A Very Special Special Election
All you need to flip a “Safe” GOP-held district is 7 (or 8) percent of voters. Mary Peltola’s historic victory in Alaska is the clearest proof-point yet for the WelcomePAC model.
This was no ordinary week in American politics.
On Wednesday, Mary Peltola beat Sarah Palin and made history, becoming the first Alaskan Native — and first Democrat in half a century — to represent the Last Frontier in Congress.
We’re celebrating by kicking off the long weekend with a Friday post (feel free to sleep in on Sunday)!
8% of all voters gave (relatively moderate) Republican Nick Begich their first vote — and then they gave their second vote to mainstream Democrat Peltola over extremist Republican Palin. By winning these decisive voters, Peltola harnessed volatility, proved the ratings agencies wrong, and proved the WelcomePAC model right.
Alaska’s implementation of ranked choice voting made for an especially clear proof point for the thesis we laid out in detail last fall in The Bulwark. We wrote then about the hidden power of “Vaccinated Republicans” when it comes to deciding close elections:
“Consider the traditional Republican-leaning voter who believes in science and democracy. Let’s call this group the Vaccinated Republicans. These voters made the difference in the 2018 congressional midterms, in the 2020 presidential elections, and in the 2021 Georgia runoffs…
To regularly win GOP nominations, Vaccinated Republicans must constitute 51 percent of primary voters. But to regularly win general elections, even in ‘Safe Republican’ seats like Gonzalez’s, Vaccinated Republicans can make the difference by comprising just 7 percent of the electorate.”
Peltola’s district (AK-At-Large, the state’s sole seat in Congress) featured prominently in our inaugural Conceding Democracy report from November, in which we combined Trump’s 2020 performance in districts across the country with campaign fundraising data to identify potentially competitive Republican-held seats. With Trump only notching 53.1% of the vote in AK-AL in 2020, the district looked like the kind of place Democrats could win by persuading a relatively small number of swing voters.
Persuading 7% of voters sounds impossible if Americans are as divided as the polarization hawks claim. But it is is far from impossible in our reality: electoral volatility is underrated — and the most important (and under-invested-in) aspect of modern politics.
Peltola is Proof
In Wednesday’s ranked choice contest, our thesis from the fall — that a mere 7% of red-blue crossover voters could put a Democrat over the top in districts like the GOP-held AK-AL — was proven true.
Not only did Peltola edge out Palin by winning over an impressive 29% of voters whose first choice was center-right Republican Nick Begich in the second round of ranked choice voting, but these “Nick-Mary” crossover voters clocked in at 8% of the total electorate — just a point off our 7% target from the fall.
In the face of the choice between a moderate, mainstream Democrat like Peltola and an extremist Republican like Sarah Palin, the ranked choice voting results allow us to see that 8% of Nick Begich voters made the right call.
Volatility — not polarization — is the defining feature of our politics. You only need to win that 7 (or 8) percent of voters to harness that volatility. Hail the Nick-Mary vote!
The Ratings Agencies Were Wrong (Again)
We've also been banging the drum on how the political ratings agencies can be too conservative in their forecasts, leading to underinvestment in potentially winnable races. In CA-41, for example, they were painfully slow to acknowledge GOP Rep. Ken Calvert’s vulnerability.
These agencies — from Cook Political Report to Sabato’s Crystal Ball to FiveThirtyEight to Split Ticket and beyond — command an undue degree of power when it comes to influencing the allocation of precious resources in the political marketplace — despite the fact that there are plenty of cases where they’re in disagreement with each other.
It’s unsurprising that they were again caught off guard on Wednesday. Going into the AK-AL special election, all had rated the seat as at least “Likely Republican” — and one had even gone as far as to rate the seat as “Safe Republican” (a marker of the ideal WelcomePAC target district: “Safe but Winnable”).
All election ratings agencies were wrong, at least one historically so:
Here’s our AK-AL ratings scorecard:
The relatively little money invested in Peltola’s campaign also demonstrates the replicability of this model. She raised a mere $379,088 while Sarah Palin and Nick Begich both raised over $1 million.
Peltola’s relatively meager haul can be at least partially explained by the fact that the ratings agencies and experts wrote her race off from the start.
The prognostications of a handful of ratings agencies might be informative, but they certainly aren’t gospel. It’s time for more ambition and imagination on the part of practitioners of politics looking to flip Republican districts.
Candidate Quality Matters
You have read how it takes a special kind of Democrat to win in reddish districts. In the places where Democrats traditionally don’t win, it takes a candidate who can differentiate herself enough to reach escape velocity and break free of the party’s toxic brand with swing and rural voters.
Peltola, whose campaign featured the hyperlocal big-tent slogan “Fish, Family, and Freedoms”, is precisely the kind of brand-differentiated Democrat with unique appeal to crossover voters.
Here’s how the Washington Post opened its post-election profile of her:
"Mary Peltola is a Democrat who as a child campaigned with her father and his friend the state’s longtime Republican congressman. Later, she helped reelect a Republican senator. And she’s friendly with Sarah Palin, the state’s former governor who popularized the kind of combative, anti-establishment politics that propelled Donald Trump to the White House."
Where does Peltola fall on the political spectrum? Lindsay Kavanaugh, the executive director of the Alaska Democratic Party, had this to say about her politics:
“‘[Peltola] is an Alaska Democrat,’ and ‘she’s probably, compared to a Lower 48 Democrat, she is a little more moderate.’”
But here’s the zinger:
“In the legislature, Peltola helped build the Bush Caucus, a bipartisan group of lawmakers representing rural parts of the state. She developed a reputation for working across the aisle, focusing intently on issues related to natural resources, and winning over opponents with persistence and unrelenting kindness…
In 2010, Peltola helped run the successful write-in campaign for [Lisa] Murkowski, who had lost a Republican primary to a tea party challenger, Joe Miller. Later, Peltola told the Christian Science Monitor that Murkowski is ‘really following her own moral compass. That appeals to Alaskans. We like people who are independent thinkers.’”
A moderate, fishing-focused former Republican aide with a strong bipartisan background and deep connection to rural and tribal communities in her state? Peltola might differ from many of the Lower 48 Democrats, but that’s precisely the point: we think they should be paying closer attention.
More Peltola Please
Ultimately, Peltola's upset victory in Alaska is the clearest proof-point yet for the WelcomePAC model.
There are dozens more districts like hers — winnable GOP-held seats (many written off by the agencies) where the right candidate can win over that 7% of Nick-Mary voters.
Now is the time to build the infrastructure for investing early in recruiting candidates and engaging and persuading crossover voters in winnable-yet-overlooked districts across the country.
If Democrats can win the middle in Alaska, they can win anywhere and save our democracy.