As noted in this post, Pete Hegseth was confirmed by the Senate in a vote of 51/50 with Vice President Vance casting the tie-breaking vote. The GOP Senate members who voted “Nay” were Susan Collins of Maine, Lisa Murkowski of Alaska, and Mitch McConnell the former Majority Leader.
Murkowski is the quintessential RINO and yet she’s from a red state, Alaska. You may wonder why she’s still Alaska’s senator. She was first elected in 2002 and has held the seat since then, having won her most recent election in 2022. That means she is up for re-election in 2028, if she decides to run. She’ll be 71 years old then, not especially geriatric by current standards in politics.
But if you look at Murkowski’s election history it’s a bit easier to understand, although strange. She’s the daughter of a well-known and once-popular Alaskan governor who had also been a senator. Her father appointed her to the Senate when he resigned his own seat to become governor in 2002. She was already in politics, however, as a member of Alaska’s House of Representatives starting in 1999. When I say that her father was a “once-popular” governor, I’m referring to the fact that he won the governorship by a wide margin, but by the time he tried to run for a second term he was primaried out and left with the dismal approval rating of 19%.
Lisa Murkowski has held on more or less by the skin of her teeth. (By the way, I don’t usually put anyone down for having failed the bar exam because I’m well aware of how difficult it is, but Murkowski has the distinction of having failed four times and passed only on the fifth try.) For example, when she ran for re-election to the Alaska House in 2000, she won by 56 votes.
When her father appointed her to the US Senate in 2002, many Alaskans were unhappy:
The appointment caused controversy in Alaska. Many voters disapproved of the nepotism. Her appointment eventually resulted in a referendum that stripped the governor of the power to directly appoint replacement senators.
As far as her elections to the Senate go:
Murkowski has had several close challenges but has never lost a general election. She has won four full terms to the Senate; she won 48.6% of the vote in 2004, 39.5% in 2010, 44.4% in 2016 and 53.7% in 2022.
That 2010 race was a three-candidate event in which she was successfully primaried and was not the GOP nominee, but decided to run anyway in a write-in campaign and beat the official Republican nominee, a Tea Party candidate, by a narrow margin. My guess is that the reason for her victory included crossover Democrat votes, people who realized one of the Republicans would win and wanted it to be the RINO. In 2016 it was a four-way race:
[In 2016] Murkowski was re-elected with 44.4% of the vote, becoming the first person in history to win three elections to the U.S. Senate with pluralities but not majorities, having taken 48.6% in 2004 and 39.5% in 2010.[4] Miller’s 29.2% finish was then the best ever for a Libertarian candidate in a U.S. Senate election in terms of vote percentage.
Her 2022 victory was extremely strange as well [emphasis mine]:
This was the first U.S. Senate election in Alaska to be held under a new election process provided for in Ballot Measure 2. All candidates ran in a nonpartisan blanket top-four primary on August 16, 2022, and the top four candidates advanced to the general election, where voters utilized ranked-choice voting.
Murkowski had been a vocal critic of Donald Trump during his presidency and opposed several of his initiatives. Murkowski was one of seven Republican senators who voted to convict Trump in his second impeachment trial in 2021, and was the only one up for re-election in 2022. On March 16, 2021, the Alaska Republican Party voted to censure Murkowski and announced that it would recruit a Republican challenger in the 2022 election cycle. Kelly Tshibaka, a former commissioner of the Alaska Department of Administration, was endorsed by Trump and the Alaska Republican Party. Republican Senate leader Mitch McConnell and the National Republican Senatorial Committee supported Murkowski.
In addition to Murkowski and Tshibaka, Democrat Pat Chesbro and Republican Buzz Kelley also advanced to the general election. On September 13, Kelley suspended his campaign and endorsed Tshibaka but remained on the ballot. Murkowski received a plurality of first-place votes; however, because no candidate received a majority of the votes in the first round, an instant runoff was triggered. Murkowski won reelection in the third and final round, winning most of the second-choice votes from Chesbro’s voters.
So she won because of Democrat votes, this time without a doubt. She also had the support in that election of none other than Mitch McConnell.
I think that history explains, at least in part, how it is that Alaska came to have Lisa Murkowski as its long-time senator.
For McConnell, I don’t think his vote is any mystery: he hates Trump, and perhaps it has something to do with his financial interests as well.
Susan Collins is much easier to explain. I wrote:
I don’t fault Collins. She’s from Maine. She helps even if she sometimes votes with Democrats, because when she retires she’ll be replaced by a real Democrat.
She has to choose the times she will vote more conservatively, and when it doesn’t matter as much is free to vote with Democrats. She almost certainly was aware of the breakdown of votes, and knew that Vance was available to break the tie.
Commenter “Old Flyer” wrote:
I am not so charitable toward Collins. There are ample opportunities to assuage the Left leaning voters in her relatively tiny constituency; but Hegseth’s confirmation was hanging in the balance. I believe that she is a committed anti-Trumper and will oppose him as long as she feeds at the Senate trough–regardless of the stakes.
I think the answer is as I said above: that she knew it actually didn’t hang in the balance. It’s possible to forget that votes are often known in advance and that members of Congress sometimes vote to make a point when they know it doesn’t matter in the end.
