2022 Alaska Senate Predictions

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In 2010, Alaska Senator Lisa Murkowski’s political career appeared to be over, after a Sarah Palin-backed tea party candidate, Joe Miller, beat her in the Republican primary. Murkowski was undeterred and launched a long-shot write-in campaign to both secure a large enough slice of the electorate to win and to teach her supporters how to spell her long last name correctly. She became the second candidate to win a write-in campaign in Senate history.

In the years since, Lisa Murkowski has been one of the nation’s most independent Senators, helping her build a rare bipartisan coalition of Republicans, Independents, and Democrats. She faces another challenge from the right, this time from fellow Republican Kelly Tshibaka, but Murkowski has a better shot of surviving this election cycle thanks to the state’s adoption of ranked-choice voting, which enabled the top four candidates regardless of party to move onto the final round in November.

We have designed a special ranked-choice election model just for Alaska, modeled after our successful NYC Mayor Forecast. Once the vote count is completed, the candidate placing fourth is automatically eliminated, and their votes are rerouted to the candidate that those voters ranked second on their ballot. If neither candidate has over 50% of the vote, the same process is repeated for the third-place candidate. 

Polls indicate that Murkowski will face a razor-tight first round, but she’s likely to gain support in the second and final third round of voting. She will almost certainly face Tshibaka in the final round. Every time we update the forecast, we simulate the Alaska race 10,000 times. In each simulation, the candidates will over or underperform their projections. To predict ranked-choice voting, we built a poll average that tracks who voters say they will rank second and third - separated by the candidate they ranked first overall.