As David posted last night, Democrat Mary Peltola won, and Sarah Palin lost, the special election for the AK-AL house seat vacated when Don Young was beamed straight to hell by a benevolent and loving god. Despite Alaska being as red as a butcher’s floor, with voters who would do almost anything for a R, AK voters won’t do that. Since we’re going to see a rematch in November, here’s hoping that Palin can keep her losing streak going for yet another election.
Here in Rochester, home of NY-25, we have a similar situation, though we’re a fairly blue district. The Republican candidate, La’Ron Singletary, is the former chief of the Rochester PD, who quit/was fired in the aftermath of the police killing of unarmed, naked Daniel Prude. La’Ron was on the local NPR interview show last week, and holy christ is he a terrible candidate. The host, Evan Dawson, spent about 10-15 minutes trying to get a straight answer from La’Ron about the death of Prude. The most important case in his life, and La’Ron didn’t have any answers. Then, La’Ron fumble-bumbled through some questions about limits on gun control. At one point, in response to a question about whether machine guns should be illegal, La’Ron pointed out that they already are under federal law. Since he’s running for a seat in the governmental body that makes federal law — well, you fill in the blanks. That interview made me think there should be a slaughter rule for shitty Republican candidates when they leave the Fox bubble to be interviewed by competent journalists. Suffice it to say that the DCCC won’t need to be spending any money in this district.
AK-AL is a R+8 district, and Cook now rates it as a “Democratic Toss Up”. It should not be that close, and though we’d like to blame Dobbs for pissing off some moderates, or hail Peltola for being a good candidate, Sarah Palin is just widely disliked in Alaska. Pretty girls make graves, dogs die in hot cars, and shitty candidates lose elections.
RaflW
First?
I guess so. I am wondering what Peltola’s chances are in Nov. Is there a second R on the ballot again to split the GOP vote? My sense is that AK is still conservative, but that some 1/4 or third is just not willing to have Sowbilly Snookie potentially mess up the delicate balance AK has with the lower 48.
As a single-rep state, if La Palin goes rogue in office, the backlash could be stronger than to say, MTG or even Marsha Blackburn. AK has their special government handout every year, and it’s $$$
eta: I have no idea how the Permanent Fund oil checks work, but in tis current political climate, I think practical Alaskans know they don’t want to risk something that special.
Nicole
I read the WP article last night and I think it’s going to likely be the same 3 names in the ranked-voting in November, plus a 4th name. So… maybe? Fingers crossed.
Props for the Meatloaf reference, mm.
Suzanne
I heard on CNN that most of Begich’s votes went to Peltoia, and relatively few to Palin. I wonder about that dynamic…. is it because of Palin’s personality/image/reputation, or her politics?
Amir Khalid
Why do Republicans keep picking crappy candidates?
In case you missed this, because I mentioned it in what would be the small hours over there, Najib’s wife Rosmah Mansor was convicted today on three charges of corruption and sentenced to ten years jail plus a huge fine. She’s still out pending an appeal.
Betty
@Suzanne: I read that Palin’s in-laws campaigned against her. That says a lot.
CaseyL
@Suzanne: My guess is it’s her personality/image/reputation. Alaskans know her as someone who is most interested in immediate payoff. As mayor of Wasilla she drove the town deep into debt to get a stadium built, to raise her profile. As Governor, she left twice: first to be McCain’s VP candidate, and then quit entirely mid-term for a book deal.
Alaskans are very RW (though more about deregulation than religious matters), but they also do apparently think their elected representatives should work for them, not for themselves.
MattF
Everyone has figured out by now that Palin has zero interest in governance, much less policy. Some soap-opera addicts are fine with that. Some, apparently, are not.
ian
So the last 50 years was like the Israelites wandering the Sinai?
Scout211
Not really. She and Todd have been divorced for a few years and there is no love lost in that extended family.
JCJ
It helps to be pro-fish!
