Alaska Sen. Lisa Murkowski (R) closed the gap Wednesday against GOP challenger Kelly Tshibaka and is close to shoring up enough votes to win her fourth term under the state’s new ranked choice voting system.
Murkowski made the gains after a big batch of absentee and early ballots were counted Tuesday.
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The newest ballot tally put Murkowski less than 600 votes, or about 0.3%, behind Tshibaka, a candidate who was hand-picked and endorsed by former President Donald Trump in a bid to unseat Murkowski, a Republican senator who voted to impeach him.
Murkowski is considered to be one of the more centrist Republican voices in Congress, and her win could help President Joe Biden pass his agenda as well as extend her clout in the Senate, where Democrats hold a slim majority.
Even though the path to a win for Tshibaka has been all but blocked, her campaign adviser Mary Ann Pruitt claimed the new vote totals were “an ominous sign” for Murkowski “to be trailing at all at this stage of tabulations,” the Anchorage Daily News reported.
Neither Murkowski nor Tshibaka is expected to reach the 50% threshold needed for an outright win, which means the race will come down to a ranked choice tabulation.
Under that system, instead of picking a single candidate for office, Alaskan voters were allowed to rank whom they wanted to fill a particular position. In the first round of counting, if no candidate makes it to the 50% mark, it goes to a second round, which starts with the candidate who got the fewest votes in the first round being eliminated. If the eliminated candidate was a voter’s top pick, their next choice would get their vote in the round. This continues until one candidate is declared the winner.
Additional rounds of voting won’t start until Nov. 23.
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Of the four candidates in play, it’s likely that Republican Buzz Kelley will be the first candidate eliminated. Kelley has endorsed Tshibaka, so some of his votes will go to her. In the third round of voting, it’s likely Democrat Pat Chesbro will be eliminated. Most of Chesbro’s supporters are expected to rank Murkowski ahead of Tshibaka, securing the senator’s win.
