But standing in the back of the room, by a table of auction items — a red, white and blue Kate Spade bag, a Trump 2024 hat, a mug that said Trump “won” — it struck me that given the composition of the audience, this was a strange thing for a Republican Party chair to have to say. In this heavily conservative state, reminding Republicans to vote Republican would seem to signal a big problem in the GOP.
Republicans were rattled earlier this year when Palin, a one-time political sensation and one of the GOP’s original populists, lost a special election for a vacant congressional seat to a Democrat, Mary Peltola. They pointed fingers at Alaska’s new ranked choice voting system, in which a voter’s second choice — if their preferred candidate fell short — could help decide the outcome. The system is meant to weed out extreme candidates, and true to form only about half of voters who supported Nick Begich III, a more traditionalist Republican and the candidate endorsed by the state party, had marked Palin as their second choice.
The result was a repudiation of Palin, a uniquely unpopular figure in Alaska following her vice presidential candidacy in 2008 and her abrupt and not-well-explained resignation from the Alaska governorship the following year. But the special election also laid bare exactly how much Republicans were willing to lose in the seemingly ceaseless feud between the party’s Trumpian and more establishment-minded bases of support.
ndependents — a majority of th
Ie Alaska electorate and a critical set of voters to both parties in more competitive states — had pulled away from Palin. In a state that Donald Trump carried by 10 percentage points in 2020, Alaska’s closest approximation to the former president hit a wall. And for the first time in nearly 50 years, Alaska had sent a Democrat to the House. It probably wouldn’t have happened without Alaska’s unusual ranked choice voting system. The state hadn’t turned Democratic overnight, after all. But it was possible that Palin’s loss had revealed something alarming for Republicans about the limitations of a MAGA personality’s appeal in the post-Donald Trump presidential era — not just in Alaska, but in the Lower 48, as well.
I have to wonde wha t percentage of Alaskans take anything sites like Politco has to say with anything other than a grain of salt. I'm pretty sure they have the same concerns about what is happening to the country CURRENTLY and how they will survive as Democrats continue their war on affordable and reliable energy. Making the issue about Palin and Trump is silly and meaningless when you cant afford to survive.
The left is angry because they are now being judged by the content of their character and not by the color of their skin.
It is time for rank choiced voting to go away. It just makes elections more confused.
It also makes it take longer for election results to be confirmed.
Thomas Sowell: There are no solutions, just trade-offs.
