On the Fence

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For likely opponents, click here.

*Uninsured numbers come from 2008 U.S. Census Bureau data.

I’m told by Sotomayor opponents that the NRA’s decision to “score” the Sotomayor vote will be responsible for “no” votes from several Republicans, such as the two senators from Utah. And they’re optimistic that a Democratic senator, possibly Sen. Mark Begich (D-Alaska) or Sen. Ben Nelson (D-Neb.), will be cowed into opposing the president because of the NRA’s pressure.

[Alaska GOP Chairman Randy Ruedrich] thought Begich should step down “so Alaskans may have the chance to vote for a senator without the improper influence of the corrupt Department of Justice.”

Gov. Sarah Palin concurs with Ruedrich and believes a special election is appropriate, said a spokeswoman for Palin’s political action committee, Meg Stapleton. “I absolutely agree,” Palin said in a statement.

All you really need to know is that Begich led Stevens in the polls long before the corruption verdict came down, and that Begich won because absentee voters — many of whom voted before the verdict — chose him over Stevens.

Petraeus agrees. While he says it’s actually unclear how many people live in Afghanistan, “the bottom line [is] your point is exactly right,” he says, “even accelerating the development of the Afghan army.” He says that the ratio is something he’ll keeping an eye on “as our assessment goes forward.”

Flournoy says that in the crucial areas it’s closer to the field manual’s advised ratio. “The concentration [of the insurgency] south and into the east” of Afghanistan,” she says. “When looking at the troops required on our side, our allies, Afghan troops, police and security forces, we were trying to concentrate efforts on the insurgency belt in the south and east to get to those kinds of ratios in the areas where insurgency is strongest.”

She doesn’t say what the ratio is and will be there, though, and Begich requests an answer down the road.

Petraeus did say that he included that ratio in the field manual as a matter of “intellectual honesty,” so there was a concrete measurement. Following his lead, then, I’d like to apologize publicly to radio host Christiane Brown of KJFK in Nevada. I appeared on her show on Monday and downplayed the field manual’s measurement in response to a point she made. I was wrong to do so and hereby apologize.

Begich appears to be up by 2,374 votes. At last count he was up by 1,022. The Anchorage Daily News reports that updated numbers will be released tonight between 4 pm and 5 pm Alaska time — between 8 pm and 9pm Eastern.

There is no automatic recount rule in Alaska, but Begich has already asked supporters for funds to pay for lawyers if he does ultimately win and Republicans demand a recount.

The state Republican Party pushed voters to support Stevens, assuming the convicted felon would be ejected from the Senate. The GOP hoped to hang on to the seat in a special election.

Most of the 24,000 ballots left to be counted are from Anchorage voters, a good sign for Stevens’ Democratic challenger, Anchorage Mayor Mark Begich, who took the lead in the vote tally last week. Begich was up by 1,022 votes on the last count update.

Begich emailed supporters on Friday asking for money in the event of a recount in early December. There is no automatic recount vote in Alaska, unless there is a tie.

Why is it taking so long for such a small state to count all its votes?

As I’ve noted, the counting has dragged on for two reasons. First, absentee ballots need to be post marked by Election Day, rather than in the hands of the state by that date, as is the case in many other states.

Second, rules were tighter this year after voter fraud was allegedly detected in the state’s last election. Some two dozen voters are suspected of having mailed in their ballot and then voted in person. In response, Alaska waited to begin counting mail-in ballots until after all in-person ballots were counted and the rolls could be compared.

The Anchorage Daily News reports this morning that Democratic Anchorage Mayor Mark Begich has pulled ahead of Sen. Ted Stevens in the vote tally expected to take about another week to complete.

Begich has been trailing Stevens by 1.5 percent in the count, a bizarre situation since Stevens was convicted on seven counts of federal bribery-related charges one week before Election Day.  Today, Begich is ahead by 814 votes, with 40,000 questioned and mail-in ballots still to be counted.

The Daily News notes a number of factors that favor Begich. First, ballots from Anchorage, where Begich is a popular mayor, won’t be counted until Monday or Wednesday of next week. Those are also likely to break Begich for another reason. During the campaign, Begich pushed voters to vote early.  Stevens depended on a last-minute appearance in Alaska, and a media blitz a few days before Nov. 4, to get out the vote.

It’s too close to count out either candidate — but a promising turn of events for Begich.

Sen. Ted Stevens (wdcpix)

Who would vote for a convicted felon to serve in the U.S. Senate?

Right now, about 42 percent of Alaskans say they would.

The day after a Washington jury found the Senate’s longest-serving Republican, Ted Stevens, guilty of failing to disclose $250,000 in gifts from an oil services firm, Rasmussen conducted a poll in his home state of Alaska. It showed that Stevens’ Democratic challenger, Anchorage Mayor Mark Begich, had pulled ahead by eight percentage points. Before the verdict, the race had been a statistical tie.

Most people who are following the race believe Begich will eventually win by a greater margin.

