ANCHORAGE, Alaska—When Alaska politicians dutifully trek to the annual convention of Alaska Natives each election season, they come to gladhand, take selfies, and trot out their shaky Yupik and Inupiaq greetings to an appreciative crowd.
But on Saturday, Republican hopeful Kelly Tshibaka came to the U.S. Senate candidate forum with one goal: throwing every possible punch at Sen. Lisa Murkowski.
Tshibaka, a 43-year old America First hardliner and Harvard-educated attorney, executed her goal with a prosecutor’s single-minded determination.
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Before a packed crowd, she teed off on the $1 trillion infrastructure bill, which Murkowski helped write, as a fatally flawed boondoggle. She decried having “Alaska’s voice” used to “push through radical nominees and red-flag gun control,” references to Murkowski’s recent Senate votes. And she all but stated that Murkowski was bought and paid for by special interests and “dark money.”
If Murkowski was fazed, she only showed it briefly. Onstage, Tshibaka repeatedly suggested that the incumbent lacked the influence to deliver fully for Alaska—emphasizing in particular that Murkowski lacked the chairmanship of the powerful Natural Resources Committee.
In fact, Murkowski hadn’t failed to win that post—she held it so long that, under Senate GOP rules, she had to give it up.
“The reason I am no longer the chairman of the Energy and Natural Resources Committee is because I've been there for six years,” Murkowski said. “And six years? Pretty good.”
At that line, the vastly pro-Murkowski crowd erupted in applause.
As a reflection of the state of the race between Murkowski and Tshibaka, the display was, in fact, pretty good.
With three weeks to go until Election Day, Murkowski—the dealmaking centrist with a penchant for frustrating both parties and a relentless parochial focus on Alaska—is favored to cement her reputation as her state’s ultimate political survivor.
After two decades in office, Murkowski has built up a vast reserve of ill will among Alaska Republicans. Tshibaka may have bet that, after the senator’s vote to impeach Donald Trump for Jan. 6, her long-running ability to defy partisan politics and get away with it had run out.
While Tshibaka is running a hard-edged and aggressive campaign that leans into partisan fights, the audience for them in Alaska may prove limited as it appeared to be at the Alaska Native convention.
In an interview on the sidelines of the convention this weekend, Murkowski allowed a concern that her famously independent and idiosyncratic home state might be growing as polarized as the rest of the country.
“These are more partisan times, there is no doubt about that,” Murkowski said. “As much as I like to think that Alaska is where we can be insulated by stuff that goes on in the Lower 48, because geographically we're not connected there…. we are part of that, and our politics are also part of that.”
“For some candidates, they feel like there’s a partisan set of talking points that if you’re a Republican, this is the script,” she continued. “And I think we see some of that reflected in Kelly Tshibaka’s approach.”
A Murkowski victory in November‚ which is seen as likely by Alaska political insiders, could have implications that reverberate well beyond the borders of the Last Frontier, affecting the battle for the future of the GOP and the future of one of America’s most politically unusual states.
Like so many other Republicans before her, Murkowski might have been replaced with yet another MAGA warrior if Alaska hadn’t changed its election system.
For 2022, the state did away with closed party primaries, a structure that likely would have doomed Murkowski. In the August open primary, she placed first, with 45 percent of the vote to Tshibaka’s 38 percent.
In November, voters will rank the three Senate candidates—Murkowski, Tshibaka, and one Democrat, Pat Chesbro—in order of preference, with their second choices earning their votes if no candidate gets a majority of support on the initial ballot.
That system, called ranked choice voting, could not be more favorable to Murkowski, who has survived challenge after challenge in Alaska by winning over a diverse array of voters. The changes are a big reason why many insiders expect Murkowski to fend off the spirited challenge from Tshibaka.
Murkowski acknowledges those reforms’ critical role in allowing her to compete as fiercely as she has. “I have always been a coalition builder,” she told The Daily Beast. “In any campaign that I’ve been part of, it’s been about, how do we broaden our community here—not just catering to a partisan base.”