Ken
To repurpose a line from Terry Pratchett, they keep picking what they think is the cream, but it’s just the crap floating at the top.
Roger Moore
@Amir Khalid:
Because they’re a bunch of whacked-out crazies who demand candidates who match their own beliefs. Or at the very least, there are enough whacked-out crazies in the pool of people who vote in the Republican primary to push their candidates strongly in that direction.
MinuteMan
@RaflW:
They were using a ranked choice voting (RCV) so there was no vote splitting. All of the votes originally cast for the other GQP candidate were reallocated to those voters second choice who mostly wasn’t Sister Soulless. RCV is really the way to run elections since using plurality winners in multiway elections can really produce some odd results.
Frankensteinbeck
By dying? Do they dominate the memorial monument sculpting industry? Is that a reference to how hot goth fashion is? Is this a literal reference to them using shovels? Are they murderesses? This expression confuses me.
RaflW
@Ken: It’s also reflective of the hollowing out of the GOP. They don’t field better candidates because.for decades they’ve not had any interest in policy, governance or results.
State legislatures and governorships have attracted crap, and so the pool is lousy. So they go to the media darlings. And get Vance, Oz and Palin. Oh well!
MinuteMan
@JCJ:
True that. The Dem candidate for our state senate seat had to issue an emergency mailer to counter claims that she was against sport fishing. The flyer pictured her whole family out on the lake with fishing poles.
Ceci n est pas mon nym
I keep seeing that line. I’ve never heard it before. It must be a big thing in Alaska politics. Does that refer to sustainable fishing or something? Or is she giving the fish HIMARS to defend against commercial fishermen?
Scout211
So this is interesting. (Or maybe not . . .)
. . .
James E Powell
@Frankensteinbeck:
It’s a song by The Smiths.
Frankensteinbeck
@Amir Khalid:
Smart people, people who know things, keep telling Republican voters that they’re wrong. So, as part of their package of grievance, they want a stupid, ranting, spite-driven asshole.
randomcitizen
@Frankensteinbeck: It’s a quote from Kerouac:
“But on top of all that, the feelings about Princess, I’d also gone through an entire year of celibacy based on my feeling that lust was the direct cause of birth which was the direct cause of suffering and death and I had really no lie come to a point where I regarded lust as offensive and even cruel. “Pretty girls make graves,” was my saying, whenever I’d had to turn my head around involuntarily to stare at the incomparable pretties of Indian Mexico.”
Also a song by the Smiths…
craigie
@Frankensteinbeck: I was also wondering about that
Ceci n est pas mon nym
@Scout211: Running out of money for that particular legal fight? It’s never his own money of course, so my guess is he’s running out of other people’s money to use on it.
Perhaps triggered by the RNC saying they’re not going to pay for his espionage defense.
Frankensteinbeck
@randomcitizen:
Okay, yes, if people stopped having sex, after a certain amount of lag time people would stop dying. That argument is undeniably true.
Alison Rose 💙🌻💛
@Amir Khalid:
Do they have any other options?
Ken
@Scout211: I’ll take a wild guess that he heard the term “double jeopardy” and thinks that turning over these documents means they can’t file charges for those documents.
PAM Dirac
@Suzanne:
No, Palin got 50.3% of the Begich votes, Peltoia got 28.7% and 20.8% didn’t list a second choice. (Results). I suspect the Nov election will be decided by what that last group does. If they didn’t realize they could list a second choice, will they the second time around? If they do and the second choice for that group is split in the same way as the people that did list a second choice, Peltoia would still win. I don’t have the slightest idea what will actually happen.
wegners shoppers club member mistermix
@randomcitizen: Also the name of a band, as is “dogs die in hot cars”.
Mai Naem mobile
@Scout211: as expeditiously as possible better mean before the election because if Kevin McCarthy takes over that agreement might as well be written on toilet paper TFG will flush down the toilet.
prostratedragon
@Frankensteinbeck: Not just me, then. Maybe men fight over them?
germy shoemangler
JCJ
@Ceci n est pas mon nym:
A tweet of hers:
If your campaign isn’t pro-fish it isn’t truly pro-Alaskan.
