Murkowski’s murky future

Trump’s antipathy represents the most immediate threat to Murkowski’s hopes of winning a fourth full term in the Senate. But it’s not the only one. So, while their mutual disdain may have exacerbated her precarious standing, that didn’t cause it. Lisa Murkowski was in trouble well before Donald Trump descended the escalator. If she loses in 2022, the surprising thing won’t be that she does, but that she managed to hold on for so long.

Murkowski would have let go long ago if Alaska Republicans had gotten their way. They nearly did in 2010, when she lost the primary to Tea Party favorite Joe Miller. He was endorsed by Palin, the former Alaska governor and 2008 GOP vice presidential nominee who burst into the spotlight by ending the political career of Murkowski’s father, Frank. Murkowski’s career, too, seemed over. Yet rather than acquiesce to her fate, she opted to run as a write-in candidate in the general election. She did so in defiance not only of history but of her party’s voters and leadership. National Republicans refused to support her, and the state GOP chairman at the time said she’d be treated like “anyone who chooses to oppose our party’s nominees.” Against all expectations, Murkowski’s “historic gamble” paid off, and she was reelected to a second full term, becoming the first senator to win a write-in campaign since Strom Thurmond in 1954.

A centrist who supports abortion rights, Lisa Murkowski was a prime target for the Tea Party fervor that swept through the GOP in 2010. Yet her relationship with Alaska Republicans was already tenuous, largely because of how she got her seat in the first place. She wasn’t elected to the Senate but was appointed by her father to replace him after he was elected governor of Alaska in 2002. Though the taint of nepotism has never completely washed away, it hasn’t prevented Lisa from winning three consecutive terms in her own right. Frank was the one punished by voters, who gave him a paltry 19% of the vote in the 2006 Republican gubernatorial primary won by Palin.

Lisa Murkowski arguably got off on the wrong foot with Alaska Republicans and has never quite recovered. Yet she proved more than a match for them in 2010 and was handily reelected in 2016 (this time back on the Republican line). Since then, she’s only compounded her treachery in the eyes of her detractors by, among other things, voting against both Obamacare repeal and Brett Kavanaugh’s nomination to the Supreme Court.

Her positioning as “a moderate who doesn’t always heed the party line” may “infuriate many Alaska Republicans,” as the Christian Science Monitor reported in 2019, but such disaffection merely burnishes her independent credentials in the eyes of the rest of the state’s electorate. Yet Murkowski knows she can push only so far. So, though she opposed nominating Amy Coney Barrett six weeks before the election, she voted for her anyway, no doubt aware that rejecting a second Republican Supreme Court pick was untenable.

But that was before the election, before Trump’s lies, before the ransacking of the Capitol. House Democrats impeached Trump for his role in the riot. Murkowski, who voted for acquittal in his first impeachment, joined six other Republicans in voting to convict him this time. She had already demanded he resign, telling the Anchorage Daily News, “I want him out.”

As the only one of those seven up for reelection in 2022, Murkowski will be the first to face Trump’s wrath and thirst for vengeance. “But I can’t be afraid of that,” she insisted to a group of journalists after casting the potentially fatal vote. If Alaskans decide that because I didn’t “support my party that I can no longer serve them in the United States Senate, then so be it.”

The feeling is mutual. In March, the Alaska GOP censured her for a litany of sins, but mostly for backing Impeachment 2.0. “The party does not want Lisa Murkowski to be a Republican candidate,” said a former state GOP chairman. Hence the directive to party leadership to recruit a challenger. One soon materialized in the form of Alaska commissioner of administration Kelly Tshibaka. Her campaign was quickly populated with associates of Trump, who endorsed her in June. The state party followed suit last month, spurning the incumbent.

There was little doubt Tshibaka would have Trump in her corner. After Murkowski told reporters last summer she was “struggling” with whether to support his reelection because of his handling of the George Floyd protests, Trump tweeted that in two years, he’d be in “the Great State of Alaska (which I love) campaigning against Senator Lisa Murkowski.” All Murkowski’s foes had to do was find an alternative. “Get any candidate ready, good or bad, I don’t care, I’m endorsing. If you have a pulse, I’m with you!” He renewed his vow this past March, telling Politico that come 2022, he would be “in Alaska campaigning against a disloyal and very bad senator.”

Turning Tshibaka’s most coveted endorsement against her, Murkowski dismissed her rival as “somebody with a pulse.” (Tshibaka, for her part, proclaimed on her website that she believes “Alaska’s Senate Seat isn’t something that should be passed down like a family heirloom.”) As for Trump, Murkowski has been sanguine, even insinuating in an interview that his threats “to do a lot to those who have stood up to him” are mostly talk. Murkowski has raised more money and has more in her account than Tshibaka, according to their most recent campaign finance disclosures.

