ANCHORAGE — Sarah Palin’s bid to join the U.S. House, Sen. Lisa Murkowski’s bid to retain her Senate seat and Donald Trump’s influence in both races will be tested Tuesday in two simultaneous elections in Alaska — with voters to vote under unusual new circumstances. On one side of the ballot, Alaskans will vote in a three-way special general election to fill the remainder of the House term left open by Republican Don Young, who was the longest-serving member of the House until his sudden death in March. The 45th president has endorsed Palin, a former governor and vice presidential candidate, over Republican Nick Begich III and Democrat Mary Peltola. The election will be the first in Alaska to use a ranked-choice system passed by voters in 2020. Final results likely won’t be determined for at least two weeks. State election officials say they won’t begin counting runoffs and redistributing votes until after the deadline for absentee ballots to arrive, and political observers see a race without a runaway candidate. The other side of the ballot includes Murkowski’s Senate primary, where she faces Trump-backed Republican Kelly Tshibaka, a former department commissioner in the Alaska state government. Throughout the primary season, Trump has sought to oust Republicans across the country whom he views as hostile to him. After Murkowski voted against Brett M. Kavanaugh’s nomination to the Supreme Court in 2018, Trump lashed out at her and predicted her political demise. Unlike in 2010, when Murkowski lost the Republican primary to a tea party candidate and won the general election only after a campaign, she is favored to advance Tuesday to November’s general election. That’s because of Alaska’s new open primary system, in which all 19 U.S. Senate candidates appear on a single, nonpartisan ballot, with the top four advancing to the November ballot. Murkowski, Tshibaka and Democratic-endorsed Pat Chesbro, a retired superintendent and superintendent of schools, are considered the frontrunners for progress, leading to a primary with relatively little drama. “There’s not a lot of expectation as to whether Lisa Murkowski will move forward or not,” Murkowski said in a phone interview Sunday from outside Fairbanks, where she was between a renewable energy expo and a pool at a local hot springs resort. “So it has a different feel.” The race to replace Young was livelier. Palin surprised many Alaskans by filing at the last minute to run in her first election since her failed run for vice president in 2008 and her decision to step down as governor of Alaska a year later. Forty-seven others also filed to run in June’s special primary election. Among them were the Anchorage newspaper gardening columnist, a Southeast Alaskan halibut fisherman and a man legally named Santa Claus — who lives in North Pole City. Palin, Begich and Peltola advanced to the general election, along with left-leaning independent Al Gross. But Gross dropped out shortly after, leaving the other three as the only candidates on Tuesday’s ballot. The three finalists in the special election are also candidates in the House primary for the November general election. That race appears on the same side of the ballot as the Senate primary on Tuesday’s ballot. The first four finishers in the parliamentary primaries will qualify until November. With the new ranking system used in special elections, voters state their top preferences for candidates. Unless a candidate receives more than half of the first-choice votes — in which case that candidate would win outright — state election officials will remove the third-place finisher from contention. Their voters’ second choices will then be transferred to the two remaining candidates. While there are few polls on the race, strategists in the state say they expect the most first-choice votes for Peltola, a former state legislator who would be the first Alaska Native member of the state’s congressional delegation. While Alaska leans Republican, Begich and Palin are likely to split the conservative vote, they said. Palin, whose campaign pushed for “energy independence” and attacked President Biden, held a rally with Trump at a packed Anchorage arena last month. Since then, he has not announced any public events in Alaska and has endorsed national conservative figures such as former Housing and Urban Development Secretary Ben Carson. Palin spoke earlier this month at the Conservative Political Action Conference in Dallas and blasted the FBI’s investigation into Trump’s Mar-a-Lago Club last week. Palin campaign officials did not respond to requests for comment. Begich was quick to point out her absence from events in Alaska. “Her track record is really about standing up for herself — not for the state, not for those around her, but really for building her personal brand,” said Begich, the nephew of Democratic former U.S. Sen. Mark Begich and his grandson Nick. Begich, a Democrat who held Alaska’s congressional seat until his plane went missing in 1972. Palin, meanwhile, took her own shots at Begić, which has some conservatives worried: Negative campaigning by the two Republicans risks costing each other second-choice votes, analysts say, making Peltola’s election more likely . “You want them to see their second choice as someone they can live with. You can’t turn the second choice into someone they would never vote for,” said Sarah Erkmann Ward, an Anchorage-based GOP strategist. If Peltola wins the special election, he added, “Republicans will have a collective moment where they have to reevaluate their strategy.” Peltola’s campaign, meanwhile, has focused more on local issues, such as plummeting salmon returns in some of Alaska’s rivers, and touted her background as a fisheries manager. She responded to attacks on ads linking her to Biden and raised gas prices by joking that residents of her rural Southwest Alaska region would be happy to pay $5 a gallon because prices there were significantly higher. . But Peltola has also emphasized her support for abortion rights, and her volunteers have been calling on independents and moderate Republicans — especially women — in an effort to chip away at first- and second-choice votes. Alaska’s election is the latest in a series of special U.S. House elections held in the wake of the Supreme Court’s decision to overturn Roe v. Wade, which established a constitutional right to abortion. Democratic and nonpartisan analysts said they have seen signs of greater Democratic optimism about the midterm special election results. But they acknowledged that Biden and his party continue to face significant political headwinds. While Alaska-based officials across the political spectrum say Peltola has a realistic chance of winning Tuesday’s election, national party arms like the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee (DCCC) have stayed out of the race so far. Peltola, in a phone interview Sunday, called that decision “strange,” though she said she should tell voters she’s “just a regular Alaskan” and not a “D.C. politician.” Her allies, meanwhile, hope Peltola will garner more support in November’s general election, when she will run for a full two-year term in Congress. “It’s understandable, in a year where Democrats have been on the defensive, that they’ve been cautious about investing and learning in more red states,” said John-Henry Heckendorn, a nonpartisan Anchorage political consultant working with Peltola’s campaign. . “But I think it’s very clear to people on the ground that they’re missing a huge opportunity if they don’t invest in this fight.” Maddy Mundy, a spokeswoman for the DCCC, said in a statement that ranked-choice voting could create new opportunities for the party. “We are watching this race closely and look forward to seeing the final results from Tuesday’s election,” Mundy said. If Palin is eliminated, many of her voters are expected to rank Begić as the runner-up who would come from behind to beat Peltola, said Ivan Moore, whose Alaska research firm has conducted some of the only polling in the race. . But if Begich, an entrepreneur and software entrepreneur, comes in third, Moore said, he expects Peltola to win because too many Alaskans are tired of Palin to rank her as their second choice. “That’s going to catch up to you when you get down to the bottom two,” Moore said in a phone interview Sunday.
