While everyone was watching all of the swing state chicanery in the November election, Murkowski’s cronies managed to narrowly sneak through a drastic change in Alaska’s election process in a referendum. Murkowski knows that she is despised by Alaska Republicans, and similar to her 2010 run she likely has a trick up her sleeve to avoid the need to win their votes at all. The new election system has an open all-party primary with the top four advancing to the general election where a ranked choice system is used. Murkowski doesn’t have to get the most votes to win. Instead, she can cozy up to Democrats and Independents to get their second-place votes and hope that enough unstrategic Republicans rank her second over the Democrat. The real Republican, Kelly Tshibaka is a strong candidate but will likely lose because she won’t get 50% of the first-choice votes and will then lose once the second place votes are added. Her only hope is to create an alliance with the Alaska Independence Party candidate John Howe and for them both to tell their voters to rank the Democrat ABOVE Murkowski (there likely won’t be enough Democrats for the Democrat to win from third-place votes) but behind Tshibaka and Howe. Democrats likely already know this. That’s why HR1 includes a special carve-out to help Alaskan Native Americans vote so that more Democrats will vote and will rank Murkowski second. Democrats know that they can only push Joe Manchin so far, so they can just use Lisa Murkowski to pass their agenda instead with 50 votes if they can keep Sinema in check. Murkowski will play along because it will make her more popular with Alaska Democrats. She has no incentive to vote with Republicans because she knows that Alaska Republicans will rightly hate her either way for all of her past terrible votes.