Up for reelection this year in a red state and facing formidable competition for renomination by a candidate endorsed by former President Donald Trump, Republican Sen. lisamurkowski has no business voting to confirm Jackson to the Supreme Court.
But that is what Alaska has wrought with a new system for electing candidates to state and federal office that eliminated closed-party primaries and head-to-head general elections featuring Democratic nominees in favor of all-party primaries and four-candidate general elections decided by ranked-choice voting.
In announcing support for President Joe Biden’s nominee to succeed retiring Supreme Court Justice Stephen Breyer, Murkowski conceded she has not “and will not agree with all of Judge Jackson’s decisions and opinions.” But tellingly, the senator framed her confirmation vote as “my rejection of the corrosive politicization of the review process for Supreme Court nominees, which ... on both sides of the aisle, is growing worse and more detached from reality by the year.”Only Sen.
Murkowski voted to confirm all three of the associate Supreme Court justices nominated by Trump, including Kavanaugh and Barrett.Alaska has not voted for a Democratic nominee for president since 1964. The Democrats last won a Senate race in Alaska in 2008, last won the governor’s mansion in 1998, and last won the state’s lone at-large House seat in 1970. But that generational Republican dominance masks an electorate that underneath can be unpredictable and independent.
In 2018, Rep. Jared Golden, a Democrat who represents the Republican-leaning 2nd Congressional District, won because of ranked-choice voting. In the preliminary count, Golden trailed the first-place Republican incumbent by a couple of thousand votes. But Golden won the election after his total was bolstered by voters who had pulled the lever for losing independent candidates but marked the Democrat as their second or third choice.
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