Abso-fucking-lutely. No retreat, no surrender.
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Not sure it’s as settled as all that - fundamentally AK is Independent as much as any political label. The state wasn’t predictability “red” until the oil discoveries in the 70’s along with the influx of a workforce associated with that industry.
Mike Gravel was Democratic Senator from AK from '69-81, (granted, he wasn’t ultra-progressive in that timeframe - but I think that his (and Begich Sr.'s) tenure reflects a tendency that is less than definitively GOP loyalist).
Ranked choice was adopted by the vote of people there and I think it reveals a trend among voters towards issues and individuals rather than party lines.
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And nothing ever changes if people quit without even trying.
Fuck that defeatist noise.
Also, personal ‘lifetimes’ have gotten shorter recently, or so I read somewhere…
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But apparently not the reality in Alaska under ranked choice voting.
Even without it, Alaska is very different politically than Idaho or Wyoming. Murkowksi’s moderate position isn’t some random thing, it’s a reflection of AK’s political base.
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The upcoming election is not a Presidential election. No one here is talking about that yet. We’re talking about the House. Alaska’s history on their Rep in the House is, as you pointed out with your table, rather inconclusive of anything. Two Democrats (now three, actually), and two Republicans, one of whom served for 50 years until he died. We all know incumbents have an edge. And, as others pointed out, Alaska now has ranked choice voting, which does change things, clearly. If you want to be resigned to Republicans retaking the House in November, that’s your business. I don’t think the facts currently warrant that being a done deal just yet.
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Meanwhile:
https://www.cnn.com/2022/08/31/politics/michigan-abortion-ballot-proposal/index.html
so it’s obvious that the republican party can be depicted as a bunch of tyrannical assholes, but will this actually end up making a difference?
Aggressive gerrymanders are supposedly vulnerable to wave elections, so there is that.
we can win, but we need to win big,
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This is the most worrying thing to me- you actually see Trump flags up here sometimes now, and we’ve got people throwing rocks at Trudeau and assaulting Freeland in the street. All this rage is infection from south of the border. It’s not Canadian at all, even from the darkest corners of Alberta. I hope the US turns this around quickly, because it will quell the tide here as well.
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To add one data-point to those Alaska elections, it was the same guy winning year after year. There is power in being a long-term fixture on the political scene.
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I think you have that exactly backwards. Nothing ever changes until people start dreaming of (and working to achieve) things that were previously thought to be impossible.
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Pretending like you know the outcome of a election that hasn’t happened yet isn’t either.
And once again, people said the same thing about GA… that it would never go blue. They say the same about TX. If people believe the future is set, and then do not act to make positive change, then yeah, we’re fucked and it’s people who’ve given up who’ve fucked us.
Nah! People never change history! /s
Isn’t there an XKCD for that?
In fact, they almost never do, because we can’t KNOW what’s going to happen UNTIL it happens.
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… and what about gas prices falling for 10 weeks straight? If during Trump’s term, the Republicans would want to give him credit.
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This may very well be a stupid question, but did RCV make a difference? For all the Republican whining about how it wasn’t fair (even though it was them who introduced it, AIUI), wouldn’t Peltola have won anyway?
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First past the post, Peltola vs Palin vs Begich: Peltola wins with a plurality (but not absolute majority) of the votes
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First past the post following a Republican primary, Peltola vs Palin: enough Republicans who voted for Begich in the primary vote for Peltola in the election to give her victory.
Of course, that assumes that the ranked votes in the actual election can be translated into hypothetical votes in the two scenarios above (e.g., that a voter who ranked Begich first but Peltola above Palin would have voted for Peltola in a straight Peltola vs Palin fight): but that doesn’t seem to be a wildly unreasonable assumption.
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For sure, though it doesn’t fit here as well as most of them.
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Well said. I wish it would happen, but the Republican party has been so great with their infiltration at every level of government that I’m still pretty nervous.
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Build the wall!
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Yes. There was the question of whether people were voting against Palin or for Peltola, but this is an extendable outcome especially because of RCV and the fracture of the Republican Party. Alaska already had more moderates; the impact will be greater there than elsewhere.
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Someone I was talking to recently was of the view that the Mayflower Pilgrims were not really fleeing religious persecution. They were relatively free to practice their religion - albeit forced to do so in private (though the winds changed unpredictably about that from time to time, so maybe they were seeking stability of that freedom).
But what they really wanted was to be free to ensure that not only would they be free to openly practice their religion but that only their religion would be practised in an exclusive society - the implication being that they were as intolerant of others as history has claimed others were of them, which is why they sought to found a new settlement elsewhere.
tl;dr they wanted to escape so-called religiofascism only in order to pursue their own variety of the same thing.
Escaping it was one of the core themes in the origins of the US? Maybe importing it was one of the core themes in the origins of the US, too.
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Yes, unfortunately. I’ve had it with GWB-friendly crowd. Most of them are pretty ignorant about what happened there. Many are shocked when I describe the Brooks Brothers riot and send them some reading material about it.
“That’s some bullshit right there!” One of them said. I replied that the logical next step for the Brooks Brothers Riot was……January 6.
Not that it makes much of a difference now, but hey. I try 
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Plus the Democratic Party looks at which groups are reliable voters … and then snuggles up to the Republicans to try to steal their votes. That almost never works, but don’t give them the excuse.
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A factor also mentioned in several sources is that when the Pilgrims were living relatively freely in Holland, they discovered to their shock and horror their kids were growing up to be like the other Dutch kids that they played and grew up with. Can’t have that, all that integrating and exposure to other cultures, so back to England until they could get a ship over to the New World.
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