• AT 11:01 pm AKSD, Becky Bohrer with the AP tweeted, “Republican Dan Sullivan wins Senate race in Alaska” and media outlets were tripping over themselves to report this information. Here is a list of where you can read about the election call on Alaska’s U.S. Senate race: NBC News, The Wall Street Journal, Bloomberg, CNN,  CBS News, Roll Call, HuffingtonPost, USA Today, BuzzFeed, Fox News. And then there’s my take on the race here.

• The ever-widening gulf between Gov. Sean Parnell and Bill Walker’s vote count has been written up in Governing. This has emboldened the Unity Ticket to not only plan his transition team, but to also announce it at a press announced today. Stay tuned.

• Here are the latest vote counts on the different races from the Alaska Division of Elections. Sullivan is at 48.6%, Begich 45.4%, while Walker is at 47.9% with Parnell at 46.3%.

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With only 15,000 or so ballots left to be counted, and GOP Senate candidate Dan Sullivan maintaining an insurmountable lead over U.S. Sen. Mark Begich, the Associated Press called the race for Sullivan on Tuesday night, a week after Election Day. As of the last count, Sullivan was about 8,000 votes ahead of Begich, giving him a 3.21 percent lead: 48.58 to 45.37 percent. Begich hasn’t yet conceded, but the race is over and Alaska will now be represented by an all Republican delegation.

About $60 million was spent on about 264,000 votes, making it the most expensive race and certainly one of the most hard-fought races in the state’s history. It was a race that pitted a political neophyte against Alaska’s best politician. It was a race that pitted nearly every interest group imaginable against one another. But mostly, it was a race that tested Alaska’s ideological makeup. Begich is a Democrat, but he’s a red state Democrat, and often talked the language of conservatives, particularly on the stump. However, all that talk, all the vigorous campaigning, couldn’t change the fact that this is a conservative state, and the Democratic Party’s platform is simply not a platform that works for many Alaskans,

Most of us knew this, but many of us, particularly in the media, thought that Begich’s and the Democratic Party’s ground game in Alaska might make up the difference. Continue reading →

Update as of 10:22 p.m. Sullivan up 7,911. Walker up 4,004. The Division of Elections has counted a 23,800 absentee ballots since Election Day. There are still 10,300 absentee ballots left to be counted and about 5,800 eligible questioned ballots. The next round of counting will be on Friday.

Updated with new numbers. As of 6 p.m. Dan Sullivan is now up 8,071. Bill Walker is now up 3,839. The Walker-Mallott campaign is announcing its transition team tomorrow. From the campaign:  “Although the outcome of the gubernatorial election is not yet certain, in order to comply with the constitutional timeframe for swearing in the incoming governor, Bill Walker and Byron Mallott have taken the initial steps to prepare for transition to a new administration.”

The first big count of absentee and early voting results, 10,556 in all, have come in from the Alaska Division of Elections. Today, they’ve counted ballots from Nome, Mat Su and Southeast and some of Anchorage and Fairbanks. The count didn’t change the results of the Senate or governor’s race much. Gov. Sean Parnell is now 3019 behind Bill Walker. Sen. Mark Begich is down 8,784 votes. Dan Sullivan gained 635 votes. In state races, Democratic West Anchorage House candidate Matt Claman is beating Anand Dubey by 86 votes. In Ketchikan, Republican House candidate Chere Klein is up 9 against Independent Dan Ortiz. There’s still about 30,000 more votes to be counted. The division will be counting until 9 p.m. tonight.

Here’s a nifty graph of how the Senate vote tally has changed since last week:

.@DanSullivan2014 lead now 8,784 votes / 3.7 pts. How #aksen vote has changed in updates since election night: pic.twitter.com/rYVm79J1X6

— Greg Giroux (@greggiroux) November 12, 2014

While we’re all waiting for the Division of Elections to tally the vote, a reader brought to my attention what appeared to be a very odd vote tally, which we now know is a mistake, from the village of Chefornak. Chefornak, with a population of about 400, is about 100 miles southwest of Bethel and 490 miles southwest of Anchorage. The error-ridden vote count from the village has made at least one election-watcher nervous, and will now likely make many others nervous as well.

According to precinct results from the Division of Elections, results which are now reportedly in error said DOE head Gail Fenumiai, the village bucked all the statewide trends and the 199 people who voted in the village on Tuesday voted overwhelmingly for third-party candidates. The village calculated the votes incorrectly, and new totals coming from the DOE tonight will have the correct vote count, Fenumiai said. However, since last Wednesday ,the public, if they were curious enough to look, would have seen that in Chefornak,  Independent Senate candidate Ted Gianoutsosk received 174 votes. Statewide, he only got 1.99 percent of the total vote. Dan Sullivan and Mark Begich combined received only 14 votes in Chefornak. In the governor’s race, the Alaska Constitution Party did pretty well in Chefornak. The Myers/Rensel ticket got 129 votes from Chefornak. Statewide, they received 2.47 percent of the vote tabulated so far. Combined, Parnell and Walker got 32 votes. Here’s a screen grab of the DOE’s results from the village:

• Division of Elections will begin counting its estimated 50K absentee and questioned ballots today. The division expects to get through less than half of the votes. It will update the tallies at the end of the day. As of right now, Dan Sullivan leads Sen. Mark Begich by about 8,100 votes and Bill Walker leads Gov. Sean Parnell by about 3,000 votes. The Fairbanks News Miner has a more detailed breakdown of they types of ballots and the collective assumptions of the ballot results.

• The HuffingtonPost took at look at Latino voters and Nov. 4 election. Immigration was the main issue on their minds as they headed to the polls and while Democrats won the majority of those ballots being cast, President Obama’s empty immigration talk meant Republicans picked up a sizeable chunk because it is now abundantly clear this voting block is no longer happy with overtures-results are required for voter loyalty.

