Five days before a special election for Alaska’s lone seat in the U.S. House of Representatives, I went to a strip mall in Anchorage to look for Sarah Palin. I found her campaign office inside a real-estate agency, next to a diner, in the southern part of the city. A handwritten sign on the door said “be right back,” and, outside the headquarters, Kari James, a landscaper working in the dirt, told me that Jerry Ward, who was lending his space to Palin, had gone out for a sandwich. Nobody was inside.
“The Guardian and the Telegraph already came here,” James said. “One of them was writing an article about . . . keeping bathrooms separate? I told her some places she could go talk to liberals in Anchorage. The other one had already written her story—she just wanted to fill in quotes. Why are so many British papers here asking about Sarah Palin?” James went on, “I started landscaping here yesterday, and Jerry was already telling people I’ve joined the campaign. I haven’t. I’m just landscaping, but I love Sarah Palin.”
Alaska’s House seat is open for the first time in forty-nine years, after the death, in March, of Don Young—the longest-serving Republican in congressional history. Palin, the state’s former governor, led a field of forty-eight candidates in a June primary, and is now facing just two: the Republican businessman Nick Begich, whose grandfather formerly held the seat as a Democrat, and the Democrat Mary Peltola, a Yupik Eskimo from rural Alaska.
James moved to Alaska from Nebraska a few years ago; her family is in the military. “I don’t consider myself an Alaskan yet,” she said. “But I am thinking about this on a national scale. We need to have our own Republican version of the Squad—[Lauren] Boebert, Margie Taylor Greene, and Sarah Palin.”
Ward turned into the parking lot and let me come inside. A framed photo of him shaking hands with Trump was on a side table by his desk. “I know Trump because of Sarah,” he said. “I know Sarah because she knows my kids.” Ward, an Alaska Native and a former state senator, managed Donald Trump’s 2016 campaign in the state, and now runs the real-estate business with his wife. They also live there. “It’s a home, a company, a veterans’ talking circle, a prayer group—we pray for Biden and Trump,” he said. Sean Hannity was on the radio, doing a segment about Clinton’s e-mails. “Sarah was here this morning,” Ward told me. “She sits at the glass table. She was with nurses or veterans, I think. I have no idea.” Hannity went to commercial break; an ad for Palin came on the air, in which she said, “Don’t retreat—reload.”
“She’s got herself a situation,” Ward said. “She’s out with a church group door-knocking. It’s not a good use of her time. Alaska is very spread out.” I wrote down my contact information on a sticky note. Ward took a picture of it. “I sent her your stuff—she’ll call you,” he said. “Or not.”
“I have so many Sarah Palin narratives,” Andrew Halcro, a former Republican member of Alaska’s statehouse, told me. “Which one do you want?” We were in the coffee shop of the ocean-liner-size Captain Cook hotel, in Anchorage. Halcro spent ten months with Palin on the campaign trail when they both ran for governor, a little more than fifteen years ago, and he pointed to the café across the lobby from us, where he and Palin had sat debriefing after an event about agricultural policy. “She was, like, ‘You’re out there spitting facts, Andrew, and I’m looking out at the crowd, and I think, Are all those facts really so important?’ ”
Halcro, who was among the forty-eight candidates who had run for the U.S. House seat, went on: “Throughout the whole luncheon, you literally couldn’t understand a word she was saying, but when she worked the crowd after it was like the Second Coming. She’s good at pep rallies—she makes people feel like they’re on a different plane of existence. As soon as she realized glittering generalities served her better, she was able to float above it all.” At one event, months into the campaign, Palin had demanded that all the candidates give their remarks while seated, because, if she stood, she couldn’t read the talking points on the back of her place card. “When I watch her today and think back, it’s almost as if she was frozen in time and someone went and cracked the tomb open, and here she is, emerging unchanged,” Halcro said.