— Mary Peltola (@MaryPeltola) August 20, 2022
Abd from an article about her:
For the past five years has led the Kuskokwim River Inter Tribal Fish Commission, which advocates for salmon conservation and fishery management for tribes and rural residents.
Although your idea of giving the salmon HIMARS is intriguing…
Ken
@germy shoemangler: I feel we must entertain the idea that John McCain was a deep agent tasked with the destruction of the Republican party.
Frankensteinbeck
@prostratedragon:
Per @randomcitizen above, apparently it’s part of someone’s argument that every new life created eventually dies. Thus being sexual desirable creates future deaths. And it got incorporated into a song lyric.
Omnes Omnibus
@Frankensteinbeck: Line from “Dharma Bums” by Kerouac. Becomes title of song by The Smiths. Becomes name of band from Seattle.*
*Not sure if the Seattle band was riffing of the Smith’s song or if they went straight to the original.
Roger Moore
@MinuteMan:
I understand the benefits of RCV, but it has flaws, too. The biggest one is that RCV requires more effort, which is a problem when the ballot is already complex enough to scare voters away. For example, in my most recent primary election I had to vote on more than 20 offices, some of which had 10 or more candidates. Just figuring out who I wanted to vote for was a hassle, and it would have been much more of a hassle if I had needed to rank all the candidates. If one of our goals is to encourage more people to vote, making the voting system more complex is not a good way forward.
That’s not to say I think we should stick with plurality voting, but that we need to work on the other end of the problem to simplify the ballot. For one thing, we should vote for fewer offices. Many of the offices I had to vote for should be appointed rather than elected. Not having to vote for attorney general, insurance commissioner, superintendent of public education, sheriff, assessor, and judges would simplify the ballot a lot. I also think we need more vetting of candidates to get on the ballot to keep the number within reason.
rikyrah
Paul Begala (@PaulBegala) tweeted at 8:54 PM on Wed, Aug 31, 2022:
Consider @MaryPeltola’s victory in #AKAL with @PatRyanUC’s win in #NY19 and the pro-choice landslide in Kansas, and you see a pattern. As Adm. Yamamoto said after Pearl Harbor: “I fear all we have done is awakened a sleeping giant, and filled it with a terrible resolve.”
(https://twitter.com/PaulBegala/status/1565156097131937792?t=uY0pCiJxYhodT7HiOWl8qw&s=03)
Belafon
@Suzanne:
Palin got 50.3% of Begich’s voters. Petola got 28.8%. 20.9% didn’t put down a second place candidate.
https://twitter.com/Redistrict/status/1565131292169084928
rikyrah
Christopher Bouzy (@cbouzy) tweeted at 7:24 AM on Thu, Sep 01, 2022:
What I am about to say will annoy a few folks, but it needs to be said. The DOJ shouldn’t indict Trump before the midterms. There are only 67 days until Election Day, and Trump isn’t going anywhere. Republicans will use the indictment to galvanize their base.
(https://twitter.com/cbouzy/status/1565314650312507393?t=-i1kOiSNq3cMFQzSz-wyRw&s=03)
Another Scott
@James E Powell: Thanks. I didn’t get the reference either.
Too many songs out there! ;-)
Cheers,
Scott.
Another Scott
@randomcitizen: Thank you as well.
There’s too much literature out there! ;-)
Cheers,
Scott.
Glidwrith
@Frankensteinbeck: Thanks for saying something, it bothers me too. Pretty women are responsible for men foolishly killing themselves?
And we have plenty of crappy candidates win office (witness orange turd in the punch bowl).
Another Scott
@wegners shoppers club member mistermix: Thank you as well.
There are too many bands out there! ;-)
(Yes, I could do this all day. But I’ll stop.)
