Sarah Palin

Mary Peltola's victory delivers blow to Palin's hopes of political comeback and prompts concern for Republicans in November midterms.

In the first round, Peltola won 40% of the votes while Palin took 31% and her Republican rival, Nick Begich, gained 29%. Palin, who left the Alaska governor’s mansion in 2009, had been hoping to use the special election as a stepping stone towards a return to the national political stage. said only dead fish go with the flow”, prompting critics to “accuse her of a ‘flaky’ decision and walking away from her post”. It was being seen as a significant outcome on several levels – as a potential response to the recent US supreme court overturning of the constitutional right to abortion, to Trump’s enduring grip on the Republican party, and to Palin herself. Of the five contests, the Alaska result showed the biggest surge in Democratic support. The single House seat was held for almost 50 years by the Republican Don Young, until his death in March.

Plus, Arm sues Qualcomm and the pound suffers its worst month since the 2016 Brexit referendum.

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Mary Peltola won the special election for the late Don Young's seat, becoming the first indigenous person to represent Alaska in the House — and the first ...

[struggling](https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2022/08/republicans-running-away-mastriano) to maintain the support of his state’s Republican establishment; there’s Dan Cox in Maryland, who outgoing Republican Governor Larry Hogan has [slammed](https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2022/08/18/hogan-cox-moore-governor/) as an unstable “QAnon whack-job”; and there’s the slate of Republican senate candidates so inept that Mitch McConnell appears to be [losing hope](https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2022/08/mitch-mcconnell-suggests-republicans-wont-win-back-senate) of taking control of the chamber. As Anchorage pollster Ivan Moore [told](https://www.npr.org/2022/04/18/1093080089/sarah-palin-is-attempting-a-comeback-in-alaska-but-her-star-has-dimmed-at-home) NPR earlier this year, more than half of Alaskans held a negative view of her in the years following the 2008 election, with many respondents dismissing her as a “quitter” after she resigned as governor in 2009. [10 points](https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/2020-elections/alaska-president-results) — but it turns out that enough Republican voters preferred a Democrat to Palin and ranked Peltola higher on their ballots, sending their votes to the Democrat once third-place candidate Nick Begich III, a Republican and grandson of the congressman Young unseated 50 years ago, was eliminated. [condemned it](https://twitter.com/MattGertz/status/1565305395240996865) as a “scam to rig elections.” That’s a gross mischaracterization, as fellow Republican Adam Kinzinger [noted](https://twitter.com/adamkinzinger/status/1565160830513152002?s=10&t=EGlhkC--zl2w61SVUFslxg) — there’s a good argument to be made that ranked-choice voting is [more democratic](https://www.bettergov.org/news/can-ranked-choice-voting-transform-our-democracy/), not less. “Democrats are on a roll,” Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee Chair Sean Patrick Maloney Those views have seemingly held firm in the years since; according to Moore’s polling last fall, 56 percent of Alaskans had a negative view of her, compared to 31 percent positive. Then again, the country is absolutely teeming right now with similarly flawed GOP candidates: There’s Doug Mastriano in Pennsylvania, who is But Cotton is right in one respect: About 60 percent of Alaska voters picked a Republican as their top choice in their ranking. It also flips a long-held GOP seat to the Democrats — for now, at least — as the party attempts to buck off expectations of a “red wave” this midterm cycle. [triumphed](https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2022/08/democrats-focus-on-abortion-fight-in-midterms) over Marc Molinaro in an upstate New York race that the Republican was initially a slight favorite to win. Ryan framed his race as a referendum on the GOP’s antiabortion extremism. Alaska hasn’t been represented by a Democrat in the House in five decades — not since the late Don Young defeated incumbent Democrat Nick Begich Sr.

The race was an early test of the state's new ranked-choice voting system, which promises to reduce political polarization by advancing more moderate ...

“It’s provided a hobby for political pundits and election watchers,” Persily, the political commentator, said. “Now, with the wait for results, the Band-Aid gets pulled off slowly, and you can keep wondering—is the next tug going to reveal something?” He continued, “It’s inside baseball. And the confusion surrounding it, even if genuine, played into their messaging: as Erickson, the economist, put it, “they say, This just shows how the bureaucracy and the coastal élites are rigging our elections in ways you can’t possibly understand.” Palin had called ranked-choice voting a “convoluted newfangled system” that leaves Alaskans “frustrated, confused, and discouraged” and allows “Joe Biden and Nancy Pelosi to lock up the state.” Tom Cotton, the Republican senator from Arkansas, called Peltola’s victory “a scam.” But it’s not just Republicans who are skeptical. You’ve never talked to a liberal in your life, but it’s time.” Larry Persily, a frequent commentator on Alaska politics, told me, “it gives people permission to vote their heart.” For instance: “I don’t like Biden, but I care about fishing.” “The word ‘primary’ is used as a verb now—as a threat,” Rebecca Braun, a former Alaska policy adviser, told me. “This race showed that Alaskans have an appetite for someone who isn’t partisan, and for campaigns that are positive,” she told me. After the primary votes came in, a candidate for the state house had to call the department of elections because his campaign couldn’t figure out whether he was still in the race. Proponents of the practice hope Alaska can be a microcosm for the rest of the country. “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. “If you have a moderate Republican who is working in a bipartisan way, the Party will say, we’re going to primary you.” Ranked-choice voting, she went on, “allows you to vote for your actual favorite candidate and then hedge your bet.” In the run-up to the special election, architects of the measure tended to describe it in simple, almost childproof terms: “You’re at the ice-cream store, and you want strawberry, but they’re out of strawberry, so you get vanilla.” When I was in Alaska for the primary, the state director of Americans for Prosperity used a box of props to demonstrate how R.C.V. The winner would only finish out Young’s term in Congress, and the three remaining candidates—the Democrat Mary Peltola and the Republicans Nick Begich and

Mary Peltola, a Democrat, defeated Sarah Palin, a well-known Republican, in a special House election. But they will enter a rematch in the fall.

Ms. Begich first and Ms. McCain and Ms. Peltola had defeated Ms. Before Ms. As news broke that Ms. But it was Ms. Trump’s endorsement of Ms. After Barack Obama defeated Ms. Peltola and Ms. That tally showed that Ms. Trump had endorsed Ms.

Mary Peltola will be the first woman to represent Alaska in the House of Representatives and the first Alaska Native ever to serve in Congress.

“As an Alaskan who was born and raised here and intends to be here the rest of my life, the fine people on this stage, I’m going to be working with them for the rest of my life. Please see our republishing guidelines for use of photos and graphics. House of Representatives and the first Alaska Native ever to serve in Congress. So you are not going to hear me say anything bad about any of the other leaders that are in this race,” Peltola said “I do have 10 years of experience in the Legislature. House race here in 50 years and will serve the remaining four months of the term left unfinished by Alaskans for Better Elections, the group that backed the installation of ranked choice voting, called the vote a success. Any legal challenge to the results must be filed by Sept. Follow Alaska Beacon on You can’t do 10 years of public service without disagreeing with half the people all the time. “In fact, I think God prepared me for an outcome like this, believe it or not. It isn’t yet clear when Peltola will be sworn into office and officially take her seat. I think God has kind of given me peace all along.”