It would be amazing if the Republicans didn't take the Senate in Alaska in the runoff, but not impossible.
True, but that's technically true of various races that
have been called. Anyone in any election could just have 80% or more of the remaining votes go to them after half were counted and change the result from a loss to a win, but it's astoundingly unlikely (unless only certain areas have been counted, and the outlying ones may actually skew that heavily--which I don't think is the case here).
The way I understand it, the Democrats could take the hose in Alaska.
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I don't understand Alaska politics; but if I understand them the way I think that I understand them; the thought of two Republicans splitting the vote in the General Elections seems crazy to me. Did the Democrats come up with that plan?
Alaska has Ranked Choice Voting, which mostly prevents ticket splitting. So, assuming the numbers on that image stay the way they are, this is how it will work (technically there is a fourth candidate on the ballot who currently has something like 2% of the vote but we'll ignore them for simplicity). Now, in the election, you didn't simply vote for one candidate. Instead, you ranked them according to your preference. Your favorite candidate is ranked 1, your second favorite 2, and so on for 3 and 4 (you can also choose to stop ranking at any point). The percentages we see there are for people's first votes.
[EDIT: I realize that the photo doesn't show up in the quote, so for those who want easy reference and not have to keep scrolling back up: Peltola is the Democrat who currently has 47% of the vote (in terms of voter's top choices), while Palin (Republican) is in second place with 26%, and Begich (also Republican) has 24%.]
So here is what will happen assuming those numbers stay the same. Begich, who has the lowest number of votes, is knocked out. Anyone who voted for him will then have their vote moved to their second choice (or will be removed from the pool entirely if they chose to rank no one else). The question, then, is how that will work. Begich was a Republican so obviously we'll expect the majority to go to Palin, but undoubtedly some of his voters would prefer Peltola, and some just stopped at Begich (perhaps they didn't like Palin or Peltola much). How their votes get distributed will then be what decides the election. Thus splitting is avoided, for anyone whose vote was legitimately split between Palin and Begich would just have Palin as their second choice. If Begich's second-place voters aren't enough to put Palin into the majority, then that indicates in a hypothetical world where he was never on the ballot (say, where they did "normal" nominations where each party nominates one person and Palin won the Republican primary), Peltola would've still won because enough of the people who would've preferred Begich over Palin as the Republican nominee would've voted for her over Palin.
Given how far Peltola is ahead, it's most likely she wins, but it's possible, though unlikely, that Begich's voters favor Palin so strongly that she overtakes Peltola.
Peltola seems like she's a fairly strong candidate, given how much Republicans are dominating in the other statewide elections. I already noted how the Senate is basically guaranteed to go to a Republican, and it's looking like the main Republican in the governor race will win a majority outright, eliminating the need to calculate out how the second place votes go.