Cheers,
Scott.
lowtechcyclist
@randomcitizen: That’s interesting, I hadn’t realized the source was Kerouac. I’d always figured it had originally been the title of a murder mystery.
Belafon
@lowtechcyclist: Sounds like an indirect way of saying “The face that launched a thousand ships.”
kindness
Alaskans (like the rest of us) really don’t like Sarah Palin. The winning Democrat came in 1st. Palin 2nd. When the votes for the 3rd place Republican were distributed between the two, most of those Republican voters voted against Palin.
There is hope for this world yet.
RaflW
RU oil company Lukoil president just died. Seems another failed window. Such a chronic problem over there. This time in a hospital, even. Have they no safety standards?!
PAM Dirac
@kindness:
Not true. The redistributed votes were 50.3% Palin, 28.7% Peltola, and 20.9% no second choice. Palin gained votes, but not enough to overcome Peltola’s first round lead.
RaflW
@Belafon: My math may not be right, but it looks to me like about 10% of GOP voters in the election were anything-but-palin voters.
I realize the KS abortion vote was a very different thing, but the math there seemed to suggest a somewhat similar breakaway?
I’m old enough to remember the years of hearing about “Reagan democrats”. Shouldn’t we be hearing about the new wave of crossover/revulsed GOP voters?
And I don’t mean the professional-class “never Trump” people like Rick Wilson or Tom Nichols. I mean 1000s of people (some in diners!) in lunch bucket ‘red’ states.
daveNYC
Hey now. Machine guns actually are legal, just heavily regulated and very expensive (both for the permit and the gun). Pretty sure that La’Ron isn’t thinking of expanding that level of regulation to other firearms though.
catclub
That still means twelfth of never. Maybe one page per day.
catclub
@PAM Dirac:
I find this amazing that getting 28% of begich’s votes versus Palin getting 50%, was enough. Glad it did, though.
Bugboy
LOL! I have watched Don Young for a long, long, time, and it couldn’t have happened to a nicer guy. But seriously, folks, the despicable ex-congressman has held my attention much more often than even my local Floriduh Replublican’ts, not just for his own stain on society but also for the mini-me’s his office has produced.
Immanentize
@Omnes Omnibus: Which is why fifty plus years of contraception access and abortion rights have made Kerouac and his contemporaries less poetic and more confusing.
Amir Khalid
@rikyrah:
I disagree with Bouzy. The DOJ should arrest and indict Trump whenever Garland decides it’s ready to go forward with the case. Timing that decision to help the Democratic party in the midterms is the sort of political interference that Comey did in 2016, and that Biden has rightly said his administration wants to avoid.
Another Scott
@daveNYC: Yup. People own tanks and cannons too. They have lots of rules about them though…
Cheers,
Scott.
Paul in KY
@Frankensteinbeck: The logic is impeccable :-)
brantl
@Ken: No, he was just a dick. Read all the stuff he wrote; he was just a dick, plain and simple. Defied orders to become a POW, crashed 4 planes (3 in the service, 1 definitely from hotdogging).
Kelly
@daveNYC: I have a friend with a fully permitted WWII .30 cal belt fed machine gun he purchased as the finishing touch for his restored M3 half track. Doesn’t fire it often as you can shoot up $100 worth of .30-06 in less than a minute.
Walker
The thing about Alaska is that it is much more Libertarian than Republican. They just vote Republican because those are the closest candidates. But that state is very pro-choice and has little tolerance for culture war. That is why the vote is as it was.
Martin
The best explanation I’ve seen for Palin’s loss is that Alaskans have seen Bobert and MTGs sideshows and know that Palin is just going to do that shit on TV and not do a goddamn thing for Alaskans.
I know Alaska is a very ‘by your bootstraps’ kind of place, but it’s also a place that needs a certain amount of federal support and the folks there know it. They can’t afford an MIA, barred from serving on committees Rep. that just goes on Fox News and screams ‘lipstick on a pig’ over and over.
caphilldcne
@James E Powell: Jeez, I haven’t heard that song in decades. I’ve never really like The Smiths but I liked this one.
