Alaska’s U.S. Senate race tightened slightly in the latest batch of election results released Wednesday.
Democrat Mary Peltola now has 48.7% of the vote to Republican incumbent U.S. Sen. Dan Sullivan’s 47.1%. Her lead narrowed from 4,250 votes Tuesday to 3,975 on Wednesday. She also fell below an important threshold: Her lead is less than the 4,100 votes cast for Daniel J. Sullivan Jr. of Petersburg.
That matters because the Trump administration in October sued to pre-emptively block “any election result that may be impacted by voter confusion.” It said that threshold would be met if Sen. Sullivan lost to Peltola by fewer votes than went to the other Sullivan. A District Court judge dismissed the case but the Trump administration is appealing.
In the governor’s race, Democrat Jonathan Kreiss-Tomkins also lost some of his lead over his nearest challenger, Republican business owner Bernadette Wilson. He now has 49.6% of the vote compared to 28.9% for Wilson.
The results Wednesday added 5,612 early, absentee and Election Day ballots to the total — roughly 5,000 of which were absentee votes from state House districts covering the Matanuska-Susitna Borough, a Republican stronghold, according to data from the Division of Elections. The Associated Press estimates that 14% of votes remain to be counted.
Peltola’s campaign manager, Cheryl Bruce, said she expected the outstanding vote to favor the Democrat.
“As we’ve said, tens of thousands of outstanding early votes and absentee ballots from Anchorage and rural Alaska remain uncounted and will break for Mary, sending her to the United States Senate,” she said in a statement emailed to reporters.
In a statement earlier Wednesday, Nate Adams, spokesman for Sen. Sullivan’s campaign, also noted the outstanding ballots and said “there’s a long way to go before every Alaskan’s voice is heard.”
“We thank the Division of Elections for their hard work and look forward to a complete and accurate count,” he said.
The next scheduled update is Friday, the deadline for most mailed ballots to arrive. Ballots sent from overseas have until Nov. 18, which is also the last day for counting and the day ranked choice tabulation takes place in races where no candidate got more than 50% of the vote.
Kreiss-Tomkins, speaking earlier Wednesday, said his campaign’s internal projections were that he’d receive between 51% and 52% of the vote when counting is complete. He said he had already begun planning his gubernatorial transition and said he planned to name an ideologically diverse set of transition co-chairs — a Democrat, a Republican and an independent — once there was “a little bit more public certainty” about the outcome of the race.
“I’ve had the fortune over the last week to start to think about what executive branch governance looks like and how we will want to build an administration if, in fact, once the votes are counted, the outcome is confirmed,” he said at a Resource Development Council conference in Anchorage.
In an interview Wednesday on Right Side BroadcastingWilson slammed ranked choice voting, saying it produced an “absolute and complete mess” in Alaska. She said that while results showed a majority of Alaskans voting for one of three Republicans in the governor’s race, “it appears as though we’re going to land a Democrat in the seat.”
“But regardless of outcome,” she said, “I can assure you, I’m not going anywhere.”
The Associated Press has yet to call Alaska’s races for governor or Congress.
Republican Congressman Nick Begich continues to hold a substantial lead in the U.S. House race and Ballot Measure 2, which would repeal Alaska’s ranked choice voting system, is still failing in the latest results. “No” leads with 52.5% of the vote.
Source: alaskapublic.org
