“There was the shock and surprise and disbelief of it,” Democrat Mary Peltola, who beat former Alaska Governor and Vice Presidential Candidate Sarah Palin for Congress, told the Business Journals in a Sept. 1 interview.
Peltola won the Aug. 16 special election to fill the seat of the late Republican Congressman Don Young who died at age 88 after representing Alaska in Congress for almost 50 years. The election results didn’t become known until Aug. 31.
Peltola’s election marks the first time since 1972 that Alaska’s only congressional seat is occupied by a Democrat. She now is embarking on a campaign to be elected to a full two-year term.
“In Alaska it is very customary and nothing out of the ordinary to wait two or three weeks for all of the ballots to be received through the mail,” Peltola said. “Our mail service is very slow and we have just such an enormous state and have inclement weather and the Division of Elections is waiting on overseas ballots.”
Peltola said that another factor that slowed down determining the election result was Alaska’s use for the first time of the “ranked-choice” voting system. Voters are allowed to rank their choices in order from one through four. If no candidate receives more than 50% of the first-place votes, a complex formula is used to add ranked votes from the low-scoring candidates to votes of higher-scoring candidates so that one candidate emerges with more than 50% while still reflecting the choice of the voters.
Palin, who had run as the vice presidential candidate on the GOP ballot with Presidential Candidate Sen. John McCain in 2008, lost to Peltola by about 2% of the votes cast. Peltola received 91,206 votes to Palin’s 85,987. Palin had been endorsed in her bid for Congress by Donald Trump.
“Sarah lifted the McCain presidential campaign out of the dumps,” Trump said in a post on social media. “I am proud to give her my Complete and Total Endorsement, and encourage all Republicans to unite behind this wonderful person and her campaign to put America First.”
“I’m comfortable by the margin I won by but it certainly was not a landslide,” Peltola told the Business Journals. “I think there are myths about Alaska and one of them is that we’re through and through Republican and that’s just not true. Sixty to 65% of Alaskans are pro-choice; a third of our households are labor households.”
Peltola said that in the first phase of the election campaign there was a field of 48 candidates.
“Sarah Palin was one of those people and she clearly had an advantage being an international celebrity,” Peltola said. “Another person who was in the field of 48 was a gentleman whose legal name is Santa Claus and he is on the municipal government in North Pole, Alaska. So, he was another formidable person with significant name recognition. Those were some hurdles. Out of the field of the 48 candidates, the top four vote-getters would then go on to the general election.”
Peltola said she was the sole progressive against very conservative candidates in the general election runoff.
“One of the things that polling revealed was that Sarah has 30% or 35% support but she also has a 60% negative rating and I just think she has a ‘hard cap’ on her ceiling of supporters,” Peltola said. “I think for most Alaskans the top issue affecting households is inflation and we have always paid the highest prices in the United States for our goods and services because we are so remote and logistically it is just so expensive to ship our goods up here and transportation costs are going up as well. We have a significant housing shortage as do people across America.”
Peltola said that while there may be a geographic spread between Alaska and the lower 48, there are common concerns.
“We all want the same things. We want good jobs with livable wages, adequate housing for our family, good schools to send our kids to and certainly Alaskans are very covetous of our freedom and our privacy and that extends to women’s reproductive rights as well,” Peltola said. “I’ve been running a very clean campaign focused on issues that matter most to Alaskans. I am very intent on serving all Alaskans regardless of their ethnic background or religious background or gender or gender identity and I am very honored to have been selected to fill out the remainder of Congressman Young’s term and I hope to represent Alaska in the same way that Don represented all Alaskans. I’m excited about what the next four months brings.”
Peltola is from Bethel, Alaska, and will be the first Alaska native to serve in Congress. She told the Business Journals that she hopes to help make the Democratic hold on the Congressional seat permanent.
