WASHINGTON — It’s tempting to write off anything that happens in Alaska politics as just plain weird, the result of irregular sunlight or too many low-altitude flights. And maybe that explains what’s happening in the country’s last undecided Senate race, where Senator Lisa Murkowski now seems likely to pull off an unlikely victory as a write-in candidate, after having been ousted by a Tea Party candidate in a Republican primary in August.
But it’s also possible that Alaska’s defiant electorate, like the California voters who just approved a radical change to their voting system, is actually telling us something important about where American politics is headed, at a time when our system for selecting candidates feels increasingly anachronistic.
Alaska election officials began scrutinizing and counting some 92,000 write-in votes on Wednesday — about 11,000 more votes than were cast for Joe Miller, Ms. Murkowski’s Republican opponent. Assuming almost all of those write-in votes ultimately end up in Ms. Murkowski’s column, she would be the first write-in candidate to win a Senate election since Strom Thurmond, who did it in 1954 after Democratic Party leaders in South Carolina gave him the boot for endorsing Dwight D. Eisenhower.
What makes Ms. Murkowski’s potential victory different and especially surprising is that she was, in fact, her party’s original preferred candidate. This means that a lot of voters who weren’t as ideological or as motivated as the Tea Partiers had to go to the trouble of spelling out her three-syllable name, rather than simply checking a box. If they made a movie, it would be called “The Establishment Strikes Back.”
The ballot review process in Juneau included a challenged write-in of “Lesa Murkoski” instead of Lisa Murkowski.
Christopher Miller for The New York Times
It’s impossible to know, of course, exactly whom Ms. Murkowski’s write-in votes came from. As many as half probably came from more moderate Republicans, judging from her vote totals in August and November. And polling before the election indicated that as many as a third of registered Democratic voters were open to switching their support to Ms. Murkowski, too, if that’s what it took to deny Mr. Miller a victory. (Among the things Mr. Miller became known for during the campaign: citing East Germany as an example of effective border security.)
But chances are that Ms. Murkowski also reeled in some significant bloc of unaffiliated voters, who make up about half the electorate in Alaska.
Something like 230,000 Alaskans appear to have cast ballots in this month’s midterm election, compared with fewer than 146,000 who voted in the Republican and Democratic primaries combined. A CNN/Time poll in the weeks before the election showed Ms. Murkowski edging Mr. Miller among independent voters, even though she wasn’t actually on the ballot.
What all of this probably means is that some critical number of independent voters decided they didn’t like the options the two parties had given them, and they were willing to go to the trouble of writing in a candidate who seemed to have a real chance of winning rather than pull levers A or B.
This was bound to happen somewhere. There was a time in America when our primary process made perfect sense, because most voters identified closely with one party or the other, and it was safe to assume that someone who wanted to participate would choose a team. In the 1950s, independents lagged behind both parties, making up less than a quarter of the electorate.
Representatives of the Murkowski and Miller campaigns joined Alaska officials in inspecting ballots.Rick Bowmer/Associated Press
That number has risen steadily, however, especially among younger voters, to the point where independents have recently overtaken both parties, hovering around 40 percent. A recent Pew Center poll found that the number of voters who identified themselves as independents had risen five percentage points since 2002.
You have to wonder, given this trend, whether the primary process as we’ve known it can remain tenable. With each passing year, it seems, an ever smaller group of voters in either party — rallying, in a year like this one, around ever more extreme points of view — get to effectively determine the options for the rest of the electorate.
It’s a dynamic that this year prompted major change in California, the state where most innovations — fast food, computer chips, etc. — spring to life before sweeping eastward. In an initiative championed by Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger and opposed by both parties, voters approved an open primary system in which candidates of all qualifying parties will be put on the same primary ballot. Then the top two vote-getters will enter a runoff in November, regardless of party.
The idea is that nonpartisan voters, too, will get to take part in winnowing down their choices for November. And candidates will have to appeal to a much wider array of voters during the primary phase of the campaign, rather than just to Tea Partiers or the most liberal activists.
This kind of system might well be the norm in America in 10 or 15 years, as a more independent generation of voters ascends toward middle age. If not, expect to see more primary uprisings among sharply ideological voters followed by more write-in rebellions like Lisa Murkowski’s. If anything’s weird in Alaska this year, it has more to do with the system than it does with the state.
http://lnkclik.com/7bn1
http://lnkclik.com/7bn3
http://lnkclik.com/7bn1
http://lnkclik.com/7bn3