• The Alaska Journal of Commerce announced that the BOEM has updated the Chukchi lease sale, though regulations still need to be met before drilling can occur making exploration in 2015 unlikely. That might have something to do with six environmental groups filing a lawsuit with the U.S. District Court in Washington, D.C. to protect walruses from oil drilling off Alaska’s coast.

• Red-state Democrats are finding themselves in a new position of power heading into 2015 as bipartisan leaders for Sen. Mitch McConnell or Sen. Harry Reid according to Politico.

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Although Gov. Sean Parnell is down 3,000 votes, it’s possible, but unlikely that the 41,000 or so votes left to be counted will swing any other than they did on election night. We’ll know soon enough, but Republican turned Independent Bill Walker is likely to be the state’s next governor and his running mate, Democrat Byron Mallott is likely to be the lieutenant governor.

It’s an odd pairing, only made possible because of the National Guard scandal and the fact that Gov. Sean Parnell seemed to be caught flat-footed after the so-called “Unity Ticket” was announced on Labor Day. Prior, Parnell only had a shell of a campaign structure, which seemed to turn into a real organization only about two weeks before the election. By that time, most of the air-time was already bought and the National Guard issue dominated the media’s attention.

What wasn’t focused on much was the hallmark of Bill Walker’s candidacy: the fate of both of the natural gas pipelines, the smaller ‘bullet line” and the large diameter pipeline. Continue reading →

No matter who wins the upcoming Senate race in Alaska, the Republicans will be in majority, and this session, they’ll likely begin to dismantle some of the more easily dismantlable parts of ObamaCare.

One of the first to go will likely be repealing the medical device tax that was passed to help pay for the Affordable Care Act. The 2.3 percent sales tax on medical devices– surgical gloves, x-ray machines, defibrillators, even bandages– expected to bring in $30 billion dollars over the next ten years. The tax is low-hanging fruit. Some Democrats have been trying to get rid of it, mostly because of the large concentration of medical device companies in Massachusetts, New York and California, and because of the army of lobbyists the industry has hired. Continue reading →

• The Heat is On the Division of Elections to count those votes and for the campaigns in limbo to make a declaration of victory/defeat. The Fairbanks News Miner, the Daily Caller and many more are chomping at the bit to know the winners.

• Alaska is making the news, but not in so much as in a ‘Yay Alaska!’ way, but more in an [insert colorful explicative of choice] Alaska! The Christian Science Monitor, amongst many, has a piece by Becky Bohrer regarding Typhoon Nuri and its ripple effect of frigid weather for Outside.  How this winter vortex is going to affect our economic sector, that’s anybody’s guess.

• Teflon Don has coasted into another victorious Congressional term and that has caused KTUU’s Grace Jang to ask some of his previous opponents what they view as his strengths behind his roaring successes at the poll?

• The Hill has a glossy overview of some of the worst candidates of 2014.

• Chieftain Metals Corp. of Canada has provided scarce details regarding its desire to simply barge the ore coming out if its Canadian located Tulsequah Chief mine across Alaskan waters, instead of dealing with the difficulty of building a road to connect its Canadian mine to Canada’s current road system. Details here at the Dispatch.  Expecting more than a little ire from Alaskans when word of this starts to gain traction.

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On Wednesday, the Alaska state Senate Majority announced its leadership line-up. Yesterday, the House Majority announced its organization. And today, both the Senate Minority and the House Minority announced its leaders for key positions. (See both press releases below)

In the House, leadership positions were reserved for Anchorage Legislators. Rep. Chris Tuck will continue to be Minority Leader, Max Gruenberg will again be House Whip, and Geran Tarr will serve as the House Democratic Floor Leader.

However, two of the three House Finance Committee members–Reps. David Guttenberg and Scott Kawasaki–went to Fairbanks lawmakers. Rep. Les Gara from Anchorage will also sit on the committee.

In the five-person Senate Minority caucus, Anchorage Sen. Berta Gardner will be Minority Leader.

Here’s the Senate Minority press release: Continue reading →

• The brains behind the success of a Republican U.S. Senate told CNN that he wanted to thank Democrats for “sidelining their best messenger [President Obama].” Because the Democratic strategy focused on independents, the base was forgotten, left behind and in turn the Democratic candidates were left behind.  The Washington Post details losses with a spiffy color-coded chart (Alaska has been added to the chart with Dan Sullivan named, though it was acknowledged that the race hasn’t officially been called). To add further salt to the Democratic leadership’s wounds, the New York Times reports that the states that most benefited from ACA elected Republicans.

• The Begich campaign received some much needed support to hold off on a concession speech from the First Alaskans Institute. The group issued a release yesterday urging a wait until all the votes are counted. While this election is pretty well determined, nobody wants to anger the Native establishment since the wounds from the Murkowski write-in debacle are still fresh.

• House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi delivered her grim election post-mortem in a phone call yesterday. The Hill’ s anonymous source was on the 75 minute call. The message: it was a “terrible year” due to low voter participation, but that next year was going to be focused on expanding the party’s membership.

• The cats have been herded, power plays fought and lost. Alaska: meet the old boss, same as the new boss in the new state House Leadership ,with a few new faces.

• The Democratic Party didn’t just lose control of the U.S. Senate and even more seats in Congress; they lost virtually every rising star for future offices across the country. Politico explains what this “lost generation” means to the Democratic Party’s future.

• Jack Wenner of Haines fame has an op/ed in today’s Juneau Empire defending not only “The Road,” but also explaining why Haines supports the road to be built on the west side of Lynn Canal over the east side selected by then Gov. Tony Knowles in 2000.

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