Lisa Murkowski Could Hold Balance of Power in Senate

Alaska’s Lisa Murkowski is pretty clearly the Republican senator who is least aligned with the GOP. Her voting record is generally regarded as less conservative than any other Republican senator’s with the possible exception of her friend Susan Collins of Maine (Collins and Murkowski are also the rare Republicans in Congress who favor any sort of abortion rights). She has refused to support Donald Trump’s general-election presidential candidacy three times now. She voted to convict him on impeachment charges after the January 6 insurrection. And uniquely among her colleagues, she’s twice been reelected over the wishes of her own state party. If it were up to Alaska Republicans or to the current national leader of the GOP, Murkowski would have been kicked to the curb long ago.

So when the senior senator from Alaska went on CNN’s Inside Politics With Manu Raju and was asked about the significance of her estrangement from Trump, her answer should have surprised no one:

Asked if she would become an independent, Murkowski said: “Oh, I think I’m very independent minded.” And she added: “I just regret that our party is seemingly becoming a party of Donald Trump.” Pressed on if that meant she might become an independent, Murkowski said: “I am navigating my way through some very interesting political times. Let’s just leave it at that.”

This is pretty much the same thing Murkowski said in 2021 immediately after the attack on the Capitol, according to the Anchorage Daily News:

Asked whether she intends to remain a Republican, Murkowski said that depends on the party itself. … “I will tell you, if the Republican Party has become nothing more than the party of Trump, I sincerely question whether this is the party for me,” she said.

She was subsequently censured by the Alaska GOP for her vote to convict Trump of impeachment charges, and when she ran for a fourth full term in 2022, the state party instantly endorsed Trump-backed challenger Kelly Tshibaka. This was not Murkowski’s first rupture with her party: In 2010, she lost the Republican primary to hard-core conservative Joe Miller (who was influentially supported by former Alaska governor Sarah Palin) and then beat him in a rare write-in campaign that November.

But Murkowski didn’t have to win a GOP primary or wage a write-in campaign in 2022. The state had recently adopted a Top Four primary system, with the winner resolved by ranked-choice voting. That meant the leading four candidates in the nonpartisan primary, regardless of party affiliation, would proceed to the general election, with voters indicating second, third, and fourth (if they wished) candidate preferences, and the first candidate to win a majority prevailing as the least popular was eliminated in rounds of calculations (ranked-choice voting is also used in Maine, New York City, and San Francisco, with several other states and municipalities considering it).

With her universal name ID (her father, Frank, had been governor of Alaska prior to Palin and appointed his daughter to the Senate seat he had occupied before returning to Juneau) and support from independents and many Democrats (she was especially popular among Native Alaskans for years of advocacy on their behalf), Murkowski was able to keep the most prominent Democrats from running against her. That November, she edged Tshibaka by 2,000 votes and handily won the ranked-choice “instant runoff.” Meanwhile, in the contest for Alaska’s one U.S. House seat, Democrat and Native Alaskan Mary Peltola defeated none other than Sarah Palin via the ranked-choice system, with Murkowski and Peltola endorsing each other in the general election.

To sum it up, Murkowksi owes very little to the Republican Party, other than to Mitch McConnell, who has backed her (as he has all Senate incumbents) through her many struggles with her state party and with Trump. McConnell, of course, is retiring from the Senate, leaving a Republican conference that is sure to be more MAGA-friendly than ever. So Murkowski could well be in the catbird seat if the chamber is equally divided after November, occupying the dealmaking (or depending on how you look at it, extortionist) role previously occupied by Democrats Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema, who have both decided not to run for reelection in 2024.

If as the oddsmakers currently expect, Republicans flip control of the Senate by a couple of seats, Murkowski could stay exactly where she is as a senior appropriator and member of the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee, important to energy-exporting Alaska (she’s also the ranking Republican on the anachronistically named Senate Indian Affairs Committee, another panel especially significant to Alaskans). But if it’s a 50-50 Senate or if Republicans need her vote to take control, she could easily declare herself an independent and offer up her support to the party that offers her or her state the most goodies. She’s not up for reelection until 2028, when she will be 70, not that old by current standards. And while Alaska Republicans are trying to get voters to overturn the Top Four ranked-choice vote system that they approved in 2020, so long as it exists, Murkowski is a very solid bet for perpetual reelection. She is well positioned to become queen of the Senate any November now.