Republicans gathered one recent Saturday night in a restaurant ballroom near Sarah Palin’s house on Lake Lucille, where they draped golden balloons from the paneled ceiling, lined up at the bar, and held a drawing for a “wall of guns.”
A state Republican Party chair named Ann Brown spoke at the event, which served as a fundraiser for a local Republican women’s group, and she had a very particular request.
She urged people to vote Republican in the ranked choice election in November and “never for Democrats or any other party.”
The audience cheered. But as I stood in the back of the room behind a table of auction items, including a red, white, and blue Kate Spade bag, a Trump 2024 hat, and a mug that read “Trump Won,” I thought this was an odd thing for a Republican Party chair to have to say given the audience’s demographics. Reminding Republicans to vote Republican would appear to indicate a serious problem with the GOP in this strongly conservative state.
When Palin, a former political sensation and one of the GOP’s original populists, lost a special election for a vacant congressional seat to a Democrat, Mary Peltola, Republicans were alarmed earlier this year. They criticised Alaska’s new ranked choice voting method, which allowed voters’ second choices to influence the result if their first preference was unsuccessful. Only roughly half of voters who supported Nick Begich III, a more conventional Republican and the candidate chosen by the state party, had listed Palin as their second option, which is in line with the system’s intended goal of eliminating extremist candidates.
