AK-AL Special election: Peltola wins!

[Holmes]

Obviously we’ll see what happens on the 31st but it wouldn’t surprise me if a lot of low information Democrats ranked Begich first assuming he was a Democrat, and then put the Democrat they’d never heard of as their second choice.

The candidates' party is listed on the ballot in Alaska, but honestly thay wouldn't be such a problem anyway because those votes will end up going to Peltola regardless.

[Holmes]

Why don't they release the data on the 2nd choice rankings among the votes that have already been tabulated?

That would be messy since no one has been eliminated yet.

[Holmes]

It would kind of be a hard ask to get Palin to drop out and endorse Begich if she comes a close second whereas Begich didn’t even advance to the final round.

[Holmes]

Will the results be released all at once?

Probably not. Seems like the calculations will be happening live on stream so we'll see it happen in real time. Who knows how long it will take but it should be quite the show.

[Holmes]

Begich will stay in because he can present himself as the more electable Republican. Palin will stay in because she will have been the candidate who came the closest and just barely lost. Both are valid arguments. Peltola might also get an incumbency boost in November, however small that may be, but it can help in another tight race.

[Holmes]

I'm confused. The AK Elections site shows about 191.8k total votes cast. The total between the three candidates + write ins is about 188k. So that discrepancy (+ the 904 in cinyc's tweet) is the questioned ballots, right? And not all of them will be counted because reasons?

[Holmes]

Honestly I’m just gonna wait another 2.5 hours and then we’ll know.

[Holmes]

Holy sh**t

[Holmes]

https://twitter.com/lisamurkowski/status/1565143733586333697

It seems Lisa knows where her support is coming from

Peltola and Murkowski have a similar coalition.

[Holmes]

I hope it doesn't take this long to count the votes in November

No reason to believe it won’t.

[Holmes]

One thing to consider. I think the Republicans who voted for Palin are the “true believers”. For people saying a lot of Palin voters might switch to Begich in November in the first round, who’s to say a lot of Begich voters won’t switch to Peltola? Especially since she is now the incumbent and she did get a good chunk of his voters’ second choices.

[Holmes]

Terrible title for this documentary.

I mean her first election on the national stage resulted in defeat so this was never an appropriate title.

[Holmes]

One thing to consider. I think the Republicans who voted for Palin are the “true believers”. For people saying a lot of Palin voters might switch to Begich in November in the first round, who’s to say a lot of Begich voters won’t switch to Peltola? Especially since she is now the incumbent and she did get a good chunk of his voters’ second choices.

This is a good point, I didn’t think of it that way. This is certainly a possibility as well.

Either way, I think all 3 candidates stay in the race in November, I don’t think anyone will drop out. So it’ll certainly be interesting.

Palin and Begich have absolutely no reason to drop out. They can keep fighting it out, which helps Peltola. I can see a scenario in November where Peltola ends the first round with around 42-44% of the vote and Palin and Begich battle it out in the mid to high 20’s.

[Holmes]

Without RCV, Palin wins the primary and it’s just her and Peltola on the ballot, and Peltola still wins. It’s incredibly stupid to consider the combined first round R vote as the “real” results, but whatever. Cope.

[Holmes]

bookmark a tweet? lol

You can bookmark tweets. I do it all the time.

[Holmes]

I didn’t realise until this that Palin had divorced Todd, and that his parents backed Begich.

WTF???

When I was taking a look at the endorsement section of the Wikipedia article about the 2022 Alaska's at-large congressional district special election, I thought my pig was whistling.

Take a guess at who endorses Palin's adversary...

Is that supposed to be a joke? Or fake news?

Whoa, Palin is now dating someone from my native Northern Ontario. When I saw his last name is Duguay, I knew he had to be Canadian.