The current era, at least on the national level, is even more hospitable to Palin’s style. Two weeks ago, at a CPAC convention in Dallas, she lamented that the 2008 Presidential campaign had put “some shackles” on her, because what’s needed now is someone who will “go rogue.” She wore a bejewelled Star of David, a red blazer, and a black sequinned top. “Those Freedom Caucus members—I love them and I hope I hook up with them,” she said. In the 2010 page-turner “Game Change,” John Heilemann and Mark Halperin describe how John McCain’s team, increasingly desperate for a running mate, plucked Palin out of obscurity. They wanted someone who would “shock the world.” Palin was “endlessly watchable,” even “a star”—though a vetting report at the time warned that she was also an “inexperienced beauty queen whose main national exposure was a photo-spread in Vogue in February 2008.” McCain liked that she was an outsider. (At the time, she had an eighty per cent in-state approval rating, the highest of any governor in the nation.) To prep for the media, and to debate her Vice-Presidential opponent, Joe Biden, Palin sat in conference rooms, surrounded by stacks of index cards with information about world affairs. (This was called her “Eliza Doolittle moment.”)
It didn’t go well. She couldn’t memorize the note cards. She blew her Katie Couric interview. “The McCain people did fail Palin,” Heilemann and Halperin wrote. “They had, as promised, made her one of the most famous people in the world overnight. But they allowed her no time to plant her feet to absorb such a seismic shift.” It was Palin the outsider against the political insiders, who threw her under the bus after summoning her into their midst.
In early 2016, Palin endorsed Trump, and she has done many of the typical Trump-world rotations—Fox, “The Masked Singer,” Cameo, CPAC, reality shows, her own YouTube channel. She’s made a lot of money. But she might lose her new bid for office to Nick Begich, a man with three hundred and eighteen Twitter followers. Palin played on the outsider “maverick” theme when she first came onto the national stage, but now her position as an outsider in her own state is a liability. On Sunday, Begich flew to Kodiak Island, one of Alaska’s fishing hubs, to shake hands at a brewery; sometimes he goes to the airport just to say hello to people. “Sarah left Alaska” is one of his campaign mainstays. “All of her money comes from outside,” Halcro told me. “People in Oklahoma see her on TV, think she’s the cat’s pajamas, and decide to donate.”
During the Vice-Presidential run, Palin worried that Alaskans would turn on her for losing touch with the state. Now she’s fully embraced the national and the online. Earlier this month, she skipped a candidates’ forum on the Kenai Peninsula for a fund-raiser in Minneapolis. In May, after campaigning in Georgia for David Perdue, the Trump-backed candidate for governor, she had missed a forum hosted by the Anchorage Republican Women. Participants addressed questions to her empty chair. “Sarah knows how to work a crowd, how to understand crowd vibes—but it’s Sarah, Inc.,” Suzanne Downing, the publisher of the conservative news site Must Read Alaska, told me. “She’s a populist, not a conservative.”
I met Downing at the Alaska headquarters of Americans for Prosperity, an advocacy group funded by the Koch brothers, in a strip mall next to a military-recruitment center. We sat in a conference room near a plastic box of materials used to visually explain the new ranked-choice voting system that Alaskans would utilize when casting their ballots. (The controversial system, approved in 2020, is almost farcically confusing; a recent event in Juneau, titled Drag Out the Vote, featured a mock election in which drag queens tried to explain it.) The Americans for Prosperity PAC endorses Begich, as do the Alaska Republican Party, FreedomWorks for America, and the Anchorage Young Republicans; Palin’s endorsements include Trump, Bikers for Trump, Ben Carson, and Rick Perry. The goal of the populist isn’t necessarily to win elections; her ambition may be more about re-laundering her celebrity. “Sarah’s like A.O.C., but for the right,” Downing said. “All of the mayors and elected officials and leaders of the state have endorsed Begich. And then Palin’s out there with Glenn Beck and Charlie Kirk backing her.”
Wasilla, where Palin lives, is peppered with signs for her opponent. Main Street bisects a strip mall, which has a row of frontier-style shops. At the turnoff for the Best Western, across the road from dismantled shipping containers and a construction site, a lone “Sarah for Alaska” sign was weighed down with sandbags. This was the entrance to her property. Down the driveway, at an unoccupied guard station, a pile of discarded antlers sat on the ground next to a flowerpot. The Best Western and Palin’s house have adjacent docks on Lake Lucille, near a seaplane-landing area. Much of the reality show “Sarah Palin’s Alaska”—produced by Mark Burnett, who also did “The Apprentice”—was filmed in the house. She wasn’t there. I went back to the Best Western and tried to find the transcript of Palin’s recent “tele-rally,” her only scheduled campaign event the week before the election, which took place on the day of the F.B.I. raid at Mar-a-Lago; Trump called in to tell Palin’s supporters that it had been “another day in paradise.”
