RSS Feed MenuThe 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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sinz54 // Aug 26, 2010 at 9:14 am
Alaska has trended GOP; and in this anti-Obama year, they’re trending that way even more strongly.
The Dems shouldn’t bother. Miller is going to be the next senator from Alaska.
The new Congress in January won’t just have fewer Dems. It’s going to take a sharp turn to the right.
That should terrify all the liberals in America–and a good thing too!
CentristNYer // Aug 26, 2010 at 9:52 am
sinz54 // Aug 26, 2010 at 9:14 am: “It’s going to take a sharp turn to the right.”
If it does, it’s going to take a turn to the wing nut, tea bagger, belligerent right. More yelling “liar” during presidential addresses, more phony screams about “death panels” and “socialism” and more Palinesque avoidance of the media not owned by Rupert Murdoch.
Yeah, that’s gonna be fun for the country.
balconesfault // Aug 26, 2010 at 10:01 am
Miller is going to be the next senator from Alaska.
…
That should terrify all the liberals in America–and a good thing too!
Miller in the Senate with an (R) next to his name should terrify moderate Republicans as well – probably more than it terrifies liberals.
Fairy Hardcastle // Aug 26, 2010 at 10:08 am
Sinz makes a partisan cheer and CentristNYer responds with insults. I wonder if CentristNYer is really centrist (whatever that means)? Let’s see how he responds when some liberal is elected.
Moderate Republicans — and what exactly do they believe? Moderation of limited government? Or moderation of the requirements of safety regulations for abortuaries? Yeah, great things to be moderate about.
bamboozer // Aug 26, 2010 at 10:19 am
Millers a radical who makes Sharron Angle look calm, expect Republican handlers to swarm all over him for a remake. Have fun with this one Mitch.
easton // Aug 26, 2010 at 10:48 am
Alaska has trended GOP…too funny, a state that has been solidly Republican since it came into the Union, that has had a Republican forever in the House and until recently 2 Republican senators and Governor has been pronounced as “trending GOP” and I love it will have a supposed sharp turn to the right, good lord, this is a state that has as its 3 strongest party a party that calls for Alaskan secession. Begich only won because Stevens had just been Convicted and Bush had driven America into a ditch, and even then he barely squeeked in, but we are to take Sinz word that one Conservative Republican beating another Conservative Republican in the most Republican state signifies everything.
I dunno Sinz, sometimes you are pretty funny.
balconesfault // Aug 26, 2010 at 10:50 am
Murkowski had a League of Conservation Voters score of 36%. While this may not seem too notable, it actually made her the 3rd highest ranking Republican Senator, behind the two ladies from Maine. Presumably Miller will be joining the other 21 GOP Senators with scores <10%.
So much for the concept that more GOP senators will make the GOP more likely to deal in shaping climate change legislation.
Fairy Hardcastle // Aug 26, 2010 at 10:56 am
balconesfault, I like how you qualified with “presumably” What is the basis for your presumption? Have you studied his positions on various issues? I am sure like any reasonable person, Miller agrees that there is climate change.
balconesfault // Aug 26, 2010 at 11:09 am
Fairy – Miller has expressed the position that any climate change we’re currently observing is most likely a result of natural cycles, and that there’s scant evidence that it has anything to do with human activities. During the campaign one of his attacks on Murkowski was that she had worked with Democrats on crafting cap and trade legislation in the past.
Murkowski’s sin? She was trying to soften the legislation so that it would protect Alaskan energy interests. But she was willing to actually engage in dialogue with the Dems on the issue, which clearly made her complicit.
Suffice it to say that it’s highly unlikely that anyone with Miller’s mindset will be participating in any negotiations towards regulating something that he doesn’t believe is even an issue. Another Republicant headed to Congress.
Fairy Hardcastle // Aug 26, 2010 at 11:26 am
Balconesfault, that sounds plausible. I understand that a leading climatologist attributes any warming period to unusual solar activity which of course would not be due to mankind. If that is true then cap and trade’s benefits are not really to address potential dangerous warming but limit pollution, and I don’t know enough to know if that is a good enough reason for that legislation.
CentristNYer // Aug 26, 2010 at 11:31 am
Fairy Hardcastle // Aug 26, 2010 at 10:08 am: “I wonder if CentristNYer is really centrist (whatever that means)? Let’s see how he responds when some liberal is elected.”
Ideology doesn’t mean very much to me. I value smarts, reasonableness and problem-solving much more than peoples’ placement on some arbitrary ideological spectrum. It’s nonsense to think that only conservatives — or liberals — can generate good ideas. Society is best served when it avoids swerving either too far left or too far right. That’s how you wind up in the ditch.
DFL // Aug 26, 2010 at 12:09 pm
Due to the unique nature of a race where the challenger made great strides very late in the race, I would not be surprised if Lisa Murkowski surges with the absentees. I think we”ll see a race as close as Franken-Coleman by the time votes are counted about Labor Day.
DFL // Aug 26, 2010 at 12:32 pm
If you suppose that there are 5000 Republican absentee votes and that Senator Murkowski won 65 % of the absentee vote, you have a 3250-1750 spread or 1500 votes. The current spread is something like 1,650. This primary election may take a month to sort out.
