Deep-red Alaska’s one House seat now belongs to a Democrat. How did it happen?
This past spring, Alaska voters received, by mail, a choice of forty-eight candidates in an open primary to fill the congressional seat of Don Young, who died in his forty-ninth year in office. In June, the top four candidates, irrespective of their party, advanced to an August 16th election where the winner would be decided by a process in which voters ranked candidates in the order of their preference, instead of picking one.
Ranked-choice voting aspires to stifle the ascent of extreme candidates by, among other things, holding nonpartisan primaries. “Forcing us to choose between the two parties automatically truncates the choices,” Scott Kendall, one of the lawyers who authored the ballot reform, told me. More than sixty per cent of Alaskans don’t affiliate with any major party, and the state has a long history of electing independent governors and senators through write-in campaigns.
Palin, of course, complicated all of this. In a system designed to “fight polarization,” she was a uniquely polarizing candidate for Alaska in 2022, endorsed byand returning to state politics after quitting as governor more than a decade ago.
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