It’s official: Sen. Lisa Murkowski is not “ranking the red.”
She is voting for Democrat Mary Peltola for Congress. The news came in the form of a Twitter post relayed by a reporter on Friday.
Murkowski has been verywarm to Peltola since the Bethel Democrat won the temporary seat in Congress to replace the late Congressman Don Young. The news of her announcement to go with the Democrat rather than a Republican as her first choice caught few by surprise. Murkowski has been leaning more and more to the left for several years and was asked this year by the Republican Party to leave the party.
Peltola won the temporary congressional seat in August, and is now in contention for the two-year seat.
Republicans have been preaching that they should “rank the red,” which means to rank either candidates Nick Begich or Sarah Palin first, and Palin or Begich second. But as Murkowski has been dismissed by the Alaska Republican Party, she evidently feels no loyalty to other Republicans at this stage of the campaign, when the Alaska GOP has clearly favored her Republican opponent Kelly Tshibaka.
By backing Peltola, Murkowski is also backing Nancy Pelosi as House Speaker, said the Tshibaka campaign in a note. Is it a ‘Hail Mary” or her only obvious path to victory? Murkowski knows that 90 percent of Republicans are lost to her, so her only path to win is to get as many Democrats as possibles. It appears to be a purely political, and purely mathematical move. She cannot win more Republican voters than she already has by stating her support for a Republican.
At this point, Murkowski has abandoned the Republican Party completely in a state that went for Trump by double digits twice. She hasn’t identified Peltola as the best candidate; this is a math calculation based on political survival. She is also dropping her opposition to dark money from Outside, with Sen. Mitch McConnell attacking her Republican opponent, Kelly Tshibaka.
