Mid-Term Favorites: The Murkowski Write-In (2010)

This Day in Esoteric Political History

Jody Avirgan & Radiotopia

History

4.6 • 982 Ratings

🗓️ 13 October 2022

⏱️ 15 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

In the run-up to the November election, we’re taking on and revisiting some of our favorite mid-term related topics. Today, we revisit an episode from 2021.

In 2010, Alaskan Senator Lisa Murkowski prevailed in her re-election effort — one in which she was forced to mount a write-in campaign after losing the primary.

Jody, Niki, and Kellie discuss how hard it is to get a successful write-in campaign going, and what the Murkowski story says about the way in which parties and voters can moderate themselves.

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Our team: Jacob Feldman, Researcher/Producer; Brittani Brown, Producer; Khawla Nakua, Transcripts; music by Teen Daze and Blue Dot Sessions; Audrey Mardavich is our Executive Producer at Radiotopia

Transcript

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0:00.0	Hey everyone Jody Abergan here.
0:01.7	It is October of an even-numbered year,
0:04.3	which means that our minds turn to the election
0:07.3	in early November.
0:08.5	All this month, we are going to be doing special episodes,
0:10.8	still about history, but ones that feel like they might
0:13.3	speak to the run-up to this year's very important election. This week we're going
0:17.9	to re-air a few of our favorites and then we're going to do special theme weeks
0:21.1	on polling, referendums, midterm elections, right up to election day.
0:25.7	So that's the plan. Happy October.
0:28.2	Here we go with one of our favorite midterm related stories from the archives.
0:32.6	Hello and welcome to this day in esoteric political history from Radiotopia.
0:39.2	My name is Jody Avergan.
0:40.9	This day, November 16, 2010, 14 days after the 2010 election day, Alaska's
0:49.9	Republican Senator Lisa Murkowski finally surpassed fellow Republican
0:54.4	Joe Miller in the vote count in their bid for the Senate seat. Okay, that's fine
0:59.1	or a senator wins re-election. It's a close race that doesn't seem that special
1:02.4	but the very weird thing about
1:04.4	Murkowski's win, which she ended up winning by just about 1500 votes, is that she was not on the
1:10.3	ballot. Murkowski had lost the primary and decided to launch a
1:14.5	write-in campaign in the general election. So some 92,000 people did indeed write-in
1:20.8	Murkowski's name and she was re-elected. It was the first right in Senate
	...

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