Skip to footer

Senate elections 101: In remote Alaska, remotest places could be crucial

To fend off his Republican challenger, Democratic Alaska Sen. Mark Begich is depending on rural voters and rural issues.

|
Ted S. Warren/AP/ File
Sen. Mark Begich (l.) waits for his late-night burger to be prepared as a moose head hangs on the wall of Kito's Kave, a bar in in Petersburg, Alaska, on Oct. 14.

The Monitor's "Senate elections 101" series looks at the specific issues that will be driving voters in each of the 10 tossup races.

In June, the United States Environmental Protection Agency did something that Alaskans are still talking about. Without waiting for the state to make up its own mind, the EPA made it up for Alaskans: It moved to stop the Pebble Mine, a proposed open-pit mine that would be one of the largest in the world.

To those who view the state’s wide-open spaces with a sense of manifest destiny, the EPA proposal was just another example of an overzealous EPA – Exhibit A of a job-killing Obama administration run amok.

To others, it was an unfortunate interference, but necessary. If the mine polluted Bristol Bay, it could devastate the state’s $5.8 billion fishing industry, not to mention an unspoiled ecosystem so beautiful that Alaskan Sarah Palin named her now-famous daughter after it.  

To be honest, the Alaska Senate race – like all the tossup Senate races across the US – is mostly about President Obama. Republican Dan Sullivan has Xeroxed those pages directly from the Republican playbook: A vote for Democratic incumbent Sen. Mark Begich is a vote for Mr. Obama, he says.

But if Senator Begich is to survive Mr. Sullivan’s Obama barrage, it might just be over issues like the Pebble Mine.

It’s one reason that the Alaska Federation of Natives endorsed Begich. It endorses candidates only rarely, and its endorsements carry no small weight. Put that endorsement together with a massive Begich ground game that has made contact with 43 percent of registered voters, according to a YouGov survey, and Begich’s own playbook becomes clear.

Make the election about local issues – not the president – and then try to turn out as many of the voters that care about those issues as possible.

It’s Begich’s attempt to win Alaska’s great unaffiliated middle. Generally speaking, Alaska’s electorate leans right. Some 60,000 registered voters are Democrat, and 134,000 are Republican. But 183,000 are unaffiliated, and with Republicans motivated to oust Begich, he’ll have to bring undeclared voters by the bushel.

Is he succeeding? That depends on which poll you look at. Alaska is notoriously hard on pollsters, and this year appears to be no different. One recent poll has Sullivan up by five points. Another has Begich up by six.

What seems certain is that, if Begich is going to win, it might take a while for the rest of America to find out. His campaign’s get-out-the-vote campaign has spread into Alaska’s remotest corners. Moreover, many of the voters most likely to be influenced by the Alaska Federation of Natives’ endorsement live in the hardest-to-reach places.

Counting of all those votes can take days. In a close race, they might matter.

Please read our other entries in this series:

You've read  of  free articles. Subscribe to continue.
Real news can be honest, hopeful, credible, constructive.
What is the Monitor difference? Tackling the tough headlines – with humanity. Listening to sources – with respect. Seeing the story that others are missing by reporting what so often gets overlooked: the values that connect us. That’s Monitor reporting – news that changes how you see the world.
editor@csmonitor.com
Subscribe
Mark Sappenfield
Editor

Dear Reader,

About a year ago, I happened upon this statement about the Monitor in the Harvard Business Review – under the charming heading of “do things that don’t interest you”:

“Many things that end up” being meaningful, writes social scientist Joseph Grenny, “have come from conference workshops, articles, or online videos that began as a chore and ended with an insight. My work in Kenya, for example, was heavily influenced by a Christian Science Monitor article I had forced myself to read 10 years earlier. Sometimes, we call things ‘boring’ simply because they lie outside the box we are currently in.”

If you were to come up with a punchline to a joke about the Monitor, that would probably be it. We’re seen as being global, fair, insightful, and perhaps a bit too earnest. We’re the bran muffin of journalism.

But you know what? We change lives. And I’m going to argue that we change lives precisely because we force open that too-small box that most human beings think they live in.

The Monitor is a peculiar little publication that’s hard for the world to figure out. We’re run by a church, but we’re not only for church members and we’re not about converting people. We’re known as being fair even as the world becomes as polarized as at any time since the newspaper’s founding in 1908.

We have a mission beyond circulation, we want to bridge divides. We’re about kicking down the door of thought everywhere and saying, “You are bigger and more capable than you realize. And we can prove it.”

If you’re looking for bran muffin journalism, you can subscribe to the Monitor for $15. You’ll get the Monitor Weekly magazine, the Monitor Daily email, and unlimited access to CSMonitor.com.

Subscribe to insightful journalism

QR Code to Senate elections 101: In remote Alaska, remotest places could be crucial
Read this article in
https://www.csmonitor.com/USA/Politics/DC-Decoder/2014/1102/Senate-elections-101-In-remote-Alaska-remotest-places-could-be-crucial
QR Code to Subscription page
Start your subscription today
https://www.csmonitor.com/subscribe