TPM Reader GM checks in from way, way up North …
Your note on the Joe Miller campaign’s bizarre “self-immolation = victory” narrative caught my attention.
I’ve been watching the scene up here for a while. Politically and culturally speaking, Alaska is really North Oklahoma. Nation-wide, there is a 15-20% part of the population that is hard-core right wing conservative (e.g. the ones who still gave Dick Cheney a thumbs up at the end of the Bush years). Up here, that number is 30-35%. These are your hard-core Miller supporters, and there is almost literally nothing he can do to alienate them so long as he toes their ideological line. That is the vote he will likely get, and it is not surprising that the PPP poll supports that.
When you look at it, the Murkowski/McAdams split is also not surprising given the dynamics of three-party races, in which it often happens that the least popular candidate ends up winning.
Throughout the state’s recent political history, the main battle has been between the far right (the mainstream Republicans) and the extreme far right (e.g. the Alaskan Independence Party), with the less-popular Democrats there to pick up the remainder of the votes when these two split. This happened several times through the ’70s and ’80s, when Wally Hickel (Nixon’s first Secretary of the Interior and a far-right favorite) broke off from the Republicans and ran write-in or third-party campaigns, allowing low-polling Democratic candidates to take the governorship (e.g. Bill Sheffield and Steve Cowper – this split went the other way once, though, when centrist Republican Jay Hammond won over Hickel’s write-in campaign.)
Here, the dynamic is different only in the labels attached. It’s not two conservatives splitting the large conservative vote, but rather Murkowski and McAdams splitting the sane vote. Murkowski has spent a lot of money to sow doubts about McAdams (“a nice guy, but too inexperienced, too unknown, and he can’t win”). He is a newcomer to statewide politics, and he never got the chance to write his own narrative. So a lot of people who would otherwise support McAdams have gone to Murkowski. And the less-popular Miller is there to pick up the leavings, and likely a US Senate seat.