Illustration by: Matt Mahurin

Nevertheless, thousands of Alaskans could line up Tuesday to cast their vote for a man who betrayed the public trust by using his powerful position as chairman of the Senate Appropriations Committee to accept gifts and perks from Veco and its chief executive, Bill Allen. Among the gifts that Stevens was convicted of accepting were renovations that doubled the size of his home in Girdwood, Alaska, a state-of-the-art Viking grill, furniture and a massage chair.

In Alaska, Stevens and his handiwork have a variety of pet names. He is known as “Uncle Ted,” and the billions of dollars in federal money he has brought to the state is called “Stevens money.”

To truly understand Stevens’ continuing attraction in Alaska despite his conviction on seven counts of lying on Senate disclosure forms to conceal the gifts, you need to look at how the senator embodies the Western spirit of Alaska. It is a spirit that uneasily accommodates two conflicting views of government. On the one hand, Steven represents a state where people go to escape their past and find their fortune, free of the intrusions of a meddling government. Their destination, on the other hand, is a young, remote state heavily dependent on federal money for its infrastructure and other projects.

Stevens is thus part wild west and part inside the Beltway, an accommodation that has brought Alaska $3 billion in earmarks in the last four years alone — and earned him a special place in voters’ hearts.

“The reality of the situation is that there is a combination of that — those big projects — but it’s also genuinely his commitment to help the Congress understand that Alaska is unique and what its needs are,” said Stephen Haycox, a history professor at the University of Alaska, Anchorage. “He is highly respected by all the people he has helped in Alaska.”

Haycox explained that the state’s single-minded pursuit of federal money stems from its anxiety over job security because Alaska’s “extraordinarily narrow economy” is heavily dependent on oil production in Prudhoe Bay.

“Alaska is an economic colony,” Haycox said. “The only thing from which to construct an economy is development of natural resources.”

The state’s top revenue source is taxes on oil production, which accounted for 41 percent of the 2007 budget, or $4.5 billion.

The federal government is the second largest revenue source, amounting to $2 billion, or 28 percent of total revenues.

Remaining revenues come from taxes on such goods as alcohol, cigarettes and fuel. Alaskans do not pay income taxes.

A Stevens loss Tuesday would be quickly felt by the state. Don Mitchell, the author of a Stevens biography, recently told Newsweek magazine that Alaska could turn into a “wasteland” within 24 months if Stevens isn’t reelected.

In an interview with The Washington Independent, Mitchell cited the billions of federal dollars that Stevens has brought to the state to pay for projects helping Native Alaskan populations, for the construction of infrastructure and even for a cost-of-living bonus for federal employees because living expenses in Alaska are higher than in most other states.

“No one of these things, in and of itself, brings on the end of the world as any of us knows it,” said Mitchell. “But this has been cumulative for 30 years. It could go a lot quicker than people think.”

Since Stevens’ indictment was made public in August, polls have showed some nervousness among voters about abandoning their federal delegation all at once. Support for Stevens initially dropped, but it has rallied over the past few weeks.

By contrast, support for the state’s lone congressman, Don Young, who has his own legal troubles, has plummeted. Young has spent about $1 million in legal fees in the past year, according to his latest House financial disclosure forms. The FBI is investigating his ties to Veco as well.

“As we moved into this political season, there was kind of a subconscious feeling going on that people were considering seniority,” said prominent Anchorage pollster Ivan Moore.

Leaders of the Alaska GOP, including fellow Sen. Lisa Murkowski, have urged Stevens to stay in the race despite calls from many Republicans, including Sen. John McCain and his running-mate, Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin, for him to bow out.

The state Republican Party cannot put a new candidate on the ballot in time for Tuesday’s election. So if Stevens wins and then resigns from the Senate, the state would hold a special election to fill the vacancy.

Haycox said that Alaskans who still support Stevens, despite his conviction, say they are comfortable with him because the charges were insignificant. “Most people regard the charges as fairly technical,” Haycox said. “They don’t think this is an individual who set out to lie, who deliberately set out to obscure the truth and deliberately set out to use his position to see what he could get.”

In September, Claude Morris, a long-time neighbor of Stevens in Girdwood, told me that he would support the senator “no matter what.”

When I asked him by phone Wednesday if he has changed his mind, Morris said the verdict led him to “still feel the same way.”

“Mostly it is a fabricated deal from the Democrats, and I don’t have much faith in our judicial system anymore,” Morris said from his home. “This should have been done up here, where everybody was and all the actors in the scenario were. They kept it in Washington because they knew they could get him convicted down there.”

Morris, 82, a retired oil field project manager and gunsmith, says he has seen the renovations on Stevens’ house. He said it was a “haphazard” job worked on sporadically. As such, he said it was understandable that Stevens didn’t know that he hadn’t paid all the bills for the job.

Less devoted Stevens fans might be wavering. But no one can say for sure until after Tuesday.

“I don’t think it will be close in the end,” Moore said. “But as you know, weirder things have happened in Alaska.”