Both Alaska and Washington alike have been trying to figure out why popular Republican Sen. Lisa Murkowski failed to soundly defeat Joe Miller, a previously unknown Tea Party candidate, in Tuesday's primary. Even though Murkowski has had consistently high approval ratings in the state, Miller leads the senator by about 1,600 votes in a race that won't be called until all the absentee ballots are tallied in September. In the meantime, the two big stories that have emerged about the election involve Sarah Palin and anti-incumbency.
I've already gotten into how opinion of Palin among Alaskan conservatives isn't monolithic -- she has her base, but there are still a lot of people who were disappointed by her final performance as governor. So I don't have much more to add beyond pointing out that one of Miller's biggest endorsements came from Anchorage talk-radio host Dan Fagan, who urged Republicans to "vote for Joe despite Sarah."
As for whether the contagion that is anti-incumbency fever has spread northward, that's a tricky question. While there are sections of Alaska like Fairbanks and the Mat-Su Valley where an anti-establishment message resonated, I think this is just as much of a story about the complacency of the state's center-right as it is about Tea Party enthusiasm. More election data was made available yesterday, so I took the district returns and sorted them by turnout and candidate popularity. If you look at the five districts in which Miller did best, all of them had over 3,000 ballots returned. If you take the five most pro-Murkowski districts, only one broke 1,000 votes. For a little bit of scale, the greatest number of ballots cast in any district was 4,276, and the average return was just over 2,300 votes. Miller supporters seemed to be motivated in a way that Murkowski fans just weren't.
I live in District 37, which was second out of 40 as far as Murkowski support goes and which was 36th in terms of turnout. Here, she got 74 percent of the vote. There were a few Murkowski signs scattered about my community -- a fishing town in the Aleutian Islands -- but there wasn't much beyond that to indicate that there was a heated primary race going on. The general attitude was that the last major poll showed that Murkowski was up 30 points and that there just wasn't a serious chance that she could lose. While she may have had plenty of supporters here, nobody was working to get people out to the polls. Now, like most everyone else, people here are wondering what exactly happened.
-- Alexandra Gutierrez
