The mood was at first excited, then tense, and then turned glum at the Snow Goose Restaurant in Anchorage Tuesday night as the election results for the U.S. Senate race came in. This was Republican Senate candidate Joe Miller's place to celebrate, the same venue where a little over two months before at the primary election he told an exuberant Alaska crowd he was heading to Washington, D.C., to fight for them. And it was from this same place where the tweet that Palin sent out that evening -- the one that talked about a miracle on ice -- got the crowd all atwitter.
Miller was Palin's pick. They were, in fact, friends, and she spent quite a bit of emotional and political capital on supporting his race against incumbent GOP Sen. Lisa Murkowksi.
Palin and her supporters were busy Tuesday night celebrating every winning Palin-endorsed victory as each came in. Among Palin's tweets Tuesday was this one: "As always, proud to be American! Thanks, Commonsense Constitutional Conservatives, u didn't sit down & shut up...u 'refudiated' extreme left."
But there was no tweeting from Palin's computer, or whomever's computer does such things for her, about the Senate race in Alaska. Not only was she silent about Miller, her supporters were quiet as well. And, for someone not normally at a loss for words, Miller himself was relatively terse. After it was clear that the write-in votes -- the Lisa Murkowski votes -- would exceed his own, Miller gave a short speech and then left the Snow Goose.
Breaking with tradition, he didn't make his way down to the Egan Center, or "Election Central" as it's called here, a few blocks away, where all the candidates and their supporters converge at the end of election night. (Murkowski did the same thing on primary night).
This race isn't officially over. Murkowski has about a 13,500-vote lead, a number expected to grow once the 26,306 absentee ballots come in. Miller has said he is amassing a team of lawyers to make sure all votes are interpreted and counted correctly. The counting of the write-in vote will begin Nov. 10,, according to The Associated Press. But few pollsters and political analysts, apart from Miller himself, believe the Alaska Division of Elections will throw out enough misspelled Murkowski ballots to make Miller Alaska's next U.S. senator.
Apart from Miller and other Senate candidates, Palin and her supporters had reason to celebrate last night. She did particularly well with the governors she endorsed. Six of the eight backed by Palin won, with one still undecided. She was less successful with her U.S. House endorsements -- 48 percent of her endorsees won their races. In the Senate, six of her endorsees won, (including Sen. John McCain) and five lost flat out. And then there's Joe Miller, the resident of Palin's Last Frontier who wants to join her on the national stage.
If it proves to be the case that Murkowski ends up winning, then it's not only Miller who will have lost in Alaska. It'll be Palin, one of the most intriguing and arguably powerful politicians in the country, who lost in her own backyard, against Lisa Murkowski, one of her chief political antagonists.
Palin has been recently making more encouraging statements about running for president in 2012. But the big question remains: If the tea party candidate she backed at the home of the tea party loses, what does it do to her clout in national politics? If her candidate in Alaska can't win, what message does that send to the rest of the country?
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The final tally of Palin's successful 2010 endorsements won't be known until results are finalized in each state election. Check back for updates as more race results come in. |
Tea party Senate losses
Nothing Palin has done as a politician so far has been traditional, and nearly every professional political pundit, particularly D.C. pundits, has been wrong about her. If it were up to many of them, after she and Sen. John McCain lost in 2008, she would have stayed in the Alaska governor's seat, read up on Sino-American relations, maybe learned quantum physics or Arabic, and stayed out of sight until, well, forever. But she didn't.
The national press has made a cottage industry out of trying to guess who her main advisers are. But it's pretty clear by now that her main adviser is herself. And it's clear that her main adviser has led her down a road that has much, much sway.
That, say some of her Republican critics, is all well and fine if it means that a sway translates into someone who can grab headlines, bring a crowd into a rally, leverage a high dollar amount on a reality show, and win partisan primary races.
John Feehery, one of those insiders, pundits and "establishment Republicans," as Palin would say, thinks that in order to make a successful 2012 presidential run, she's going to need more than that. Her chosen candidates must win general elections, elections which need to reach out to a broad swath of voters.
And Tuesday night, her losses didn't help, especially those tea party candidates who failed in Senate races.
"It's going to be very difficult for her to get the nomination anyway," Feehery said. "Last (Tuesday) night makes it more difficult. The highest profile campaigns are the ones that people remember."
Those high profile candidates were Sharron Angle in Nevada, Christine O'Donnell in Delaware, Colorado's Ken Buck, and, of course, Palin's very own Joe Miller of Alaska.
But perhaps most damaging is that if it weren't for Palin's endorsement, probably none of them would have won their primary elections. They kept more electable Republicans off their tickets. And that very well might be the reason the Republicans have a Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, instead of a Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell.
As to the candidates Palin endorsed who did win, Feehery thinks many of them would have prevailed with or without her endorsement. "It's hard to give her credit for the House wins," he said. "Just as many people who won didn't want her to campaign for them in their district."
Back to Miller and Alaska: Does Miller's potential loss say anything about her support in the state? Does it matter?
One of Palin's big claims when McCain plucked her from Alaska was her popularity in the state. Indeed, headlines across the country screamed she was the most popular governor in America. Few in the Lower 48, however, have taken note of fading support among Alaskans since she resigned her post. The other night MSNBC's Lawrence O'Donnell and Rachel Maddow both seemed positively shocked to learn that President Obama had more support than Palin in Alaska.
But as these things go, it's more complicated than that. Anchorage-based pollster David Dittman (the only pollster locally or nationally who called Alaska's Senate race correctly before Tuesday night) says many Alaskans generally support Palin, if support means they have goodwill toward her. It's just that they don't think she has any business running for president of the United States.
A Dittman poll taken in February, found that only 17 percent of Alaskans wanted to see Palin run for president. Thirty-six percent thought she should stay politically active. And about 43 percent said she should get out of politics altogether -- roughly, though perhaps not coincidentally, about the same percentage of voting Alaskans who supported a write-in candidate Tuesday night.
Contact Amanda Coyne at amanda(at)alaskadispatch.com.