2022: Murkowski In Serious Trouble
Geographic Isolation And 2022's Weirdest Race
It was Canada Day night, 2016, and while I'm pretty sure I had no plans for the actual celebration, I remember finding myself slumped on my couch playing video games as the clock struck July 2and, and I was immediately reminded of the fact that that day, in Australia, was an election, so I found the Australian Broadcasting Corporation's feed of the results program and tuned in, only dimly aware of the specific seats but aware of who all the players were. And then, suddenly, the results started coming in, and everyone started to get befuddled by the results out of Tasmania.
Three seats - Bass, Braddon, and Lyons - flipped from the Liberals to Labor, and all three augured the kind of night the Turnbull government would have, but it wasn't the psephological implications of those three seats falling that sticks with me to this day - or, I should say, not just the electoral ones. It was also clear that between two senior politicians, three veteran reporters and commentators, and the smartest man in Australian politics, Antony Green, nobody had really thought that the swing in Tasmania would be as large as it was. And then it just shocked everyone.
The first 90 minutes of results counting is mostly just people riffing on the idea that "wow, things are happening in Tasmania, who could have guessed it?" and, as funny as it is to watch, it's always stuck with me because it was so absurd that nobody on that panel had picked up the swing that was coming. Tasmania was a thing that happened over there, away from the mainland, away from the world. Tasmania may only be 150 miles from the mainland, but for all the concern it can get, it may as well be a million miles away.
And that's how Alaska feels to American political watchers.
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A poll out Monday from Cygnal has prompted this bout of reflection, because it included a(n entirely useless) ballot test for a pro-Trump GOP challenger to Lisa Murkowski, showing Murkowski as a weak candidate, but that's not the value of the poll, it's Murkowski's 33% favourable rating and 63% unfavourable. Yes, the poll was for the pro-Trump challenger, from a GOP pollster, but Cygnal are possibly the best private pollster in America, and I would treat their data as a good signal of the state of Murkowski's position in Alaska.
They also broadly match the only poll from the 2020 cycle which included the approval of Murkowski, the "crowdfunded" "Election Twitter" poll of Alaska that I maintain was neither crowdfunded nor for Election Twitter, because I totally believe the conspiracy that it was an Al Gross internal that was released under the guise of neutrality. That poll had her approval at 29%, but with 16% undecided, so the trends are the same. It passes a smell test, if nothing else, because Murkowski is a candidate who has tried so much to appeal to everyone that she is now a candidate for nobody… and yet nobody has noticed.
Murkowski was an acceptable candidate for Demcorats in 2010 and 2016, but the Trump era's increases in both polarization and stakes means that she is now deeply unpopular on both her left and right. Her right flank hates her for the same reasons they always have - they think she's a Republican In Name Only, insufficiently committed to conservative principles and also being annoyed with her for being pro-Roe and pro-gay marriage, which is why Joe Miller got 30% against her in 2016 as a Libertarian. But now, because of the Trump era, she can't pull the trick off again.
Democrats disapprove of her votes for the Trump tax cuts, for Amy Coney Barrett, and against the Biden recovery act (and, presumably, the votes against the rest of Biden's agenda to come, given her statements so far), while Republicans oppose her for sinking skinny repeal, for voting against Kavanaugh, and just generally not being a reliable Republican vote. That voting record is often described as moderate or pragmatic, and people think it means that she'll be able to keep a broad coalition of Democrats, independents, and moderate Republicans to win. What it actually means is that she's a candidate for nobody, and not a lock in any way to even make the final two when the distribution of preferences happens.
If Democrats run a serious candidate, they're probably a lock to get at least 25% of the first preferences vote. The pro-Trump GOPer is probably going to get around 30-35% of the vote, and the Green or whatever else makes the ballot will probably get 5%. So, that means that Murkowski has a narrow path to get there, if every person who has a positive opinion of her puts her as their Number 1 choice - but, of course, that won't happen. If she's this unpopular, she will languish in third place, placing the final race for the seat a battle between the Trumpist and the Democrat.
If that happens, the Trumpist would be favoured, probably heavily. I wrote the headline as Murkowski is in trouble, not the GOP. I think the GOP win the seat, because Alaska is just a bit too far away for Democrats, even if I still think the state is a good medium term target for the party. The state is still a bit too red, but as you can see in the map above, Biden did really well in the cities. If the Trumpist candidate's views turn off Anchorage enough, you could see it be competitive in a way that Gross v Sullivan never was - but that race would be Likely R, and only truly competitive if the rift between Murkowski and the Trumpian candidate got so bad that all of her supporters gave their second preferences to Democrats out of spite, which could happen, but not more than 15% of the time.
Everyone thinks Murkowski is safe because RCV protects moderates, which is only kind of true in the evidence we have from Australia, and is definitely not true of Optional Preferential Voting systems, which Alaskan RCV is. Murkowski is a candidate whose broad appeal would actually be best served by a Compulsory Preferential Voting system, where you have to vote 1-4 for your vote to count at all, because then she could just get everyone else's second preferences because "fuck it, she's better than the other side." Under an optional preferential system, she'll need to get people to actively choose to put her second, instead of just letting their ballots exhaust, and even in Australia, where voters understand preferential voting better than in the US, there is plenty of evidence that preference flows are much weaker under OPV than CPV. This poll is very bad news for the idea of Murkowski as the first place finisher on first preferences, and if 30% of Democrats don't bother picking between Murkowski and the Trumpian challenger, then you start to run out of ballots to close the gap.
All of this is misunderstood because of both American ignorance of foreign elections and American ignorance of Alaska. In the same way that Penny Wong and Scott Morrison were shocked by the results in Tasmania, that geographic isolation breeds a distinct political culture, and a deep ignorance of that culture, from mainlanders. The GOP don't have (much of) a problem in Alaska, but Lisa Murkowski has a huge one. That isolation makes people import their biases onto situations, which leads to fundamental misunderstandings of the state of play. It's complicated and messy, but the way RCV interacts with Murkowski's chances are not the same as the way her write-in candidacy worked. These are different problems to solve, but the answer for why Murkowski will win - as opposed to another Republican - is stuck in the last decade.
Murkowski is probably less than 50/50 to make it back to the Senate, even if the chances of Democratic victory in the seat in 2022 aren't much higher than 5%. The Alaska GOP are fine, but Murkowski's in a whole load of trouble, because in trying to be a candidate for everyone, she's become a candidate for nobody. And that means she's likely out of time, but nobody seems to realize it. If that fact is shocking to you, it shouldn't be - it's just yet another example of isolation leading to political ignorance.