At night, I went to a fund-raiser, in Wasilla’s Mat-Su Valley, for Begich. The event was co-hosted by Palin’s former in-laws, Faye and Jim, who have become strong public supporters of Begich, at least since Palin announced her candidacy. “There’s a lot of things Sarah hasn’t shown up to,” Jim told me. “We’ve got grandkids and we want to remain positive with them. But the bottom line is we just feel Nick is the most qualified. He wants the best for Alaska and for America. We do our best to avoid any conflict.” (In 2008, Faye told the New York Daily News that she was considering voting for Obama, instead of her daughter-in-law: “I’m not sure what she brings to the ticket other than she’s a woman and a conservative.” In this race, the family drama isn’t unique to Palin. Begich’s own grandmother has said that she wouldn’t vote for him, and his uncle Mark has put on fund-raisers for Peltola, the Democratic candidate.)
Attendees—a mayor of a nearby town, longtime local residents—took snacks from a table with chili, croissant sandwiches, and desserts; the plastic cutlery was in a mug that read “Let’s Go Brandon.” Ashley Reed, a state lobbyist for Wells Fargo and various natural-gas interests, sat at the door, asking people to sign their names. “I know Sarah,” he said. “That’s why I don’t support Sarah. We only have one seat, so the person we send there needs to actually show up. She’s trying to pump up the brand again.” Out on the porch, Eric Koan, a co-host of the fund-raiser, who was wearing a Hawaiian shirt, sat at a round table looking out over the valley. A retired federal-loan officer for rural Alaska, Koan got involved with Begich’s campaign because his wife is in Republican women’s clubs. Of Palin, he told me, “We don’t see her anywhere.”
The theme of Palin bailing out of Alaska came up all night. “She lost her Fox News deal, she doesn’t have a reality show anymore—she’s just trying to get her celebrity status back,” Truman Reed, Begich’s campaign manager and a former legislative assistant to Don Young, said. As the conservative columnist Paul Jenkins put it to me, “Alaska is a cheap political date. If you have something you want to push, this is a good place, because there aren’t that many people. But it also means people feel taken advantage of.”
Mike Koskovich, a retired commercial pilot who wore a “Trump Won” hat—“I know it. You know it.”—joined us. He first met Begich at a yearly fly-in hangar party that he hosts. “I used to load the Palins up in the floatplane and fly them out to their cabin,” he said. “I’ve known them since the seventies. Jim was running the electric utility.” In the bed of his pickup truck, there was an eight-foot sign for Begich and Kelly Tshibaka, a Trump-backed Senate candidate trying to primary Lisa Murkowski. (Tshibaka’s fund-raising efforts include a sweepstakes to go bear hunting with Don. Jr.) “After I retired, I was in the middle of a rain forest in Australia, and, when my wife and I checked into a hotel and showed our I.D.s, they said, ‘Do you know Sarah Palin?’ Sarah got a taste of the limelight and celebrity and abandoned her family,” Koskovich said. In this election, notoriety and national attention—Palin is arguably the most famous Alaskan since the state formed, in 1959—could be more damning than seductive. Bruce Botelho, the former Alaska attorney general and mayor of Juneau, said that “Begich considers himself a workhorse and thinks of Palin as a show horse—and there’s not much to show.”
Recently, NPR declared that even “right-wing, gun-toting” Republicans in Palin’s home town didn’t want her to win. Begich’s and Palin’s constituencies could both be described in equally crude terms, obscuring a split between two types of Alaskan Republicans: those who are enraptured with Palin because she might go to D.C. and sit on the steps with Marjorie Taylor Greene, and conservatives “whose first thought is about the state,” as Jenkins described it. Trump’s endorsement plays into this polarization. “People in Alaska are, by and large, Trump supporters,” Koskovich said. “But the only time Trump comes to Alaska is if Air Force One needs more fuel on the way somewhere.”
Inside, Begich, in a navy suit, stood to address the room. “Like Don Young, I want to make the business case for Alaska,” he said. “Don’t just turn Alaska into a national park. We’re blessed with minerals up here. If we don’t do it here, it’ll be Congo or Iran. The resources are going to be extracted and turned into your iPhone.” He touched on free speech, the inflation bill, resource development, “fear of being cancelled.”
Several people asked about plans to defund the I.R.S. (“Eighty-seven thousand agents! Why!”) and the F.B.I. (“A raid on a former President’s home is unprecedented!”).
