Former Alaska Governor and VP candidate Sarah Palin has announced she is running for Alaska's lone congressional seat. Politico. The seat was held by the late Don Young, who died last month. Palin has largely disappeared from politics and was once a popular governor, but she lost a lot of good will when she resigned as Governor in 2009. 51 other candidates are running for Young's old seat but Sarah Palin is the one with national name recognition and may secure an endorsement from President Donald Trump. That could have an impact on the Senate race as well as Senator Lisa Murkowski, a longtime Trump foe, is facing a primary challenge by Kelly Tshibaka. It is possible that enough people would decide to vote for Palin and Tshibaka together to finally remove Murkowski from the Senate.
My Comment:
This news broke yesterday but it is a slow news weekend and I wanted to cover it anyways. Palin is a fairly controversial figure, even among Republicans, and it will be interesting how this turns out. Alaska's only congressional seat is an important prize.
We haven't heard from Palin in a long time. The last time I remember hearing about her is when she endorsed Donald Trump back in 2015, so it's been awhile since then. Back then I thought her endorsement was pretty important but now it appears the tables have turned.
Do people still like Palin? It's hard to tell. A lot of Alaskans gave up on Palin after she gave up on the Governor's office. She was fairly popular in Alaska before she did that but a lot of people never forgave her for doing that. And it's obviously a downside in voting for her in Congress. If she quit once before why wouldn't she quit again?
Another problem, one the Politico article didn't mention, is that she is tainted by her run with the late Senator John McCain. At the time the pairing was popular but now McCain is persona non-grata in the Republican Party, to the point that some Republicans openly celebrated his death. 2008 was a long time ago and the time when McCain was a respected and loved senator are long over. Now much of the Republican party sees McCain as a warmongering traitor that attacked President Trump out of spite.
To be fair to Palin she didn't join in with McCain when he was attacking President Trump, but the association is still there. McCain is an albatross around Palin's neck and she has to balance the fact that the people that hate him want her to distance herself from him and at the same time that it's considered bad form to disparage the dead.
Still, who else is Alaska going to pick? I know it is a huge field of 51 candidates but its's Alaska, a Democrat is not going to win. That means whoever wins the candidacy will likely take the seat. And Palin has a huge advantage in name recognition and will likely get endorsed by Donald Trump. That's a huge advantage for her and will likely result in her getting quite a bit of extra fundraising.
With this mean the end of Lisa Murkowski? I sure hope so. Murkowski is a Republican in name only and has no business being in the party when she seems to disagree with almost all of its principals. Murkowski, though, has lost a primary challenge in the past before back in 2010. In that case she still ran as a write in candidate and managed to beat both the Republican and Democrat that ran that year. I don't think that will happen again but it's possible she will do so again if Palin brings enough votes in to help Kelly Tshibaka.
As for Palin herself, I think that she is probably going to face the full wrath of the media once again. They always hated Palin and given that Donald Trump isn't running in 2022 they are going to focus on Palin like a laser beam. That will probably help her, honestly, given how much people hate the media now...
Will Palin win? Honestly, I don't know enough about Alaska politics to say. I don't know how serious the other 51 candidates are. I do know that a lot of people are going to be hungry for Young's seat, he was the longest serving Republican in Congress after all. There are going to be a lot of very ambitious people in Alaska who see the seat as a stepping stone to bigger and brighter things, and Palin is just another one of them...
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