Choose wisely

Aug 16, 2022 | 8:00 pm ET

By Kate Queram

It turns out that rumors of Liz Cheney’s demise may have been grossly exaggerated. (Photo by Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images)

It’s a Tuesday in 2022, which means I’ve got more election news for you. I’ve got democracy on the docket! I have ballots on the brain! I can’t shake this passion for primaries! I am running out of ways to introduce newsletters about elections!

The Big Takeaway

Let’s chat about Tuesday’s primary elections for state and congressional seats in Alaska and Wyoming. As usual, there’s a lot to unpack here, like the fact that there are 10 candidates for lieutenant governor in Alaska and only two of them think the 2020 presidential election was legit. That’s super normal and not at all terrifying and not even close to the day’s biggest story, an honor that goes to the Republican congressional primary in Wyoming, where U.S. Rep. Liz Cheney seemed likely to lose to Donald Trump-endorsed challenger Harriet Hageman.

Cheney, an outspoken Trump critic who serves as vice chair of the House Jan. 6 committee, is a frequent target of both the former president and his supporters. She trailed Hageman by 30 points in early August among the same voters who broke 2-to-1 for Trump in 2020. As of Tuesday morning, Cheney’s re-election seemed like a long shot. But nothing is certain. She could lose by a lot, yes. She could also lose by a slim margin — or pull off the win, according to an analysis of state and county voting data compiled by Jonathan Schechter, a Jackson, Wyoming-based policy analyst.

To survive, Cheney would need to attract 30,000 votes on top of her core GOP support — a not-insurmountable hurdle, per WyoFile. Recent voter registration data favors the incumbent, Schechter said, and if enough Democrats cross over to vote in Tuesday’s primary, it’s possible that Cheney could garner the necessary support to remain in office.

But it’ll be a fairly competitive race either way, he added.

“The data on voter registration patterns suggest that the race is going to be far closer than conventional wisdom suggests,” he said.

Up in Alaska, voters filled out two ballots on Tuesday: One to select state and congressional candidates to advance to November’s general election, and one to select a replacement for U.S. Rep. Don Young, who died in March. The special election marked the state’s first deployment of ranked-choice voting, where voters have the option to list multiple candidates in order of preference instead of supporting only one. There’s also room for write-in candidates, officials told the Alaska Beacon. A smorgasbord of voter options, if you will.

“You will rank your candidates in order of preference,” said Gail Fenumiai, director of the state’s election division. “You can rank one, you can rank them all; it is entirely up to the voter individually to decide how they want to do that.”

HOPE YOU LIKE MATH! (Photo by James Brooks/Alaska Beacon)

Experts said they expected Mary Peltola, a Democrat, to take the lead on Tuesday night, followed by Republicans Nick Begich III and Sarah Palin (yes, that Sarah Palin). It’s a prediction based more on math than on Peltola’s popularity. Alaska, a solidly red state, has more right-leaning voters than Democrats, but their votes will be diluted between two candidates. That’ll likely give Peltola a boost in the early returns, but once the rules of ranked-choice voting kick in, the standings will probably shift.

And that’s when things get interesting. To win a ranked-choice election, a candidate must be ranked first on more than 50% of ballots. If no one achieves that Tuesday, the election becomes sort of a grudge match that begins with the elimination of the candidate with the fewest first-choice votes. Anyone who ranked that candidate first has their vote redistributed to whoever they ranked second.

That process continues until someone has a majority of votes, which could be less than 50%, depending on the number of voters who don’t select a second-choice candidate. (Basically, if all elections are popularity contests, ranked-choice elections are your high-school nightmares come to life.)

Here are some people voting inside of a high school, which suddenly seems like a very obvious place to hold an election. (Photo by Sean Rayford/Getty Images)

It’s all very confusing and math-y* (my high-school nightmare come to life!), and that’s before you factor in the contradictory instructions from the warring factions of the Republican Party. On one side, you’ve got the Alaska GOP encouraging voters to rank both Republican candidates and discard Peltola entirely; on the other, there’s Trump and Palin, who want supporters to rank Palin and nobody else.

It all makes for a chaotic test run for a new voting method, but officials in Alaska have plenty of time — until Aug. 31 — to sort through it all. That’s the last day that mail-in ballots are accepted, a totally normal and anticipated delay that I’m sure is understood by everyone and will definitely not be cited as evidence of non-existent election fraud if a certain candidate** loses.

*super technical math term

**(...Palin)

I hate it here: (Florida) ‘Absences grab voters’ attention’: Rep. Demings criticizes Sen. Rubio’s missed votes in Congress … Audio shows LePage again making unsubstantiated claims about Maine elections … OneVirginia2021 relaunches as UpVote Virginia with new focus on ranked-choice voting

Caught Our Eye

I’m just trying to survive the day, unlike Clark Corbin, a reporter for the Idaho Capital Sun whose idea of fun is venturing into a remote section of Yellowstone National Park known as the “zone of death” where you most likely could get away with murdering someone. There are no people there, just grizzly bears! It’s so far into the wilderness that park rangers — the people whose entire job is to know their way around the park — have had trouble orienting themselves inside it! If you screamed, for sure nobody would hear you! I would die here, is what I am saying, but Clark just moseyed on in, had a nice time, and survived to write about it here. (I haven’t made it out of Tuesday yet, but my chances seem good, thank you for your concern.)

From the Newsrooms

One Last Thing

A company is partnering with a lab to “de-extinct” the thylacine, a “wolf-sized marsupial” that resembled a tiger with a kangaroo head that died out in 1936. Their process doesn’t involve fossilized mosquitoes, but it still brings us one step closer to reanimating dinosaurs and then being eaten by them, which is exactly what 2022 is missing.