WASHINGTON TIMES EDITORIAL BOARD
“Alaska Republicans should resent Mr. McConnell’s gratuitous interference in the race and the way Ms. Murkowski has manipulated this ‘heads I win, tails you lose’ game. They should vote for Ms. Tshibaka on Nov. 8, and definitely not vote for Ms. Murkowski as their ‘second choice,’ which would only help rescue an out-of-step incumbent.”
Defeated in the 2010 Alaska GOP primary by a conservative challenger, liberal Republican Sen. Lisa Murkowski defied the odds and ran a successful write-in campaign for reelection.
Ms. Murkowski — who had been appointed to the seat in 2002 by her father, then-Gov. Frank Murkowski, in a move that gave nepotism a bad name — won that 2010 race with just 39.5% of the vote in a three-way race. That was the lowest share of the vote for a winning Senate candidate in 40 years.
Fast-forward to today. Ms. Murkowski is again running for reelection and is even less popular now with the GOP base than she was in 2010.
That shouldn’t surprise anyone after Ms. Murkowski voted against conservative Judge Brett Kavanaugh’s nomination to the Supreme Court in 2018, but then turned around and voted in favor of liberal Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson’s nomination earlier this year, or after she voted to convict President Donald J. Trump, a fellow Republican, of baseless, Democratic-driven charges of incitement to insurrection in his second impeachment trial. (After the impeachment vote, Ms. Murkowski was censured by the Alaska Republican Party.)
If all that weren’t bad enough, according to FiveThirtyEight.com, which tracks congressional votes, Ms. Murkowski voted with Mr. Trump’s positions just 73% of the time, second-lowest only to her fellow liberal Republican, Sen. Susan Collins of Maine. In the first nine months of the Biden administration, however, Ms. Murkowski voted with the positions of President Joe Biden, a Democrat, nearly 79% of the time.
No doubt fearing another primary challenge (and the unlikely prospect of successfully pulling off another write-in campaign), Ms. Murkowski and her allies in 2020 orchestrated a change to Alaska’s election laws.
Read the rest of this editorial at The Washington Times.
