With more than 100,000 ballots still to count, Alaska campaigns cross fingers and crunch numbers

Election workers help a voter at Service High School in Anchorage on November 3, 2020. (Jeff Chen/Alaska Public Media)
Election workers help a voter at Service High School in Anchorage on November 3, 2020. (Jeff Chen/Alaska Public Media)

More than a third of all the votes in Alaska’s election won’t be counted until next week at the earliest, and that means an array of candidates and causes are stuck in limbo.

But with nearly two hundred thousand votes counted Tuesday, campaigns and political operatives have already started crunching the numbers and making predictions about which races are still in play — and which ones aren’t.

Longtime Anchorage Democratic Senator Bill Wielechowski woke up the morning after Election Day trailing his Republican challenger by more than 200 votes. But does he have any anxiety about it? Not really.

“I have no doubt that when it’s done, I’m going to win by a significant margin,” he said.

Voters cast about 6,000 ballots in Wielechowski’s district on Election Day. But thousands more votes won’t be counted until next week at the earliest — part of a blizzard of early and absentee ballots that Alaskans voted this year, largely in response to the COVID-19 pandemic.

Political observers say they expect the uncounted absentee and early ballots to skew more strongly toward Democratic and independents since Republicans were more likely to vote in-person amid the pandemic. And Wielechowski says he expects those uncounted ballots to put a number of trailing Democratic candidates ahead of their rivals.

“I know people are freaking out, on the Democratic side — some people. But you literally counted the Republican ballots last night and you’re going to count the Democratic ballots next week. And you’re going to see change,” he said.

The big question is just how much change.

Republican U.S. Sen. Dan Sullivan speaks to supporters on Nov. 3, 2020, at the 49th State Brewing Co. in Anchorage. (Jeff Chen/Alaska Public Media)

Republicans did very well in the vote-counting from last night: At the state level, seven incumbent Democrats are currently losing their re-election bids. Leaders from both parties say they expect some of those results to change, but they have very different ideas about how much of a lead is too much to overcome.

Conservative news blogger Suzanne Downing’s headline Wednesday was that the Election Day results were a “huge victory” for Republicans and a “routing of the liberal agenda.”

“Most Republicans looking at last night’s results feel pretty comfortable that they’ve retaken the spirit of the House, in terms of it being dominated by Republicans. And, of course, they’ve retained the Senate — they did not lose any Republican seats,” she said.

Campaigns and political operatives now face a week-long wait before remaining absentee and early ballots are counted. But they already have a lot of information about those votes — they know the names and party affiliations of the people who cast them, along with other hints about their political leanings kept in proprietary databases.

Campaigns then use that data to make informed predictions about how the remaining votes will break down. And for Alaska’s U.S. Senate race, for example, both Republicans and a number of progressives say that it’s hard to see Democratic Party-endorsed independent Al Gross making up his nearly 60,000-vote deficit to incumbent Republican Dan Sullivan.

“This isn’t just a guess. This is a very informed analysis. Every vote will count, we think it should and it will,” said Sullivan spokesperson Matt Shuckerow. “But when we look at the numbers, we just can see that there’s no path to victory for the Gross campaign.”

Gross’ campaign wouldn’t go into its own analysis, but it released a video of Gross saying he still believes he’s going to win.

As for the two initiatives on the ballot, the proposed oil-tax increase trails by more than 50,000 votes. But the deficit for ballot measure 2, the election overhaul, is only half that, and Scott Kendall, an attorney working with that campaign, sees the race still within striking distance.

“When I look at the sheer number of outstanding ballots — a number that’s only going to grow — and our support for our measures among that group that voted by mail, I absolutely think the numbers are there,” he said.

Brett Huber, the manager of the opposition campaign for the election initiative, acknowledges that the COVID-19 pandemic has scrambled typical voting patterns. But he says he thinks it’s very unlikely that the results will flip as much as they’d have to for the Election Night counts to change for either initiative.

“Trying to get back to a win for either ballot measure is like putting your entire stack of chips on double zero on the roulette wheel. You’re going to get 36-to-1 odds because it never happens,” Huber said.

The state will start counting absentee and early votes beginning Tuesday. But any ballots postmarked by Election Day will still be counted as long as they arrive within 10 days, or 15 days for those sent from outside the country.

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