But the other reason Murkowski is favored to win adds a dimension of intrigue and significance for what the race means for the future of the GOP—and it’s far more uncomfortable for the longtime senator.
While Tshibaka has resorted to attacking Murkowski anywhere and any way she can, Murkowski has had a powerful ally doing the dirty work for her: Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell.
Through his Senate Leadership Fund PAC, McConnell is spending north of $6 million to blanket Alaska with ads attacking Tshibaka on her ethical record. While Tshibaka has raised a considerable amount of money for her campaign, she has little outside help, and is badly outgunned on local TV airwaves, where the ads attacking her are ubiquitous.
After her appearance in Anchorage on Saturday, a fuming Tshibaka told reporters that McConnell’s involvement in the race was nothing less than “fundamentally un-American” and “an absolute desecration of democracy.”
Asked what she thinks of the relentless barrage of negative ads, Murkowski was careful in her answers. That’s partially because it’s illegal for a candidate to send any kind of explicit message to an outside super PAC. But it’s also because they undercut the sober, issues-based campaign that Murkowski herself is trying to run.
“You get the media people who say negative works, and that's what you see out here,” Murkowski said. “I talked to people who really wish it weren't that way. I wish it weren’t that way. I feel like as a candidate, I've got an obligation to tell people what I've done and what I hope to do, and let them then make the decision as to whether or not we continue with that.”
But asked if she would rather the ads not run, Murkowski declined to answer. “I am a really bad person to ask about that,” she said. “You should probably talk to my comms team, because I am so busy doing my day job and doing the campaigning.” Notably, she also ventured a defense of the ads’ content. “I recognize, though, that some of the things that SLF has put up, you may view them as negative, but they’re factual.”
With McConnell’s relationship to Trump and the MAGA wing already abysmal, his all-out effort to protect Murkowski threatens to drive the rift even wider. The Kentuckian has also quickly become persona non grata among the GOP base in Alaska, which has long despised the incumbent Republican.
Loran Baxter, a retired civil engineer from Anchorage who was in the convention audience supporting Tshibaka, supported an effort in his local Republican Party precinct to formally censure the Kentucky senator. He was especially upset given that SLF has triaged GOP candidates running in other states, like Arizona and New Hampshire, where defeating incumbent Democrats could return Republicans to the majority.
“It’s really, really frustrating, because the swamp runs deep,” Baxter told The Daily Beast. “There’s a lot of Republicans in the swamp, too.”
Asked whether she worries GOP dollars spent in Alaska could sway the majority elsewhere, Murkowski had a simple response: “Mitch doesn’t do anything by accident.”
“There are decisions that are being made about where his Leadership Fund spends money, and, in my view, they’re probably pretty well researched, with an absolute goal towards the end,” she said.
Meanwhile, Tshibaka has leveraged McConnell’s involvement to cast doubt on Murkowski’s reputation as an independent thinker. She described his thinking to reporters as, “Murkowski is a vote that I can control, she’s somebody I can move this way and that way.”
But McConnell knows better than anyone else that Murkowski has, historically, been one of the likeliest senators to buck the party line. According to ProPublica, in this session of Congress, she has voted against the majority of Senate Republicans on 332 votes, or 41 percent of the time. In 2017, she had a hand in one of the biggest failures of McConnell’s career—the defeat of the bill to repeal and replace Obamacare.
It could be, ultimately, that the GOP leader has the same relationship with Murkowski that many Alaska voters do—which, perhaps more than anything else, could explain why she is poised to return to Washington for another six years.
“Even on those votes that she takes that I disagree with her on, I trust that she weighs all the sides, and decides what she thinks is best for Alaska,” said Debra O’Gara, an attorney and Alaska Native from the town of Petersburg.
Asked if she thought enough Alaska voters felt similarly, O’Gara had a quick answer: yes. “Alaska,” she said, “is not dumb.”