Alaska Reader
@Roger Moore:
Consider a corrupt governor appointing his own attorney general thus avoiding ever being held to account.
(reference to Alaska today)
Elections matter. I would rather elect the attorney general than allow a corrupt governor to handpick his protecter.
Alaska Reader
@Walker: …little tolerance for culture war?
Sounds as if you have not been to Alaska recently.
lgerard
I thought Ted reached his final resting place via a series of tubes.
Jim, Foolish Literalist
I always say trump taught Republicans what they could get away with. It seems like Sarah Palin and Dobbs are examples of over-learning the lesson
Urban Suburbanite
The mayor of Seattle, Bruce Harrell and his niece (she’s a deputy mayor) had a press conference yesterday that consisted of word salad and scuttling away from his previous threat of killing the county homelessness organization (KCRHA). He supposedly put out his budget proposal for the city parks (that department gets used a lot to push homeless people around), which he claims would include funds to upgrade bathrooms (finding a usable bathroom in this city is a fucking task), hire more people for graffiti removal (some of the tagging here is pretty impressive), all of which is a fucking joke. Parks are fenced off, bathrooms (when they exist) are routinely locked at all times, and the department budget is being burned to kick homeless people around and then act surprised when they don’t vanish.
It was the complete antithesis of his earlier bluster in front of police, but the vacuous liberal noises are a familiar performance. Durkan had the exact same act going, but she wasn’t dumb enough to try and threaten the majority of the city council.
moops
Despite being a demonstrably awful representative, Palin still managed 30% of the votes.
Republicans are idiots.
Jinchi
Agreed. She quit after being governor for two years and getting a taste of fame. Why would anyone want to vote for her as Representative?
Let’s hope Peltola is able to increase her margin in the November election.
Geminid
@Ceci n est pas mon nym: Alaska’s commercial fishing industry is a big employer in the state and has political clout. There are plenty of fish to go around up there so there is not so much conflict between the commercial and the individual sport and subsistence fisherman.
Alaska differs in this respect from east coast states like North Carolina. That state has a large sport fishing industry and their trade groups lobby hard to restrict commercial fishing. They would like in particular to put the commercial menhaden fishery out of business, and I hope they succeed.
Jinchi
What’s with all the window fatalities in Russia? Aren’t there easier ways to kill someone in a hospital?
It’s such an obvious mob hit by Putin. Do they actually expect people to believe their nonsense or are they just trolling?
Geminid
@Jinchi: There are plenty of conservatives in Alaska and that shows in Presidential races. Alaskans have a pragmatic streak, though, when it comes to to their congressional representation. The federal government impacts Alaskans more than it does people in other states, and Alaskans generally want their Senators and Representative to zealously promote the state’s interests and to be workhorses, not showhorses. This will cut against a fickle celebrity like Palin.
moops
@Jinchi: It is trolling. Everyone knows “fall from window” is killed by hired goons.
Alaska Reader
That is simply outrageously misinformed.
Alaska Reader
@Geminid:
Alaskans have a pragmatic streak, though, when it comes to to their congressional representation…
So you’re saying you aren’t aware of Senator Sullivan?
There was nothing pragmatic about Alaskans electing Sullivan.
Alaska Reader
Always so disappointing to read so many egregious misconceptions concerning Alaska…
Geminid
@Alaska Reader: So how is Sullivan not pragmatic when it comes to Alaska’s material interests?
Geminid
@Alaska Reader: I meant compared to eastern states like North Carolina. You can always set me straight if you want.
KenK
Thank dog I’m in NY-26 Repped by Brian Higgins.
Geminid
@Geminid: I would add that the idea that Alaskans in particular care a lot about the pragmatic aspects of their congressional representation is an observation I’ve read that is made by Alaskan political analysts writing for that state’s media.
Alaska Reader
@Geminid:
Alaskan ‘political analysts’ ?
No wonder you’re operating under so many misconceptions.