Alaska: A Key Democratic Target?
On The State We All Ignore
The question of what is the third best Democratic state to target, not won by Joe Biden, is a fascinating one. One and two are clearly Texas and North Carolina, in some order, but beyond that, you get a combination of wishful nostalgia for the past (Ohio and Iowa), optimism about future paths (South Carolina, Alaska, and Kansas), and the state that has every Democrat begging it to love them as much as they love it (Florida). The question is difficult, and on any given day I can find myself arguing for any of the paths that involve flipping states moving our way. But, today, the answer is pretty clearly Alaska.
This isn't to say that Democrats will win the Senate seat in 2022 - that's not the case I'm making. But, in terms of the next places to go, it's pretty clear that Alaska should get a serious amount of Democratic investment moving forward. It has the right combination of traits that should be persuasive to Democrats - a much bigger than national swing to them in 2020, cheap media markets, and an urban anchor with room to move left. Oh, and Lak's modelling thought Biden overperformed in the populous urban south.
Let's start with the Anchorage of it all, and the fact that it swung hard to Joe Biden in 2020, as compared to 2016. Per numbers compiled by Ali Dingcor for me using Presidential results by State House district in Anchorage, Hillary lost the city by 7.4% in 2016 - 48% to 40.6%. This year, Biden lost by 0.4% - 47.9% to 47.5%.
This performance looks like a story of one thing happening - third party voters breaking for Biden overwhelmingly - but I'd wager a large sum of money that the topline swing is obscuring two different trends. Yes, plenty of third party voters broke for Biden this year, but 2016 3rd Party → 2020 Major Party voters didn't break 100% for Biden. What happened was plenty of those voters voted blue, and a smaller, but still substantial number, voted for Trump this time after being unable to pull the trigger last time. And then, the GOP bled votes to Biden directly - almost assuredly well-off whites with socially liberal views and some amount of money.
The question of whether that can continue is a mostly academic one in my mind - of course it can, and it almost assuredly will. As I wrote earlier this week, "I fundamentally do not understand why people who have decided that the GOP's social conservatism is a bridge too far are going to come back to the party whose singular achievement in office was to appoint Supreme Court justices who view my homosexuality as a mere "sexual preference." Anchorage has a lot of those voters - libertarian minded, Republican leaning voters who have wanted to protect oil and gas jobs have now started to swing left, and there's no reason to think the GOP message that everything is rosy will resonate in a state where the Governor faced an attempted recall and where a coalition of Democrats, Independents, and a couple of Republicans control the State House.
It's the state of Lisa Murkowski getting run at from the right twice and winning with borrowed Democratic votes. It's the state where the land is Democratic and the voters aren't. It's the land of a lot of people who liked Ross Perot, and the land that sometimes feels like time forgot. It's a cheap media state, it's a state with three urban centers, and a state where the Biden vote loss was under 40000. Now, sure, a ~36000 raw vote margin is still 10% of the state, but it's a lot easier to organize and build a victory when you need to flip that few votes. You tend to see independents and minor parties do best in Australia in Tasmania for the same reason - the quirks of Australian history mean that Tasmania is given 12 Senate seats and 5 House of Reps seats despite only being "deserving" of three, by their population. One of their House of Reps seats is an Indy, and the history of Tasmania in the Senate is an affinity for outspoken, Tassie voices - the Greens started in Tasmania, and then of course Brian Harradine's 30 year Senate career. When you have to convince a smaller number of people, the path forward is easier.
Tssmania represents an interesting parallel in other ways, too - both resource extraction states with an affinity for independents and an electorate well trained at the art of splitting their tickets, Tasmania is in many ways its own political culture, separate and distinct from what happens on the mainland. It's a place where polling is sparse, and what polling exists is mostly shit, where big surprises can pop up just because nobody really pays attention to it. The first hour of the 2016 Australian election night program is a bunch of mainlanders just going, "fuck, what in the name of Christ is happening in Tasmania" as Labor flipped Bass, Braddon, and Lyons on route to a better night than the conventional wisdom gave them reason to hope for.
Alaska is going to be my area of expertise in 2022 because of the vagaries of Ranked Choice Voting, and the fact that nobody else in America seems to quite understand how wonky that could make things if Lisa Murkowski doesn't come in the top 2 in November, but I'm less interested in Alaska as a place where those vagaries matter as much as I'm fascinated by the prospect of it as a state where Democrats can flip the Senate advantage back their way. It's a state where you'll have to run an ideologically… interesting person, let's say. This person will, as a fact of life, have to be more pro-oil than plenty of Democrats in the lower 48 will want them to be. This is the price you have to swallow. Deal with it.
Alaska is the perfect state for Democrats to focus on, given the… let's call it counter-majoritarian nature of the Senate apportionment. It's a cheap state that could help counteract the GOP's structural advantage, with a population ripe for the picking. Take advantage, Democrats.