Republican Nick Begich is making another attempt at Rep. Mary Peltola’s (D-AK) Alaska House seat but this time without the GOP infighting that helped her cruise to victory in last cycle’s race.
Begich, the conservative grandson of a famous Democratic family, ran for Alaska’s sole House seat in the 2022 special and general elections. However, the state’s ranked choice voting system led he and former Gov. Sarah Palin to split the Republican vote.
Peltola went on to become the first Democratic representative of Alaska in 50 years.
Begich hopes to use Peltola’s newfound incumbency against her. In an interview with the Washington Examiner, he painted her as someone who had failed to stand up to the Washington establishment.
“What’s different is that the incumbent Democrat now has a record, and Mary Peltola had not developed a record in the Congress, you know, prior to, but now we’ve seen that she votes with Nancy Pelosi and Joe Biden about 80% of the time,” Begich said. “She is there for the Democrats when they need her, and she’s been absent from her job a good portion of the time.”
Peltola is also now experiencing some of the same challenges Republicans managed to avoid repeating this year. Lt. Gov. Nancy Dahlstrom dropped out of the race in September, leaving Begich as the sole Republican in the four-way, ranked-choice general election. Then, the Alaska Supreme Court decided that Democratic candidate Eric Hafner, who is serving a 20-year prison sentence in New York, can remain on the ballot, an outcome that is expected to eat into Peltola’s vote share.
“I think what we recognized coming out of 2022 is that we need to self-impose primaries and have some additional discipline within our own party,” Begich said, reflecting on the chaos of the 2022 midterm elections, in which the GOP had a lackluster performance across the country.
Ahead of the 2024 primary, Begich had pledged to drop out of the race if he came in third behind Dahlstrom. Dahlstrom would not agree to the same pledge before the election, but her decision to ultimately withdraw earned Begich an open Republican lane and former President Donald Trump’s endorsement.
The seat is today rated a tossup and will be one of the handful of races that decide control of the House in November.
Begich is, in part, relying on the fact that 2024 is a presidential election year, as Alaska voted for Trump by 10 or more points in the last two election cycles. But he’s also betting that its traditional red hue means that a Democrat cannot survive long in the district.
Prior to Peltola, Republican Rep. Don Young held the seat for five consecutive decades before his death in 2022.
“I think Alaskans recognize that whether you’re a Republican or whether you’re Democrat, you’ve got to stand for common sense values, conservative values, that reflect our state [and] are the ones that we want represented in D.C.,” Begich said. “And that’s why, anytime that you’ve seen Alaska in the past elect a Democrat, they’re quickly replaced by a Republican.”
What could boost Peltola’s chances of winning is Alaska’s ranked choice voting system. Voters rank the candidates in order of preference rather than choosing a single candidate. If one candidate receives more than 50% of the first-choice vote count in the initial count, that candidate wins. If not, the votes will be reallocated based on those eliminated.
In 2022, only 50% of Begich supporters ranked Palin as their second choice and only 57% of Palin’s supporters ranked Begich as their second choice. The lack of consolidation behind one Republican candidate contributed to the party losing the House seat in 2022, as Peltola sailed to victory with 51.5% to Palin’s 48.5% after Begich’s votes were reallocated.
On the ballot this year is also an initiative to repeal ranked choice voting altogether. Its advocates argue it helps elect more centrist candidates, but Republicans opposed to the voting method say it is not representative of the electorate. Begich supports its repeal.
While it does happen, it is rather uncommon to unseat a House incumbent; in 2022, only two dozen sitting House members were ousted either in the primaries or the general election. Reelection rates in the House have never dropped below 85%, per Open Secrets. Incumbents who have only served one term are in a precarious situation, however, as they only have a year-and-a-half record to campaign on.
Begich made a broad conservative critique of Washington in his interview, saying the size of government has hurt the voters of Alaska.
“For Alaskans across the state, they’ve seen the heavy hand of Washington, D.C., descend on Alaska and try to shut this state down. And you know, it’s been my view that regular people from everyday walks of life need to step up and take control of D.C. and rein it in,” he said.
But he also focused on Peltola specifically and the votes she has cast since arriving on Capitol Hill.
Begich pointed to a House vote on Alaska’s Right to Produce Act, a bill on which Peltola was the lone Democratic co-sponsor and from which she later pulled support and urged her colleagues to vote “no” in May. The bill would have blocked the Biden administration’s sweeping oil restrictions in Alaska’s National Petroleum Reserve, but Peltola pulled out after she said it would nullify protections for a protected fishing and conservation area in the state.
“When the vote came up, she didn’t vote yes, and she actually didn’t vote no, she voted present,” Begich said. “And I can tell you, as an Alaskan, that is not something that we will tolerate. We will not tolerate someone being half in, half out, sort of one day in, one day out, for resources in our state.”
“She should have stuck to her guns, but she bent to the pressure in D.C.,” Begich added.
While Republicans have sought to frame Peltola as lock-and-step with President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris, the incumbent has voted outside party lines recently.
She was one of four Democrats who voted to denounce the “harmful, anti-American energy policies of the Biden administration” in a GOP-led resolution in March, and she again voted to condemn Vice President Kamala Harris for the administration’s handling of the southern border.
“In Congress, Rep. Peltola has worked with both parties to champion the Willow Project that is creating thousands of good-paying jobs, crack down on foreign and industrial trawling, and fight to block the Kroger-Albertsons merger that would raise costs on Alaska families,” Shannon Mason, communications director for Peltola’s campaign, said in a statement to the Washington Examiner. “Voters trust her record of putting Alaska before politics, which is why she won an outright majority in the non-partisan primary.”
If he enters the House, Begich said it was “yet to be determined” if he would align with the hard-line Freedom Caucus or fall in with more centrist Republicans; before Begich became the party’s sole nominee, national establishment Republicans backed Dahlstrom, while the Freedom Caucus endorsed Begich. As for his legislative goals, he said he would advocate the reversal of executive orders on Alaska resource production and address the cost of living as a result of the state’s declining population.
He would approach the role not as one of the “stars that we all recognize on TV” but as someone who will be “going to work every single day and putting in those hours to make quality policy decisions on behalf of the people that they represent.”
CLICK HERE TO READ MORE FROM THE WASHINGTON EXAMINER
Begich named several Republican role models in the House whom he believes follow that mantra, such as Rep. Bruce Westerman (R-AK) and Majority Leader Steve Scalise (R-LA).
“I think at the end of the day, it’s not necessarily the flashiest members that represent the most sound approach,” Begich said. “Sometimes it is, sometimes it isn’t, but I think some of these other members are the ones that are putting in the work behind the scenes to make sure that we have high-quality policy moving forward on behalf of the American people.”