Sen. Lisa Murkowski said yesterday that she doesn’t blame her felllow GOPers for throwing their weight behind the tea party-backed Joe Miller in the Alaska Senate race. “I knew that by running as a write-in candidate, I would not be my party’s nominee,” she said. “I could not expect that same level of support that other party nominees would have, and that’s the simple reality of it.”
Murkowski launched her write-in campaign after losing to Miller in the Republican primary, and now looks poised to win as the state finishes counting the write-in ballots.
“The expectation is that the party nominee will get the funds from [the National Republican Senatorial Committee], their coordinating funds, and they did that,” Politico reports Murkowski said to reporters.
“When it’s all said and done,” she continued, “and I am returned here to the United States Senate, it will be not because I came as my party’s nominee but because a very, very wide range of Alaskans of all political stripes have stepped up and said, ‘You’re the person that we want to represent us.’ That’s a nice place to be.”
