Alaska Results in
MAGA loses again (twice)
Via WaPo: Lisa Murkowski and Mary Peltola win Alaska races, defeating Trump-backed opponents.
Democratic Rep. Mary Peltola on Wednesday became the first Alaska Native to win a full term in Congress, securing reelection along with Republican Sen. Lisa Murkowski, who both defeated challengers endorsed by former president Donald Trump after state officials finished a final round of vote-counting.
[…]
The outcome marked another blow to Trump in this year’s midterm elections. Many candidates affiliated with the former president and his polarizing positions fell in defeat in battleground contests, and his overall record was mixed in competitive races where he endorsed. That list includes former Republican governor Sarah Palin, who challenged Peltola with Trump’s backing, and Republican Kelly Tshibaka, a former state and federal official who ran against Murkowski with the former president’s support.
Well, this was about the best we could have expected from the Alaska election, IMO.
And any nose-thumbing at His Orangeness and his toadies and lackies is also a good thing.
Murk has now fended off right-wing challengers three times in a row over a 12-year period—though in different ways each time. First she had the Palin-backed Tea Partier Joe Miller beating her in the 2010 primary, and her winning reelection in a write-in campaign. Then in 2016, Miller ran on the Libertarian ticket and it turned into a three-way race once again, with Murk eking out another plurality win by consolidating the moderate vote. And now she wins through the new ranked choice system—but it’s important to realize her victory was dependent on the good will she’s built up among Democratic voters in the state. I assumed she was going to win the second round, because I figured she’d get the lion’s share of second-choice votes from the Democratic candidate.
And maybe it’s poetic justice that Palin herself played a role in flipping the House seat. (Murkowski, it should be mentioned, endorsed Peltola for this race. That probably further helped win over those second-choice Democratic votes. But it may not have been purely due to present self-interest: Murk and Palin have had bad blood for a long time, ever since Palin unseated Lisa’s dad for governor.)
@Flat Earth Luddite:
I wonder if Trump will demand a redo as he is in Arizona.
So it took over 2 weeks for liberals to come up with enough ballots (not votes) to pull off a win. Go figure. This is getting old.
@Lynn Kempen: Well, it took about the amount of time needed to go through the process.
Let me note that if there was a massive, undetectable cheating process going on, why don’t thy just have the ballots ready on election night so as to forestall claims that that the reason it takes so long is because of cheating?
In other words, if they (whoever “they” are) are so good at fabricating results, why take two weeks to do it?