Sarah Palin loses special election bid for US Congress seat

• Sarah Palin lost her bid to replace Don Young in the US House of Representatives.
• Democrat Mary Peltola is the first Alaskan Democrat elected to Congress since 2008.
• This was the first election in Alaska to use ranked-choice voting.

Sarah Palin, former governor of Alaska, lost her effort to replace the state’s open seat in the US House of Representatives on Wednesday.

Palin had intended to make her political return in the special election to succeed Republican congressman Don Young, who had served in the House for 49 years until passing away in March.

Palin was defeated by Democrat Mary Peltola despite having won the 2006 gubernatorial election and having the support of former U.S. president Donald Trump.

Peltola is the first Alaskan Democrat elected to Congress since 2008, as well as the state’s first Native American national lawmaker.

However, Palin will be on the ballot again in the upcoming midterm elections on November 8.

This was the first election in Alaska to use ranked-choice voting, in which voters select candidates in the order of their preference. If no candidate receives a majority of first-place votes, the candidate in last place is eliminated and their votes are redistributed among the voters’ second choices. The procedure is repeated until a candidate receives a majority vote.

Palin was thrust into the public eye when she was selected as McCain’s running mate in the 2008 presidential race by the late Arizona senator John McCain.

Palin’s emergence during the 2008 campaign, as a Christian conservative who emphasised her outsider status, is largely regarded as having paved the way for Trump to win the presidency eight years later.

Their norm-defying identities stood in direct juxtaposition to Mitt Romney and John McCain, the previous Republican standard-bearers.

In the midterm elections, all 435 House seats and roughly one-third of the 100 Senate seats are up for grabs.

It was widely anticipated that Republicans would take control of Congress in the midterm elections, thus Peltola’s victory represents a big upset for the Democrats.

Trump has moved to reassert his control over the Republican Party by endorsing just certain candidates in primary contests, the winners of which will run in November’s midterm elections.

In the Republican primaries, the success of the former president’s candidates, almost all of whom endorse his unsubstantiated predictions of widespread election fraud in 2020, has been mixed.

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