We’re still days away from knowing who won key midterm races in Alaska. Election officials plan to release more votes Monday and Tuesday, as high-profile congressional and gubernatorial elections remain uncalled.
In the meantime, however, there is a lot of data to look at.
The Division of Elections released a large file early Wednesday morning known as the “Report of Votes Cast,” containing data from the approximately 204,000 ballots scanned so far.
This is an incomplete sample of the overall vote. The version released Wednesday does not include ballots from rural and remote precincts that are manually counting their votes on Election Day, nor what is expected to represent tens of thousands of remaining early and absentee votes expected to be counted next week.
This means that it is difficult to extrapolate election results: newly counted votes could have a significant impact on the ultimate winner of each race.
But the data, despite its limitations, contains some interesting stories. Here are a few.
Sen. Dan Sullivan’s namesake challenger got most of his support from left-leaning Alaskans.
There is a strong overlap of support for Democratic U.S. Senate candidate Mary Peltola and Daniel J. Sullivan Jr. of Petersburg. Nearly 30,000 Peltola voters placed him second. In contrast, only about 3,000 of Republican Sen. Dan Sullivan’s voters placed him second.
Before the election, Republicans, including President Trump, accused the runner-up Sullivan of running to confuse Alaskans, siphon votes away from the senator and boost Peltola’s chances. A New York Times investigation found that Democrats were involved in efforts to recruit St. Petersburg’s Sullivan, although the Peltola campaign denies any involvement.
In fact, there are signs of “mild confusion” in the voting data, said Charles Stewart, a political science professor who directs the MIT Election Lab. Only about 16 percent of his voters ranked the senator second.
But about twice as many people voted just for the St. Petersburg Sullivan. And just over a quarter of Petersburg Sullivan’s supporters ranked Peltola second, suggesting that some voters saw the two as allied “co-partisans,” Stewart said.
“Most of the time it seems like Dan Sullivan Jr. supporters (of St. Petersburg) are protest voters in one way or another,” Stewart said. “Simply unable to give the Democrat a first place finish, or unwilling to give any of the candidates a vote, but still wanting to express an opinion on the election.”
Some 70 voters – or 0.03% of the ballots scanned so far – attempted to put the two Dan Sullivans first. These are invalid “overvotes” and will not be counted.
The Republicans’ “classify red” message has caught on, but it may not be enough
With three Republicans facing just one Democrat in the gubernatorial race, Republican candidates have urged their voters to rank all three in hopes of defeating Jonathan Kreiss-Tomkins.
Of the 204,000 ballots analyzed so far, just over half — or about 103,000 — have a Republican ranked first.
Of those, about half – 56% – ranked all three candidates. About a third chose one candidate and did not rank any others.
Wilson voters were most likely to rank all three Republicans in the governor’s race: 59% of Wilson-first voters ranked all three, compared to 51% of Bronson voters and 52% of Taylor voters.
This proves that voters listen when candidates tell them to rank themselves, said Burke Croft, who works with data at progressive consulting firm Ship Creek Group. How much of a difference this may make to candidates, however, remains to be seen.
“We don’t know the upper and lower bounds of that yet,” Croft said.
The Associated Press has not yet called the race, but at least so far, there aren’t enough Republican voters to beat Kreiss-Tomkins.
Voters rank themselves unpredictably
Since each ballot is represented in the Statement of Votes Cast, it is possible to examine each voter’s ballots in detail. (The file does not identify voters – the Alaska Constitution, like all state constitutions, guarantees a secret ballot.)
Most voters follow familiar patterns. It would make sense for a voter who ranked Republican Gerald Heikes, a conservative candidate supported by Democratic groups, to place Sen. Sullivan second. And about half of Heikes voters listed the senator on their ballot.
But some did not follow partisan logic. A Willow voter ranked Heikes first, Peltola second and the senator third.
Supporters of ranked choice repeal were more likely to place in the governor’s race
An interesting feature of the Cast Vote Record is that it allows comparisons across races because each data point represents an individual ballot. This allows results to be compared between races.
And there’s an interesting trend in the data about voters favoring repeal of ranked-choice voting, open primaries, and some campaign finance rules. In the gubernatorial race, 58% of repeal supporters ranked three or more candidates, compared to 22% of voters who favored retaining ranked-choice voting.
There is, however, a simple way to understand this: Repeal supporters overwhelmingly ranked a Republican first in the gubernatorial race, and there were two other Republicans in the rankings race.
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