Yet what many journalists and commentators are touting as her saving grace next year may, in fact, be what finally does her in.

Last November, Alaska voters approved a new election system for statewide offices. Party primaries were abolished and replaced by a so-called jungle ballot, on which all candidates will appear together. The top four finishers will advance to the general election, with the winner determined by ranked-choice voting. Instead of selecting just one candidate, Alaskans will rank the four in order of preference. If none gets 50% on the initial choice, the victor will be the one who crosses that threshold after second-, third-, and fourth-place preferences are distributed.

The initiative was spearheaded by Scott Kendall, a lawyer who previously worked for Murkowski. Those ties raised suspicions among Alaska Republicans that the effort was a ploy to boost her reelection chances by sparing her the travail of a GOP primary.

Whether such was its intent, the notion that Alaska’s new voting procedures would rescue Murkowski from electoral oblivion hardened into conventional wisdom. Typical was a January story from Alaska Public Media that proclaimed, “Murkowski gains immunity from Trump revenge with Alaska’s new voting system.”

Dominant as this consensus has been, several analysts have recently challenged it. Rightly so. Far from shoring up Murkowski’s crumbling standing, Alaska’s revamped electoral scheme is likely to undermine it further — and for the same reason commentators initially believed it would save her.

In a traditional election, every vote is effectively an either/or choice. You pick the Democrat or you pick the Republican; or, perhaps, the Alaskan Independence Party nominee. But you get one and only one vote. Lisa Murkowski has won three consecutive elections because enough Democrats and independents who believed their candidate couldn’t win and feared a vote for them would be wasted cast their ballots for her instead. Ranked-choice voting eliminates this dilemma. Now, people who’d have put her first because they had one vote can safely put her second, third, or even fourth.

Al Gross, the Democrat who lost to Sen. Dan Sullivan in last year’s contest for Alaska’s other Senate seat, is considering running for Murkowski’s. If he does, a scenario in which Murkowski finishes third behind Tshibaka and Gross is entirely feasible, perhaps even likely. That would be “game over” for her, explained FiveThirtyEight’s Geoffrey Skelley, because even if she were the second choice of most voters who backed the fourth-place candidate, she’d probably “still be in third after those votes are reallocated” and would be eliminated on the second ballot. As the election cartographer Benjamin Lefkowitz observed, even if Murkowski were “every Alaskan’s second-ranked choice,” there aren’t enough of them who’d rank her as their top choice to keep her viable.

A May survey by the Democratic organization Change Research revealed the depths of Murkowski’s predicament: 59% of Alaska voters have an unfavorable opinion of her, while just 26% regard her favorably. That number drops to a miserable 6% with Republicans, 84% of whom dislike her. She is underwater with independents, 32% to 52%. Only Democrats have positive views of her, but even with them, she doesn’t break 50%. On the first-choice ballot test, Murkowski’s 19% put her third behind Tshibaka (39%) and Gross (25%). Head to head, Tshibaka defeated Gross, 54%-46%, after the reallocation process.

In Change Research’s simulation, Murkowski, thanks to her third-place standing, didn’t make the cut. A more recent poll by Alaska pollster Ivan Moore offered gladder tidings for her. It found Murkowski ahead of Tshibaka on the initial ballot and defeating her on the final one. Yet even this survey found more Alaskans have a negative opinion of her than a positive one.

To win under the new regime, Lisa Murkowski would have to do something she’s never done before: garner 50% of the vote. One reason she’s managed to win three consecutive elections, including the 2010 write-in campaign, is that she hasn’t had to. That’s no longer true. She’s managed to scrape by, but as Elections Daily’s Joe Szymanski notes, her failure to win a majority demonstrates that she’s “never been incredibly popular with Alaskans.” She’s even less so now.

Which isn’t to say she can’t win. But any evaluation of her chances must be grounded in the political realities of 2021, not those of 2010. Implying Murkowski can pull off the equivalent of a second reelection via write-in is like saying Tom Brady can win another Super Bowl when he’s down 28-3 in the third quarter. Both were impressive, improbable victories, but neither is likely to happen again.

Does this mean Murkowski is doomed? My own view has long been that she is, a conviction strengthened by the adoption of Alaska’s new electoral system. If there’s one thing in Murkowski’s favor, though, it’s that she’s a fighter, a survivor. Cliches, yes, but nonetheless true. She knows how to win.

Or, as a Republican strategist who has worked on Senate races in Alaska in the past told me, Lisa Murkowski is “a political unicorn who knows her state.” We will learn soon enough whether she goes extinct or remains part of the menagerie that is Congress.

Varad Mehta (@varadmehta) is a writer and historian. He lives in the Philadelphia area.