Sarah Palin Set To Play Spoiler, Again, in Alaska House Race

Alaska Republicans don’t seem to have learned from their mistakes.A longtime Alaska pollster, Ivan Moore, says that with the deadline to drop out having passed, and Sarah Palin leading the Republican who came in third in August, Nicholas Begich, the election for Alaska’s sole seat in Congress is lining up to be a repeat of August.“It’s like the old classic definition of insanity,” he tells the Sun. “We’re on course to do a do-over in exactly the same way.”Ahead of the August election, Mr. Moore, who conducts polling for Alaska Survey Research, found that Congresswoman Mary Peltola had a path to victory, but only if Ms. Palin was to come in second.In the August special election, that’s exactly what happened. Ms. Peltola came in first, Ms. Palin came in second, and Mr. Begich came in third.Under the state’s new ranked-choice voting system, Mr. Begich was eliminated, and his voters’ votes were transferred to the voters’ second choices. These results broke in favor of Ms. Peltola, who ended up besting Ms. Palin by 51 percent to 49 percent in the final tally.Since then, Ms. Palin has called on Mr. Begich to drop out of the race in order to consolidate Republican support around the former governor.“Nick has until 5 o’clock today to do the right thing,” Ms. Palin said. “And if he truly supports the election of a real conservative, real Republican from Alaska to the U.S. House of Representatives, he’s not that candidate. I am.”Mr. Begich has done the same thing: “Sarah Palin’s first reaction to adversity is to either quit herself or encourage others to quit,” Mr. Begich said. “And I’m not going to quit on Alaska.”Now that the deadline for candidates to drop out of the race, September 5, has passed, the candidates are locked in to appear on the ballots in November.According to a recent Fabrizia, Lee and Associates and Impact Research poll, voters should expect the results in November to look very similar to those from August.For the first round they have Ms. Peltola leading, followed by Ms. Palin and then Mr. Begich. In the final tally, the pollsters expect that Mr. Begich’s voters will break again for Ms. Peltola, 53 percent to 47 percent.Mr. Moore argues that these results, like the results from August, show that the majority of voters simply don’t want to vote for Ms. Palin. He points to the 11,000 voters who picked Mr. Begich with no second choice as evidence.“You leave it blank when you don’t want to vote for a candidate,” he said. “They don’t want to vote for Peltola because she’s a Democrat, and they don’t want to vote for Palin because she’s a quitter.”While Ms. Palin has criticized Mr. Begich, blaming him in part for her loss, she also has publicly complimented Ms. Peltola, calling her “beautiful, smart, and tough” and “a real Alaskan chick” in conversations with Insider.The last hope for Ms. Palin is to convince enough supporters of Mr. Begich to list her as their second choice over Ms. Peltola, a task that could be challenging given her praise of Ms. Peltola and criticism of Mr. Begich.The dynamic between the three candidates might even give Ms. Peltola a better chance than she had in August, Mr. Moore said.“The problem isn’t with the candidates not dropping out, it’s with the voters not understanding that Sarah Palin can’t win,” he said.Mr. Begich seems to be aware of this as well, even though he maintains publicly that he is “on a positive trajectory to win in November.”“Sarah Palin is going to lose again if she stays in this race,” Mr. Begich told KTUU, an Alaska television news channel. “At the end of the day, Alaskans know who Sarah Palin is, and they’re not going to vote for her.”

Sarah Palin Set To Play Spoiler, Again, in Alaska House Race

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