• 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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Unless something really weird happens, it appears that GOP Senate candidate Dan Sullivan’s lead will hold  (See this dandy chart from Alexandra Gutierrez.) However, nobody has yet called the race, as they might in another place where the major networks use statisticians, which typically call races based on probably results. Because we don’t have those in Alaska, typically candidates do it themselves when a win is all but sure on Election Night. Sullivan didn’t do that. It’s unclear why, but it’s led to some interesting charges.  One thing’s clear, if and when the race is called in his favor, it’s not an auspicious way to start a term.  See below:

More D.C. staff and consultants urge halt to #Alaska vote count. What’s the beef with counting all the votes? #aksen

— Alaska Democrats (@AlaskaDemocrats) November 7, 2014

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Bethel Democratic state Sen. Lyman Hoffman joined the Republican Senate Majority and will have a seat on the Finance Committee. Eminently practical, Hoffman, who’s been in the Senate since 1990, has served in nearly every kind of majority configuration imaginable. It’s also probably worth noting that Hoffman endorsed GOP Senate candidate Dzn Sullivan in the last weeks of the campaign. From the release:

“Senator Hoffman’s rural representation and depth of experience working on budget and rural energy issues make him a very valuable addition to our group,” said incoming Senate President Kevin Meyer (R-Anchorage). Continue reading →

• Yesterday U.S. Senator Mark Begich’s campaign manager issued a written statement that explained Sen. Begich was waiting for all of the ballots to be counted before making a definitive statement about the race. Dan Sullivan’s campaign manager told the Fairbanks News Miner, “The math doesn’t look great for Mark Begich.” For Begich to become Alaska’s Comeback Kid, he would need a substantial percentage of the uncounted votes, bucking the trend so far seen.

• Alexandra Gutierrez has an ingenious spreadsheet that shows AK Senate race projections. Here is also another spreadsheet that explains how the votes by precinct have come in as of Nov. 5 at 5:30 pm.

• Politico Magazine does not hold back on naming the worst predictors of the 2014-midterm elections. Don’t worry; this is not some boring piece with spreadsheets and graphs (though graphs are fun and shouldn’t be poo-pooed).  They have known political players named, what they said, when and to whom.  Favorite quote of the piece is DNC Chairwoman Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz on This Week: “I think we’re going to hold the Senate and the reason that we’re going to hold the Senate…is because we have a ground game that, I know [RNC Chairman] Reince [Priebus] would take ours over theirs any day of the week. …Rick Scott is going to go down to defeat on Tuesday.” One thing I’ve learned in the last months: candidates and parties who have top-line ground games don’t brag about them.

• E & E News has a piece about that fate of the natural gasline in a Bill Walker administration. Rep. Mike Hawker is quoted, pessimistically saying that Walker might set the progress back five to 10 years. “Everything we’ve accomplished on gas pipeline development is at stake,” he said. Larry Persily takes a longer view and says that the companies aren’t going to walk away from the project.

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There are still as many as 50,000 uncounted ballots floating out there, but the trend isn’t looking good for Sen. Mark Begich. However, so far the Washington Examiner is the only media outlet that I know of that has called the race for Sullivan. It would be more reassuring, however, if it backed up the call with some hard numbers. Never fear, the ADN’s Nat Herz, is on the case:

#AKsen outstanding vote projections, showing Sullivan picking up 1,100 more. https://t.co/ZQZTZlVyez h/t @alexgutierrez for ingenious design

— Nat Herz (@Nat_Herz) November 6, 2014

The pressure to call the race is mounting: Continue reading →

Amidst all the other political news coming out on Wednesday, the 14-person Senate Majority announced its leadership lineup. Here’s what we know:

Leadership:

• Senate President: Kevin Meyer from Anchorage.
• Majority Leader: John Coghill from North Pole.
• Rules: Charlie Huggins from the Mat-Su.
• Finance Co-Chairs: Anna Fairclough from Eagle River and Pete Kelly from Fairbanks.

Chairs: Continue reading →

With 97 percent of Alaska’s precincts counted, it appears that GOP Dan Sullivan beat Sen. Mark Begich in the most expensive race Alaska has seen and one of the most expensive ones in the country. As of 1:30 a.m., Sullivan had a 9,151-count lead. There are still 30,000 absentee ballots out. However, only about 18 percent of those are from registered Democrats, 32 percent are from Republicans and the rest from Independents, making a path for victory for Begich virtually impossible.

The governor’s race is more difficult to call. Independent candidate Bill Walker has a 2,935 vote count lead. However, given the partisan makeup of the votes still out, Parnell could still squeak out a win, though it’s going to be tough.

Two other House races are still too close to call and will also depend on ballots still out. Democrat Matt Claman, who I predicted would win the House race in West Anchorage against Republican Anand Dubey, is only 35 votes ahead. In Ketchikan Independent candidate Dan Ortiz is wining by a mere 19 votes against Republican Chere Klein.

If you’re interested in other races across the state, you can find updated results from the Division of Elections here. Or, you can just go to my predictions here.

I probably own my readers some color, but I’m too tired.  For now, suffice it to say that the winners were happy and the losers weren’t. More tomorrow.

The GOP Senate is now a reality.  And Sen. Lisa Murkowski will now chair the Energy Committee. How much of a majority will soon be mostly decided.  Until then, here is what political pundits are having to say about decided races and what the future may have in store:

In Colorado and North Dakota, voters have rejected their state’s ballot measures to categorize fetuses as “human” and “child” in their criminal codes.  Here is what Jennifer Dalven, Director of the ACLU Reproductive Freedom Project told the Huffington Post about  Colorado’s fetal personhood measure:

“For the third time, Colorado voters have said loud and clear: We don’t want extremists interfering in our personal and private decisions, and we won’t stand for attempts to ban abortion.  This isn’t surprising: Voters in Mississippi, South Dakota, Florida and other states defeated attempts to curb access to safe, legal abortion. Time and time again, Americans have shown that they support a woman’s right to make the best decision for herself and her family.”

Confused about Louisiana’s “jungle primary system”?  You’re not the only one. Here is an excerpt from Wikipedia: Continue reading →

Updated: Within the past few hours, the GOP has won more than enough to take the Senate. So although we don’t know who’s going to win in Alaska, one thing is for sure is that Sen. Lisa Murkowski will be chair of the Energy Committee.

Voting Issues

Georgia’s Voter website that is used to verify registration status, has crashed causing Civil Rights groups to become very vocal about this potential lawsuit.

Florida gubernatorial nominee Charlie Crist’s campaign has filed an emergency motion with the circuit court to extend voting by 2 hours in Broward County due to several problems at polls across the county. Ugh Florida, you never cease to antagonize me.

Here’s what we know as of 9:14 p.m. AK time. I’ll be updated throughout the night. Continue reading →

Anything can happen, but the things appear to be looking good for GOP Senate candidate Dan Sullivan according to a Republican Party source. The big worry was Sen. Mark Begich’s vaunted ground game, particularly in rural Alaska, which, among other things, involves getting voters to the polls early. However, when they crunched the numbers, they found rural Alaska was actually under-performing by about 3 percent compared to the rest of the state when it came to early and absentee voting.

I was going to resist the Stubbs meme until I saw this:

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Outside my voting precinct. #AKelect #Alaska pic.twitter.com/tsPQKLuo1V

— Devin Kelly (@devckelly) November 4, 2014

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