PracticalGirl // Aug 26, 2010 at 1:41 pm
I have a difficult time rustling up any feelings, one way or the other, about who the next Senator from Alaska is. A GOPer representing Alaska is a given, and by any other name, is still (for the most part) the voice of NO. No real change in the balance there. If the wisdom in Alaska is to send a junior Senator to Washington to represent their needs, then ok. But my guess is that, after the spoils they have enjoyed due to Murkowski and Stevens, Alaskans will see soon enough what folly this notion is…And fault Obama, of course, even though they will have only themselves to blame.
balconesfault // Aug 26, 2010 at 1:52 pm
Fairy – I put these things on a scale.
First, I am an engineer, and do a lot of work in the power industry. I’ve had a lot of experience in combustion and emissions. I’m not a climatologist, or statistician.
I’d say that listening to people who are climatologists and statisticians, and using my technical understanding to arbit to the best of my abilities the current information and modeling, my swag would be that there’s an 85-90% chance that any warming we’re observing is being significantly enhanced by human activity. Now, formally that would mean that I’m “not 100% sure”.
But putting everything on a balance, I look at on one side an accelerated weaning of ourselves from fossil fuels (accelerated because future generations will most certainly face a depletion of available fossil fuels, so societally we’ll have to deal with this sometime), with the concurrent economic costs and resultant short-term hardships.
On the other side, I see geopolitical reasons to reduce our fossil fuel consumption (inevitable reliance on buying oil from nations whose interests aren’t aligned with ours). I see economic reasons to do so (the mammoth trade imbalance importing oil and natural gas costs us, and the economic shocks to our economy during speculative fluctuations of fossil fuel costs).
I see environmental reasons to do so even unrelated to the climate change issue (CO2 itself isn’t toxic in the concentrations we’re talking about, but drilling for oil, ripping shale deposits out of the ground, removing the top of mountains to extract coal, pushing all these fossil fuels around the country with occassional leaks and spills, and all the secondary byproducts of combustion including ozone, carbon monoxide, release of toxic metals into the atmosphere and water, NOx, particulate smog, etc).
And I see sustainability issues. Eventually these resources will be depleted, and we will need to move to new power generation sources. So maxing our consumption of fossil fuels now just kicks that can down the road for future generations – generations which will have MORE people, LESS available land for certain land-intensive renewables development projects, and LESS available water to allocate for nuclear (which is an incredible water hog).
The factors above are all drivers for the US making a concerted effort to substantially reduce our use of fossil fuels within our generation, rather than forcing other generations to deal with it when they have more constraints on how to deal. The climate change issue just raises the urgency of that action.
Consider having a transmission that’s been leaking, and the shop tells you it could fail anytime … or it could keep working for another 50K miles. You’re heading out on a family vacation across the Western States in the middle of the summer. You’re most likely going to have put a new transmission in the car sometime (or just buy a new one) – what is the prudent course? Head out on the trip because you’re convinced the transmission shop was just just being alarmist about the possibility that the tranny might only last 1K miles instead of 50K? Or bite the bullet and have the work done before you take the risk of sitting in the middle of the desert with no cell coverage on a 105 degree day hoping someone can come by to get your family to Truth or Consequences before they all get heat stroke?
LFC // Aug 26, 2010 at 2:21 pm
balconesfault said… Miller has expressed the position that any climate change we’re currently observing is most likely a result of natural cycles, and that there’s scant evidence that it has anything to do with human activities.
And the GOP march to expunge all science from their policy decisions marches on.
Fairy Hardcastle said… I understand that a leading climatologist attributes any warming period to unusual solar activity which of course would not be due to mankind.
“A” … “leading” … climatologist. WOW! Guess this guy must be leading since he disagrees with thousands of other highly accomplished climate scientists and the national scientific organizations from dozens of nations, including virtually all of the top economic producers in the world. Yep. This guy has convinced me.
This is how people operate who have a preconceived belief. They ignore vast amounts of evidence while desperately clinging to “a” guy who tells them what they want to hear. Remember how the ozone hole wasn’t real? How mandating seat belts was going to destroy auto sales. Or mandating air bags? How the Clean Water Act was going to destroy industry? How the Clean Air Act was going to cause energy costs to skyrocket? How banning DDT in the U.S. was going to cause a huge rise in disease? How evidence about cigarettes was inconclusive? How sailors were going to fall off the edge of the Earth if they went too far?
While science has certainly made mistakes, it’s a self-correcting system. There is no self correction for people who simply know what they know, because all evidence to the contrary is conveniently ignored.
PracticalGirl // Aug 26, 2010 at 2:56 pm
LFC says
“While science has certainly made mistakes, it’s a self-correcting system. There is no self correction for people who simply know what they know, because all evidence to the contrary is conveniently ignored.”
The naysayers for naysaying sake have a dismal track record and have as a group demonstrated politically motivated short-sighted decision making processes. The natural follow up question, ignored as conveniently as the evidence by this group? What if you and your one guy are wrong?
LFC // Aug 26, 2010 at 3:53 pm
BTW, wasn’t Murkowski the one who got the sweetheart land deal with a prime property on a world class salmon fishing river, only to backtrack it when she got called on it?