Alaskans are tired of Sarah Palin. In 2022, in the country’s wildest congressional race, she could win anyway.
www.politico.com
excerpts:
In Wasilla, Palin’s hometown, there is no longer a “Palin Fever” banner hanging at the Mocha Moose. Glenna Edwards, who once designed and sold Palin-inspired bumper stickers at her medical supply store in town, told me, “I’m sorry to tell you, I’m not a supporter anymore.” And at a meeting of local Republicans at the Mat-Su Family Restaurant last weekend, it looked particularly deflating for her. As one of her most credible competitors in the House race, Nick Begich III, joked in front of the room about Palin dancing “in a bear costume singing a song,” Republicans in the audience chuckled along
“She’s not seen around much,” Shelley Hughes, the Republican state Senate majority leader, told me as the meeting at the Mat-Su broke up.
Jay Ramras, a former Republican state lawmaker who owns Pike’s Waterfront Lodge in Fairbanks, had told me the day before in his hotel lobby, “Don’t beat up on Sarah Palin.” But he also said: “She’s perceived a little bit as a carpetbagger in her home state.”
Here in Alaska, she also personifies the tension between local and national politics, and her candidacy could be a referendum on which matters more. She is deeply unpopular in her home state. The longtime pollster Ivan Moore of Alaska Survey Research last registered her favorability rating, in October, at 31 percent. And yet, she still could win. In a poll commissioned by the conservative website Must Read Alaska, Palin led all other candidates, with 31 percent support. Al Gross, who is running as an independent after his failed Senate race in the state in 2020, was second, with 26 percent, followed by Begich, scion of an Alaska political dynasty, at 21 percent.
Last week, after Palin announced her candidacy, Dan Fagan, the conservative talk radio show host in Anchorage, began his show with a chuckle, saying, “All eyes are on Alaska again.” On one hand, he said, Palin’s “got some grit.” But there was a big other hand
“I think a lot of folks in Alaska are saying, ‘Oh, Lord, there’s always so much drama with her, you know, whether it’s her family in a brawl at a party in the front yard of a home, or you know, there’s the son beating up the dad, or I mean there’s just always something that’s going on that’s drama with them,” Fagan said on the air. “And it’s like ay-ay-ay, we’ve got to go through this again.”
At a Begich fundraiser in Fairbanks, Al Allen, who voted for Palin in 2006, said “she was more interested in being a reality TV star than serving Alaskans.”
“Alaska’s for the most part a blue-collar state,” he said. “You’ve got guys who work in oil fields and construction. They don’t necessarily like when you go Hollywood.”
At the same fundraiser, Ralph Seekins, a former state senator who sits on the University of Alaska board of regents, called Palin “a quitter.” And when I met Brett Hill, who builds tactical knives in Palmer, a town near Wasilla, at an outdoors show in Fairbanks the next day, it was Palin’s quitting that he immediately brought up as well.
“Oh, God, I loved her when she was governor, but I was pissed that she left,” said Hill, who recalled that Palin once wrote his wife a check for $3 for cotton candy for her daughter at a fair. “Alaskans don’t quit on anything … She got sucked in by the glamor of all that Washington, D.C., bullshit, in my opinion.”
Alaska gets one representative in the House, after all. “If you’re only one of 435, it helps to bring the biggest bat you can bring,” said Mead Treadwell, the state’s former Republican lieutenant governor. “And Sarah brings a big bat.”
In Wasilla, Verne Rupright, who was mayor of the city when Palin was governor, told me that Palin, no matter what else, is “going to take camera time from somebody, right?”
“Personally, I’d rather see camera time on her than on Pelosi,” he said. “We only have one congressman, and we have to have someone who’s a lightning rod, in my mind.”