Alaska Republicans voted to censure Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) on Monday, denouncing him for backing incumbent Sen. Lisa Murkowski in her reelection bid against Kelly Tshibaka, who was endorsed by the state party.
The Alaska Republican Party passed a resolution on Monday denouncing the minority leader for “divisive and misleading statements” after McConnell allocated millions of dollars from the Senate Leadership Fund toward attack ads against Tshibaka. The resolution passed the party with a 49-8 vote.
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“Much of the financial support from the Senate Leadership Fund has been used for malicious political attack ads targeted at our endorsed candidate, Kelly Tshibaka, that are gross distortions of fact,” the party wrote in the resolution. “We request the Senate Leadership Fund immediately stop the attack ads against Kelly Tshibaka and discontinue the support of all other opposing candidates.”
Several of the attack ads hit out against Tshibaka for her stances on abortion rights, with some knocking the Republican over claims she would ban birth control by mail. Members of the Alaska Republican Party previously rejected the ads, warning voters not to believe the claims. Several of the ads have been deemed misleading by independent fact-checkers.
Murkowski hopes to fend off a challenge from Tshibaka, who was endorsed by former President Donald Trump as he seeks to unseat the incumbent for her vote to convict him during his second impeachment trial in January 2021. Murkowski was also censured by the state party shortly after that vote, with party leaders saying they’d reject her as a Republican on the midterm ballot.
Tshibaka has sought to position herself as a “MAGA” candidate, aligning herself with Trump and promoting his claims that there was widespread voter fraud in the 2020 election. Tshibaka has been a vocal critic of McConnell, repeatedly calling on the Republican to step down from his leadership position.
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With only two weeks to go until Election Day, the race is razor thin as Murkowski leads Tshibaka by just 1 percentage point, according to a recent Alaska Survey Research poll. However, those odds may be in flux due to the state’s new ranked choice voting system.
Through ranked choice voting, Alaska voters will get to rank all of the candidates on the ballot in order of preference. After the first round of tabulation, if no one receives more than 50% of the vote, the candidate who came in last is eliminated, and counters begin to tabulate voters’ second-choice rankings. The process is repeated until a candidate garners more than 50% of the vote.
