Murkowski On the Ropes
The absentee votes are still uncounted, but Tea Party favorite Joe Miller looks to be on track to unseat incumbent Alaska Senator Lisa Murkowski.
The winner of the GOP senate primary in Alaska will not be known until all the absentee votes are counted, but it looks as if Joe Miller is on track to unseat incumbent Lisa Murkowski in an upset few in the media were predicting. At the time of writing this blog post, Miller leads Murkowski 47,027 votes to 45,359.
If Joe Miller holds on to win the primary, some political watchers speculate that the presence of a Tea Party candidate as the GOP nominee could create a situation similar to Kentucky or Nevada, states where a fringe candidate has made races that should be a Republican-lock suddenly competitive. Democrats however had expected Murkowski to win the nomination and keep the seat. But to take advantage of the possible tea party upset, some analysts think the Democrats will need to change their candidate first.
Alaskan pollster Mark Hellenthal told FrumForum about the current weaknesses of the Democratic candidate, Scott McAdams: “He’s from a very small community in Alaska and nobody knows who he is. He would be starting up with a tremendous name ID handicap and way behind the power curve. There are other Democrats on the sideline who are more substantive.” McAdams is currently the Mayor of Sitka, a small town of roughly 8,800. (To the town’s credit, it has more people living in it than Wasilla.)
Nicole Allan has gotten a quote from the chairman of the Alaska Democratic Party insisting that they will stick with McAdams as the nominee: "Sure, it's possible, we can switch out a candidate, but we have absolutely no intention of doing that," she says. "Scott's our guy. He's no placeholder. We are going to be running a very serious, hard-shooting campaign, pointing out the very wide differences between the two candidates."
The liberal blog FireDogLake also praised McAdams back in July.
Normally the dirty details about a candidate’s sordid past would be learned through their opponent’s opposition research. Since Lisa Murkowski did not do anything to impugn Joe Miller’s biography, everything we know about him has been supplied by his own campaign. The result suggests that Miller is a stellar candidate. The splash page to his website shows Miller and his wife surrounded by their eight children. He is a graduate of both West Point and Yale Law, and well as a veteran from the first Gulf War. The challenge for his Democratic opponents, will be to make their own candidate viable, and to undercut Miller’s seemingly impressive background.
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