Alaska Senate race keeps surprises coming

The tone — or was it the tune? — for this year’s strange U.S. Senate race in Alaska was perhaps set last week, when incumbent Sen. Lisa Murkowski, a normally dignified politician who favors pearl earrings and tough policy talk, started singing what sounded like “The Mickey Mouse Club” theme song during a radio interview.

“M-U-R,” she sang, “K-O-W, eh-S, K-ay, I!”

FOR THE RECORD:
Alaska Senate race: A graphic in the Oct. 20 Section A accompanying an article about the U.S. Senate race in Alaska said poll results by Rasmussen Reports were for Sept. 19 and Oct. 19. In fact, the second poll took place Oct. 13. —

There are all kinds of ways to help voters remember how to write her name on the ballot in the Nov. 2 election, she said, as she wages an unusual write-in campaign to hold on to her seat.

“You can do it visually: A cow on skis? You can think your way through this!” she insisted. “And remember the Hokey Pokey?” As the host fell silent, the senator started singing again: “You fill the o-val in, you write Mur-kow-ski out — pretty funky, huh?”

Election seasons always produce “now it has come to this” moments, but in Alaska, where elections were often predictable until former Gov. Sarah Palin came on the scene, nearly every day seems to produce a surprise. The three major candidates for Senate seem almost propelled toward a tense, expensive showdown.

The upset win of Tea Party Express-backed candidate Joe Miller in the GOP primary has left Murkowski scrambling to organize a flanking maneuver. But it has also injected new life into the campaign of Democrat Scott McAdams, the beneficiary of the intramural Republican hostilities.

A month ago, Miller had 42% support to Murkowski’s 27%. A Rasmussen poll last week showed the two Republicans in a statistical tie, and McAdams close behind. The big question: How many voters who say they plan to vote for Murkowski will hopelessly contort her name, or simply forget to write it, or neglect to fill in the oval bubble next to it?

The Murkowski campaign is handing out rubber bracelets, pens and temporary tattoos as crib sheets for voters, even suggesting (with no apparent credit to Palin, who has endorsed Miller) that citizens could write the senator’s name on their palms.

“There is no state of the art for write-in campaigns,” said Anchorage pollster Marc Hellenthal. “This is breaking new ground, really.”

In Juneau last week, Murkowski, having flown in from Barrow in the far north, dropped in on a Chamber of Commerce luncheon, sat down for a pair of radio talk shows and hosted two coffee-and-cookie get-togethers before flying on to Ketchikan farther southeast — an exhausting schedule that left her so hoarse she had to cancel several events.

“We’ve learned that negative campaigning can work. We learned that sometimes the good guy loses — but not if you can launch a write-in!” she told supporters at campaign headquarters.

Murkowski is running a balancing act. She touts the benefits to Alaska rising from her status as the senior Republican on the Senate energy committee and her coming advancement on the powerful appropriations committee. But she also reminds voters she is now running against the Republican Party establishment, which is supporting Miller.

“There’s a great amount of freedom that comes of running a campaign like I am now,” she said on KINY Radio. “I am not running as my party’s nominee.... I’m on the outside. I’m kind of the insurgency. And it’s a nice place to be, I have to say.”

Among Murkowski’s strongest backers are wealthy Alaska Native corporations. She has strongly defended the corporations’ often-lucrative, no-bid federal contracts, which are under increasing scrutiny in Congress. Alaska Native leaders say Murkowski has steered crucial financing for water and sewage systems, schools, airports and clinics to the state’s far-flung bush communities.

With money flooding into McAdams’ and Miller’s campaigns, Native corporation leaders responded with an independent expenditure of $595,000 raised through a so-called super PAC, Alaskans Standing Together. The group is composed of a dozen Native corporations but has also drawn contributions from several Alaska politicians and public employee organizations.

Democrat McAdams, a former commercial fisherman, teacher and football coach and current mayor of Sitka, said Murkowski sold out her once-moderate credentials to an increasingly conservative voting record on issues such as abortion, healthcare and federal spending.

But the heart of his campaign, he said, is against Miller, not Murkowski — a sentiment shared by many Democrats who say they are ready to vote for Murkowski if it will stop Miller.

Miller, a Fairbanks lawyer, has campaigned on a message of returning to strict constitutional government structures, ending “corrupt” earmarks that have sent millions of federal dollars to Alaska over the years, and rethinking programs such as Medicare, Social Security and unemployment.

Recent revelations that Miller’s family accepted a range of government benefits, including agricultural subsidies, low-income medical benefits and unemployment, prompted Miller to announce that he would no longer discuss his personal life.

“We’ve drawn a line in the sand. You can ask me about background, you can ask about personal issues — I’m not going to answer,” he said.

The editor of the online news site Alaska Dispatch, Tony Hopfinger, was trying so hard to get an answer from the Republican nominee on whether he had been threatened with termination as a part-time borough attorney in Fairbanks for allegedly using office equipment to campaign against the state GOP leader — a charge Miller has denied — that he confronted Miller after a campaign event Sunday night at an Anchorage school.

Miller’s security guards moved in, shoved Hopfinger against the wall and handcuffed him, detaining him until Anchorage police arrived and released him. Miller said in a statement that Hopfinger had “made threatening gestures” and “appeared irrational, angry and potentially violent.” But Hopfinger said he was simply a reporter approaching with a question. “We’re not going to stop asking questions just because he doesn’t want to take them,” he said in an interview.

McAdams says his line in the sand is Miller.

“I believe Joe Miller and the Tea Party Express and the views of that far-right-wing branch of the Republican Party are so extreme that even most mainline Republicans don’t recognize their ideology,” he said in an interview.

Tea Party Express leaders say they plan a full-court press against Murkowski, even as the Miller campaign has sought to distance itself from the “tea party” brand.

“We’re not the tea party candidate, so avoid that language,” campaign manager Robert Campbell said in a Sept. 18 e-mail obtained by Mudflats, a liberal Alaska political blog.

But Tea Party Express Chairwoman Amy Kremer appeared undeterred, saying the organization was running TV and radio ads and planned to oversee a get-out-the-vote telephone program.

“She didn’t just lose. She was fired.... She needs to put on her big-girl panties and get over it,” Kremer said of the incumbent at a phone-a-thon the group hosted for Miller.

Murkowski responded last week with her biggest gun: a television endorsement filmed by popular longtime U.S. Sen. Ted Stevens before he was killed in a plane crash.

Stevens’ voice wafting in from the grave seems strangely unstrange in this unorthodox campaign, which has some businessmen worried that a vote for Republican nominee Miller — a hard-liner against federal funds in a state where as many as one in three jobs rely on them — might be bad for commerce.

But Juneau Chamber of Commerce President-elect Tim McLeod, a utility executive, worries that if he votes for Murkowski, who “has done a good job for us,” he might inadvertently help the Democrat get elected.

“The situation is very unusual,” he said.

kim.murphy@latimes.com