Critical race theory? “Totally opposed,” Begich said. “It’s the ideological world view of bureaucrats in D.C.” Teaching cursive at school? “What is our Bill of Rights and Constitution written in?” someone responded.
“Will you eliminate the D.O.E.?” a member of the group asked.
“The Department of Energy?” Begich inquired.
“No, the Department of Education,” she said.
Many in the room had spent the past hour expressing profound skepticism about Palin’s glitzy national profile, but this conversation sounded more like Fox News than it did uniquely Alaskan. When I went up to Begich after his remarks, he critiqued not Palin’s politics but her style and the wing of the Republican Party it encapsulates. “Sarah pioneered the idea of being politically entertaining, and she took it to the extreme,” he said. “But then she skipped the Fourth of July parade here in Wasilla. I was there. I go to the air show. I don’t want to disturb people, so I stand in the beer line. I shake a thousand hands. If you don’t spend time here, you really don’t understand the challenges and opportunities that we have in the state.”
Mike Coons, a retired Air Force officer, leaned against a punch bowl. “Sarah thought she could help more on the outside,” he said. “But what about Alaska?”
“Zero!” a woman walking by shouted.
“Geographically, we’re isolated,” Coons went on. “If things go crazy and they shut things down in the Lower Forty-eight, how do we get food? How do we get supplies? I want someone like Nick.”
Laurie Vandenberg, a single mother of five children with special needs, told me, “I named my daughter Bristol, after Sarah’s daughter. She got hammered by the world when they announced that pregnancy. I love how she handled it. We don’t see that anymore, though.”
The next morning, I drove back to Anchorage to go to the polls with Mary Peltola. Downtown, almost everyone was struggling with luggage in the rain; the street corners were a mix of unhoused people in wheelchairs and cruise-goers rolling suitcases toward the dock.
Peltola arrived at City Hall wearing jeans, a blue blazer, and beaded earrings, accompanied by her stepchildren and her husband, Gene, who runs the regional Bureau of Indian Affairs. Peltola, who led the Kuskokwim River Inter-Tribal Fish Commission, often speaks about climate change and sustainable fishing; subsistence is a theme of her campaign. Alaska has among the highest density of union members in the country; Don Young was a routine vote in favor of labor, and now the unions have united around Peltola, with the Alaska A.F.L.-C.I.O. endorsing her. Sixty per cent of Alaskans favor abortion rights, and Peltola is pro-choice. “If we’re going to talk about a true Alaskan, Mary’s the real deal,” Botelho, the former attorney general, told me. “She’s Alaska Native. It puts her already in a unique category. She’s been a commercial fisherwoman—she’s had to work with her hands. She’s had to have a more—I don’t want to call it normal—but she would bring that rural perspective to Washington.”
In the polling station, booths were curtained off with flimsy flags in red, white, and blue. After being given a ballot for the wrong state House district, Peltola went back in and redid it. A procession of documentary and local-news teams followed her outside, where she stood in front of a heart-shaped sign that said, “Abortion access is a community responsibility.” Someone walking by in a poncho yelled, “Thank you for killing me!” Peltola said that she prefers to vote early, because “you never know what chaos will come in Alaska.” A few days earlier, Andrew Halcro, the former Republican state representative, had delivered a grim account of Alaska’s future. During the past two decades, oil production has been cut in half, and hopes for a gas pipeline seem perennially out of reach. Alaska has one of the highest rates of population loss of any state, and its suicide rate is double the national average. “This state is dying,” he told me.
Still, several people I met told me that looking outside the state to the Lower Forty-eight provokes the following thought: “I’m glad I’m not there.” The curiosity about Palin, her potential for spectacle, brought the national press back up to Alaska to ask her in-laws and former rivals about her, and whether she might be a referendum on Trump. But the more interesting question was whether “Alaskan issues” could draw sustained attention–—or whether the state would become more isolated. I thought of something Suzanne Downing had told me before I went to Wasilla, about Alaska as the last frontier, whose national representation may take on a greater resonance this year. “This election in Alaska is happening in the midst of these other tectonic shifts. Conservatives don’t know where to go to get away,” she had said. “I hear more and more often from people, ‘Where can I go, where’s safe?’ They come here to make a stand—this is the only place we can be.” ♦
An earlier version of this article mischaracterized one aspect of a candidates’ forum in August.
