As Anchorage pollster & consultant Ivan Moore released polling results from last weekend showing Democratic Senator Mark Begich up 8 points over Republican challenger Dan Sullivan and Democratic challenger Forrest Dunbar up 6 points over lifetime Congressman Don Young, national Republican organizations are pulling out all the stops: sending Ted Cruz and Mitt Romney to the 49th State to rally the troops for Ohio Dan and Governor Zero.
More below the Orange Moose Rack...
Moore's polls are just the latest that show all 3 statewide Republican candidates in deep moose nuggets. Parnell, Sullivan, and now even the supposedly immortal Don Young have all had declining numbers for the past several weeks.
Governor Sean Parnell's failure to nip a National Guard sexual harassment problem in the bud several years ago is coming back to bite him. In the past several week, he canned all of the Alaska Guard's top brass after a scalding report from the Army's Complex Investigations Unit revealed that Parnell had taken the word of the Guard's commanding general at face value instead of doing his own investigation after several Guard chaplains contacted his office to relay complaints about cover-ups of sexual harassment in the Guard, including several rapes and attempts by Guard recruiters to sexually assault female high school student recruits.
The same problem has tainted the campaign of Senate candidate Dan Sullivan, who was Parnell's Attorney General at the time, in spite of his denial that he knew any details of the problem or that Parnell had ever asked him for advice or an investigation.
Besides the Guard problems, Parnell is unpopular because of his refusal of Medicaid expansion, which has left 40,000 Alaskans still without health insurance, his lowering of oil company taxes by several billion dollars per year (even though a referendum to overturn the tax cut failed in the August primary, it resulted in the withdrawal several weeks later of the Democratic primary winner Byron Mallott, who became the running mate of former Republican turned independent Bill Walker, who was endorsed last week by former Governor Sarah Palin, who Parnell replaced when she resigned), and his insistence on fighting against Native American sovereignty by reviving a lost lawsuit for subsistence fishing preference for Bush residents and fighting against tribal court jurisdiction over child custody cases in violation of the Indian Child Welfare Act.
Sullivan, whose wife is an Athabascan who grew up in Fairbanks, is disliked by Alaska Natives for prosecuting those lawsuits, and has been trying for several years to overcome the perception that he's not a true Alaskan, an undercurrent deep in the psyche of Alaskans of all political stripes who "don't care how they do it Outside" (in the lower 48). While working in DC at the State Department for Condaleeza Rice, he took a resident tax exemption on his Maryland residence, and most of his campaign funding has come from his home state of Ohio, where it was recently revealed that his family, his major campaign donors, own a company, RPM Industries, that had to negotiate a settlement to repay $60 million in overcharges to the Federal Government for roofing materials.
Sullivan and Parnell have also had a lot of supposedly uncoordinated support from Karl Rove's American Crossroads PAC and from the Koch Brothers' Americans For Prosperity, who have had imported crews door-to-dooring for Sullivan, as well as saturating mailboxes and television advertising. All this dark money campaigning is backfiring as Alaskans, unused to giant attack postcards in the mail, out of state canvassers, and constant negative robocalls and push polls, have become disgusted.
Don Young also has had a regular series of gaffes and foot-in-mouth attacks, whining that high school students who challenged his opinion that youth suicide was the result of "lack of support" after learning that a student at the school had died a few days before were "disrespectful" for attempting to correct his misunderstanding the medical causes, and then, finally, after several days of public prompting by Republican US Senator Lisa Murkowski, finally apologized publicly in a widely broadcast speech at the Alaska Federation of Natives, only to offend an elderly Native woman who attempted to speak to him after the speech and then squeeze her hand so hard it hurt (in a culture that reveres elders) in a video that went viral on YouTube.
So here come Ted and Mitt, LearJetting to the rescue! I can't imagine anything that would more quickly turn off the 50% of Alaskan voters that are non-partisan than having looney tunes Ted Cruz, the bonehead that shut down the Federal Government, out campaigning for me. And Mittens 47%? What are they thinking? Alaskans KNOW this election is not about Obama.
The Odd Couple on the campaign trail for Ohio Dan & Governor Zero?
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