One of the last races for the House of Representatives has been called, that for the single congressional seat in Alaska. Democrat Mary Peltola beat Sarah Palin by 55% to 45%, a larger margin than the 3% margin in the special election held in August. Alaskan elections have an open primary in which people of all parties compete and the top four then move on the general election which is decided by ranked-choice voting of the four candidates. Peltola came close to getting 49% of first preference votes and thus would still have won if the election were decided by a plurality. The details of how the preferential votes were cast can be seen here.
There is still one House seat yet to be decided that it looks like Republican will win, which means that the House of Representatives will be 222-213 in favor of Republicans. That means that Republican leader Kevin McCarthy can afford to lose at most four of his caucus in his bid to become Speaker and to pass any legislation.
On the senate side, incumbent Lisa Murkowski fended off a challenge by Kelly Tshibaka by 54%-46%. They are both Republicans so it does not change the balance of power in the Senate where the Democrats have a 50-49 majority with Georgia is still to be decided on December 6th..
But that race was interesting because it became a proxy war between Donald Trump and Mitch McConnell. Trump was furious with Murkowski because she voted to impeach him over the events of January 6th and he backed Tshibaka in order to get revenge. But McConnell spent heavily for Murkowski from his super PAC. Tshibaka criticized McConnell, saying that the money would have been better spent on races where there was a chance of Republicans beating Democrats. Trump must be livid that yet another person he backed has lost, adding to him image as a big loser, and that McConnell helped to defeat him.
As for Palin, it is not clear what she will do now. This loss must sting because the seat had been held in Republican hands for 49 years before Peltola won the special election. After Palin lost as John McCain’s running mate in 2008, she had a lucrative career as a Fox News personality where she got to display her impressive ability for run-on sentences that made little logical sense, and appeared on various reality shows before she faded from view. Maybe she will try to resuscitate that life. She has not conceded as yet. She is an ardent Trump supporter who believes that he won the 2020 election.
…Murkowski … voted to impeach him …
This always puts me in pedantic nit-pick mode: Murkowski voted to convict Trump after the House impeached him.
Offhand, I’m predicting Palin will go back to being some sort of right-wing TV “personality,” most likely on Faux, or OAN, or the like. She’s pretty much a spent farce in electoral politics, having been exposed as both an incoherent fool AND a loser.
Then again, she’s pretty much lost her looks, so anywhere she goes she’ll be eclipsed by Boebert, eMpTGreen, or any number of equally stupid mouths attached to prettier faces.
Palin, like Trump, is a low-intelligence, but cunning, grifter. They found each other back in 2011 when they met in NYC to eat pizza with a knife and fork and use each other’s fame to further their own agenda.
The R’s thought they found their “it” girl in Palin, a barely-functional religious nutcase who could be cleaned up with enough professional hair and makeup and clothing experts to make R’s “see stars” and get funny feelings in their pants.
She couldn’t manage without her husband’s shadow help as mayor of a town of 6,000, she quit suddenly not even halfway through her term as governor of 600,000 after being found guilty any number of ethics charges, and she was a disaster for McCain on the campaign trail because she didn’t know anything and wasn’t willing to be taught.
Next, she failed her way through any number of reality-tv and softball roles as a political speaker for Fox. She tried to extend the grift with her own subscription site and that failed.
Apparently she was back to try to recapture the money in state politics, but once again, she failed.
Meh. She is just a determined loser doing what losers do.
Of course she hasn’t. That’s something a grownup would do.
Conservatives don’t seem to have much problem being recycled into tv pundits. They could probably even work with someone as fundamentally bad at communicating as Palin is. The key is to limit their time and have them remote so they can trivially be disconnected from screen time. If they say something ridiculous, the anchors cover for it and either provide a missing explanation or spin it as something else. Example: Palin mouths some pure word salad. Anchor responds with “Look at all that enthusiasm from Alaska! And in other news…”
From the outside it looks like conservatives are so desperate to hear that they’re right that they don’t really question the people giving them that message. So it really ends up looking like their talking heads don’t need to justify where they were wrong. The people who would be most concerned about that are going to vote for democrats in the next election anyway.
Sorry, but I always think of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tina_Fey when that specimen is mentioned.
Example: Palin mouths some pure word salad. Anchor responds with “Look at all that enthusiasm from Alaska! And in other news…”
Or “The Democrats are gonna have a hard time addressing the points she’s making!”
Sarah Palin: says/does something stupid, as usual.
The usual suspects: It’s all Democrats’ fault!
“Thanks Hillary/Obama/Biden!”
(They could just roll all three of those boogeypersons into one all-purpose boogeyperson, “Hillary O’Biden,” and chances are a significant number of their base would think that’s a real person. With email on her laptop proving her complicity in unspecified horrible crimes.)
@10; just recently, some commenter (forget who, forget which blog) blamed Joe Biden for not stopping the 1/6 failed coup attempt. Just a reminder: Joe Biden was a private citizen who was the president-elect and held no political position on 1/6. THAT is the unreasoning knee-jerk prejudice so many old.
@K & Raging Bee:
I commend your fortitude. You seem to have sat through quite a lot more of Sarah Palin talking than I have.
@Lanir, do I remember right that you’re not American? If you are not, then you wouldn’t have paid as much attention.
I can’t speak for Raging Bee’s experience. For mine, I was astounded back in 2008 when the R’s nominated a female candidate for VP. Back then they had several choices of R women that weren’t utterly appalling, but they picked a virtual stranger. I tuned in when her first speech was televised. As she opened her mouth, it was obvious that she was not the candidate for the job. She came across as ignorant and spiteful and the epitome of exactly what the country did not need. Yet the overwhelming reaction from many men was their pants-feelings about her.
Then I heard someone say she was a narcissist and realizing I didn’t know the official meaning of the word (hey, it was 2008!), I looked it up. Then I googled her name and found a whole lot of people who knew exactly what they were looking from--most from Alaska--and I read what they had to say about her.
Her family fled Idaho under suspicious circumstances and Palin was raised in Alaska, where she was the small-town bully. The family went to Canada for free medical care and her father was an uneducated high school substitute teacher. She tried her luck in beauty pageants and failed at them--most notably to a black woman, which set her on the racist road. She barely graduated high school, went to 6 colleges in various states until she either did or didn’t graduate (she claims a degree that her last college doesn’t even offer--and they refused to confirm or deny that she graduated). Then she tried her hand at a variety of things until she got pregnant out of wedlock and found someone to marry her.
Her entire life has been one long grift after another. At some point she got herself embedded in the Republican party where being Alaska-pretty meant she never had to be able to actually do anything effectively.
Then she got the attention of grifters in the lower 48 and was tapped to be McCain’s running mate. Various books and movies reveal just what a nightmare she was to McCain. After failing at that, she failed at a number of reality tv shows and used her connections to get her family on various reality shows, including her visibly-pregnant daughter.. Who denied she was pregnant for the run of the show, which is very Republican in its thinking.
I guess it’s not so surprising she and Trump found each other. Both are badly-educated, low-intelligence grifters. And a shocking 40% of the country preferred both of them during election time.
Alaskan elections have an open primary in which people of all parties compete and the top four then move on the general election which is decided by ranked-choice voting of the four candidates.
This is the type of thing that convinces me I will never understand the US electoral system.