Alaska hasn’t been represented by a Democrat in the House in five decades—not since the late Don Young defeated incumbent Democrat Nick Begich Sr. in 1972. That will change.
Mary Peltola won out Wednesday, August 31, over Sarah Palin, the former Alaska governor and onetime 2008 vice presidential candidate, to take the state’s at-large congressional seat. Peltola’s win will make her the first Alaska Native member of Congress, as well as the first woman to represent the state in the House. It also flips a long-held GOP seat to the Democrats—for now, at least—as the party attempts to buck off expectations of a “red wave” this midterm cycle.
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Peltola’s victory over Palin is the latest instance of the Democrats overperforming in special elections this year; just last week Pat Ryan triumphed over Marc Molinaro in an Upstate New York race that the Republican was initially a slight favorite to win. Ryan framed his race as a referendum on the GOP’s antiabortion extremism. Mary Peltola made a similar case, tailoring a message of reproductive rights to voters in a state she described as having a “libertarian bent.”
“We are very much covetous of our freedoms and our privacy,” she told CNN.
Still, Democrats shouldn’t get too giddy about a blue wave, as there are some important caveats: First, Peltola’s win allows her to finish out what remains of Young’s term. (Young, who was the longest-serving congressional Republican in history, died in March.) That means she’ll have to defend the seat again in the November midterms. Second, it’s not exactly clear how much an election using the ranked-choice voting system Alaskans passed two years ago by ballot initiative can tell us about races that use the typical plurality vote system. Some Republicans were notably incensed by the ranked-choice system after Peltola’s win; Senator Tom Cotton condemned it as a “scam to rig elections.” That’s a gross mischaracterization, as fellow Republican Adam Kinzinger noted—there’s a good argument to be made that ranked-choice voting is more, not less. But Cotton is right in one respect: About 60% of Alaska voters picked a Republican as their top choice in their ranking. Which brings us to the third caveat: Palin’s unpopularity.
Alaska may, indeed, be a red state—Donald Trump won it two years ago by 10 points—but it turns out that enough Republican voters preferred a Democrat to Palin and ranked Peltola higher on their ballots, sending their votes to the Democrat once third-place candidate Nick Begich III, a Republican and grandson of the congressman Young unseated 50 years ago, was eliminated. Palin retains a somewhat large national stature among conservatives, as the late John McCain’s 2008 running mate and a kind of ur-Trump. But in Alaska? Her reputation is not particularly good. As Anchorage pollster Ivan Moore told NPR earlier this year, more than half of Alaskans held a negative view of her in the years following the 2008 election, with many respondents dismissing her as a “quitter” after she resigned as governor in 2009. Those views have seemingly held firm in the years since; according to Moore’s polling last fall, 56% of Alaskans had a negative view of her, compared with 31% positive. “I think she’s out of touch with Alaskans right now,” one conservative voter told NPR. “She’s moved into a different circle…. I don’t think that the people here—we don’t take her very seriously.”
All this is to say: The issue in Alaska, for Republicans, may come down to the candidate as much as it does to some national trend. Then again, the country is absolutely teeming right now with similarly flawed GOP candidates: There’s Doug Mastriano in Pennsylvania, who is struggling to maintain the support of his state’s Republican establishment; there’s Dan Cox in Maryland, who outgoing Republican governor Larry Hogan has slammed as an unstable “QAnon whack-job”; and there’s the slate of Republican Senate candidates so inept that Mitch McConnell appears to be losing hope of taking control of the chamber. And then, of course, there’s the guy leading the GOP, who has never won a popular vote, is currently facing the very real possibility of federal espionage and obstruction charges, and yet still somehow commands loyalty from much of the party apparatus.
Not all of the dynamics in the Alaska House race are transferable to other contests, and there’s always only so much a single race can tell you. But are Democrats encouraged by Peltola’s upset victory? To quote Palin herself: You betcha. “Democrats are on a roll,” Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee chair Sean Patrick Maloney wrote Wednesday night, “and we will keep it going straight through November.”
This post originally ran in Vanity Fair.
