special election, Alaska’s first use of ranked choice voting. “The vote is that … It was a legally sanctioned process.”

Kelly Tshibaka isn’t conceding, either. She was on Steve Bannon’s podcast asking his audience to contribute to help her in possible legal battles ahead.

“We're anticipating a whole bunch of shenanigans here in these next couple months, between now and January, to try and hold on to the Murkowski monarchy,” Tshibaka said on Bannon’s show. “And that's why I really need your help. Our race is not over and I'm not going to give up this fight.”

Tshibaka did not say how she intended to fight. She’s previously pointed out that her campaign has not challenged the legality of ranked choice voting and would accept the election outcome, as long as it believed nothing went “super wrong.”

That’s it for me today. Thanks for reading. Let me know your questions and suggestions. They help guide this newsletter.

- Liz Ruskin

lruskin@alaskapublic.org

Follow me on twitter: @lruskin

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Read more election coverage at alaskapublic.org/elections.

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