Revenge Of The Murk

In a stunning upset (think the ring announcer at the end of Rocky III), Sarah Palin Joe Miller defeated took a difficult-to-surmount lead over never-in-a-quinzillion-years-thought-her-re-election-would-be-more-dramatic-than-my-morning-turd-landing-in-the-waiting-bowl incumbent Senator Lisa Murkowski in Alaska's Republican senatorial primary last night.

There are still some eight thousand absentee ballots to count, of which, if the primary partisan percentages hold, six thousand or so will be Republican.  Now maybe a majority of them will be Murk votes, since Miller's surge (and Sarahcuda's endorsement) did come right at the wire.  But she'd have to get almost two-thirds of the GOP absentees in order to overcome her primary night deficit, and unless she's gonna start hiring Donk lawyers, I kinda doubt that stealing the primary is a viable way out for her continued incumbency.

Sorry, I guess I couldn't help telegraphing the direction this story is taking.  Like the post title doesn't:

With a loss to Joe Miller looking likelier by the hour, Senator Lisa Murkowski is looking into a third party run a source inside her campaign tells the Daily Beast. Shushannah Walshe reports from Alaska.

The ongoing battle for who won the Republican primary in the Alaska Senate race will come down to the absentee ballots, but in an exclusive interview with the Daily Beast, a source within the Murkowski campaign says they know of one possible legal option to pursue a third party run. If Murkowski is not victorious when the absentee ballots are counted and decides to wage an independent party bid, they might consider using this option, which the source wouldn't describe, but did confirm they were seriously looking at.

Ace, as you probably expected, went ballistic:

Are you kidding me? Have you people no useful employment skills other than spending other people's money? Shit, a lobbyist job in DC consists chiefly of thinking of new ways to spend other people's money while actually spending other people's money as you run up big tabs on your company account.

Is there no stake sharp enough to get the job done with these god-damnable bloodsuckers?

This does seem to be worse than Joe Lierberman in '06 or Sorry Charlie Crist at the other end of the country.  In Liebs' case, his defeat in the Connecticut Donk senatorial primary over his support for Operation Iraqi Freedom, as well as his decision to run for another term as an independent, was already a fait accompli long before election day, so there was no surprise and no seat-of-the-pants scheming.  Plus, with the Republican in the race a non-entity and thus GOP voters likely to support Lieberman as the lesser of two evils combined with indies and some non-looney lefties, he had legitimate reason to expect to run and win in the general.

With Sorry Charlie, he wasn't the incumbent but his sense of engraved entitlement wouldn't let him accept that he wasn't, even after Marco Rubio took a blowout lead in the Florida GOP senatorial primary race.  Again, the outcome was no longer in doubt when the Malcolm McDowell doppelganger bolted the party and began his pathetic meltdown of crazed, mercenary opportunism.

For Lisa Murkowski, her likely defeat is not only stunning but also personal since Sarah Palin, her father's conquerer for the Alaska governorship four years ago.  In her mind it's a bitter pill to have to swallow and she's flailing about looking for some escape hatch that will allow her to continue the battle beyond where honor, decorum, and party loyalty dictates it should end.

On that score, her options are, shall we say, limited:

(1) Win a primary. <--Murkowski can't do it this way if Miller wins.

(2) File a no-party petition. <--Murkowski can't do it this way, she missed the deadline.

(3) Replace a primary winner by party petition.

It's this last one that they may be thinking of. By party petition forty-eight or more days before the general election, a candidate may be placed on the general election ballot if the primary winner dies, withdraws, resigns, or becomes diqualified.

The Alaska Independence Party's not an option because they didn't field a senate candidate, and according to DrewM, their nomination wouldn't have been for sale anyway.

But the Libertarians did, and their third-grade-educated-sounding candidate sounds....persuadable:

Hi Drew

The Message is more important than messenger.

If Lisa would of supported “The Peoples Bail Out” she would of over whelmed Joe Miller so I doubt she would do it now, some people just do not get it, but it is never to late to see the truth and Lisa is a smart lady; I voted for her.

David

In 2004 (I hope)?  Just how closely does Forrest Libertarian Gump follow senatorial politics, anyway?  'cause whatever you can say about the Murk's message, it ain't one no CAPITAL-L Libertarian has ever promulgated.

I am - how do I put this? - highly...dubious of the chance of success of this tantrum gambit.  Let's return to the Lieberman example.  He lost renomination to fever swamp crazoid Ned Lamont 52%-48%, but in the general election he lost the Democrat vote by a two to one margin.  Liebs triumphed because he carried eighty percent of the Republican vote.  And all that was with his Iraq war support baked into the electoral cake.

As Eeyore notes, how much of the 49.1% of the GOP vote she captured can Murk expect to retain if she pulls a whiny, petulant, treacherous stunt like this?  I have to think she'd take a bigger hit than Lieberman did.  And can she really expect that Democrats will abandon their non-entity nominee (Scott McAdams, if it matters, although there's no mention of him talking about boxes of chocolates) in droves sufficient to boost her past Joe Miller?  We've already seen this fan dance play out in Florida, where the non-entity there, Kendrick Meek, nevertheless romped in a fairly hotly contested Dem primary.

As I step back and ponder this mess, I find myself not so much angry as incredulous.  Perhaps it's the other side of Ace's aforequoted conniption, but this is to me like the survivalist during a plague pandemic that saw the disaster coming, prepared for the worst, took all the precautions, and is, well, surviving even as his neighbors are succumbing all around him.  Then his Levi Johnston-esque [heh] son starts sneezing from the plague he caught because he snuck out to slip it to his slutty girlfriend one more time before Dad battened down the hatches.  What does the survivalist do to protect himself and the rest of his family?  Somehow quarantine his non-account heir in their own home and run the risk of infecting and killing everybody else, or jettison his diseased ass for good?

Gosh, when you put it that way, there's no conundrum at all, is there?