THE ALASKA Division of Elections was scheduled to finish counting ballots in the senatorial election yesterday, two weeks after midterm elections in which Republicans swept the House and made substantial gains in the US Senate.
The Alaska race has come to symbolise tensions between moderate, establishment Republicans and the more extreme Tea Party. It has led to a cat fight between Sarah Palin, the state’s former governor, who backed the Tea Party candidate Joe Miller, and Lisa Murkowski, the incumbent senator and the scion of an old Republican family.
Ms Murkowski lost the Republican primary to Mr Miller, a Yale-educated lawyer, after Mrs Palin endorsed him and the California-based Tea Party Express pumped money into his campaign. Ms Murkowski stood nonetheless, as a write-in candidate.
Mrs Palin wrote on Facebook of “Lisa’s Gall vs. Miller’s Honour” and accused Ms Murkowski of having “reneged on her primary vow to not contest the will of the people”. After his surprise victory in the primary, Mr Miller’s reputation soured. His bodyguards handcuffed and detained a journalist who asked about his use of his government office to further his campaign.
Mr Miller also cited the former East Germany as proof that the US could stop illegal immigration.
By yesterday, Ms Murkowski had 92,164 votes to Mr Miller’s 90,458. Eight thousand write-in ballots remained to be counted, but 97 per cent of write-in ballots so far were for Ms Murkowski.
Only once before, in South Carolina in 1954, did a senator – Strom Thurmond – win a write-in ballot campaign.
Even if Ms Murkowski won the poll, as expected, Mr Miller promises to be a sore loser. He has filed a lawsuit against the state, demanding that 7,601 ballots where the name “Murkowski” was slightly misspelled be disqualified. The state announced at the outset that it would consider “voter intent,” accepting misspellings such as “Merkowski”.
Native Alaskans, for whom Ms Murkowski has obtained funding as senator, filed a counter lawsuit, saying Mr Miller had endangered the voting rights of indigenous peoples and others with difficulty filling out their ballots perfectly.
Mrs Palin objected to then Governor Frank Murkowski appointing Lisa, his daughter, to the Senate in 2002. Mrs Palin later defeated Frank Murkowski, taking the governor’s office in 2006.
When Mrs Palin resigned in July 2009, Lisa Murkowski issued a statement saying she was “disappointed”.
On announcing her write-in candidacy, Ms Murkowski said she was “a Republican woman who won’t quit on Alaska”.
Mrs Palin, a former vice-presidential candidate, now earns millions of dollars a year from book contracts, speaking engagements and television appearances.
She reportedly receives $250,000 for each episode of her new series, Sarah Palin's Alaska, which debuted on Sunday night.
The programme was watched by five million viewers, a record for the TLC channel, which specialises in freakish titles such as Nineteen Kids and Counting, Obese and Pregnant and Strange Sex.
Ms Murkowski returned to Washington on Monday to complete her present term in the lame duck session. In an interview with Katie Couric of CBS News yesterday, she said she would not support Sarah Palin for president because Mrs Palin lacked the “leadership qualities” and “intellectual curiosity” required for the job.
“You know, she was my governor for two years . . . and I don’t think that she enjoyed governing. I don’t think she liked to get down into the policy,” Ms Murkowski said. Asked about her relationship with Mrs Palin, she said: “We just don’t really have much in common – I mean, we don’t talk to one another.”
If Ms Murkowski has won, a second battle between establishment Republicans and the Tea Party is looming over her position as ranking Republican on the Senate energy and natural resources committee.
The Tea Party patriarch Senator Jim DeMint, has lobbied for Senator Richard Burr to take Ms Murkowski’s place.