Forrest A. Nabors is assistant professor of political science at the University of Alaska in Anchorage.

Democrats might long remember 2014 as the year when Sarah Palin won a place in their hearts. Four years ago, an endorsement by the former governor and vice-presidential contender vaulted Joe Miller from obscurity to Republican primary winner in the U.S. Senate race in Alaska, defeating incumbent Republican Sen. Lisa Murkowski. In the general election, Murkowski ran again as a write-in Republican, and won. Miller sank between the primary and the general election, helped along to his demise by eagerly reported news accounts of improprieties, including his security detail’s handcuffing of a journalist.

Although Miller narrowly lost his bid for the Senate, he parlayed Palin’s endorsement into national name recognition, what he calls a “top-ranked” Internet news site (“Restoring Liberty” at joemiller.us) and a small but intensely loyal local following—the kinds of people who are “looking for the Ted Cruzes, the Mike Lees, the Rand Pauls.” Miller is running again this year in the Republican primary for the right to oppose incumbent Sen. Mark Begich—one of the most endangered Democrats of the 2014 midterms and a key takedown target for Republicans.


Yet by an unusual arrangement of events, Miller is actually poised to seal Begich’s re-election, protect the Democrats’ Senate majority and prevent the repeal of Obamacare. And it’s all thanks to Sarah Palin.

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By most logic, Begich ought to be in trouble. After all, he first became a senator in 2008 due to a stroke of fate. Ted Stevens, the Republican incumbent, had been indicted and convicted of graft, yet Begich still only won in a squeaker, by just 4,000 votes. In 2012, Mitt Romney took the deep-red state by 15 percentage points—and President Barack Obama has only become less popular since then.

The GOP primary, which will be held in August, is still very much in flux. Several polls show that the two chief Republican candidates, Dan Sullivan and Mead Treadwell, are ahead of Miller and are breathing down Begich’s neck.

Treadwell, the current lieutenant governor, has an accomplished career in business and government and degrees from Yale and Harvard. Sullivan, along with stints as Alaska’s attorney general and as a state national resources commissioner, previously served as U.S. assistant secretary of state and as an officer in the Marine Corps. His degrees are from Harvard and Georgetown.

Begich’s main achievement, by contrast, apart from his present office, was serving as mayor of Anchorage. He has no educational credentials beyond his high-school diploma, thus earning the dubious distinction of being the only U.S. senator who didn’t go to college.

But resumes don’t win political contests. Begich might not have fancy degrees under his belt, but he learned electoral politics for years in the unforgiving hard-knocks school of local government. As a Democrat in deep-red Alaska, he has had to hone his political fighting skills to gain and hold office. His opponents are much less experienced. Treadwell is a veteran of only one campaign, which was successful, but was hardly as challenging as an average year in Begich’s long Alaskan political career. Sullivan has never run for office before now.

The Begich campaign’s messaging is timely, disciplined and clever. Take, for example, his attacks on Treadwell, who hews more closely to the policy positions of George W. Bush on national security than to the Republican Party’s libertarian faction, which is particularly strong in Alaska. When Treadwell announced his candidacy in June 2013, Begich ran ads reminding Alaskans that he disliked the Patriot Act and opposed President Obama’s surveillance state. He has also smartly distanced himself from the president on gun control, another hot-button issue in Alaska, and Obamacare, where his line has been “let’s fix what is wrong, and keep what is right.” When asked in January if he’d want Obama to hit the trail on his behalf, Begich said, “I don’t need him campaigning for me, I need him to change some of his policies.”

Two recent speeches at the University of Alaska further underscore why nobody should discount Begich’s chances.

Treadwell, who spoke on Nov. 7, showed a strong command of policy. He knows his principles well and demonstrates a deep and broad mind. He is equally comfortable in the company of intellectuals, business leaders or officers of government, and is widely recognized as a good man. In another age, he would be seen as a genuine statesmen. But glad-handing and kissing babies are clearly not his strong suit. His speech—a thoughtful address on Alaska’s potential and its struggle with federal government interference—didn’t do much to rouse the crowd.

Begich spoke on Feb. 3, ostensibly on the subject of new business opportunities in technology. As he was being introduced, his darting eyes and scratches on a handful of paper suggested that he was crafting his speech at that very moment, which became evident when he reached the lectern. His dilatory thoughts connected poorly to one other, but all the while, he was scanning his audience for reactions. By the end of the evening—though it would be impossible to give a summary of his wandering speech—the audience was eating out of his hand. Begich also managed to work in good-natured, but well-calculated shots at his Republican competitors, which, to the careful listener, was his real purpose. He never attacked them by name, but the subtle jibes were everywhere. This man knows how to work a room.

If the Alaska public sees Treadwell as a good man, reliable but wonkish, they might view Sullivan as a cipher. There is no questioning his impressive resume, but he has yet to show that he can compete and define himself in the political arena. Worse, with his Midwestern roots and his long experience in Washington (while living, his detractors point out, in a “swanky D.C. suburb”), he’s easily portrayed an outsider—and Alaskans are very particular about their candidates’ length of residency here. Even Sullivan’s fundraising success is being turned against him: A good portion of his donor base comes from Ohio, his native state, and his opponents are using this to affix the carpetbagger label and make it stick. “I’ve got a jar of mayonnaise in my refrigerator that’s been there longer than Dan Sullivan’s been in Alaska,” Treadwell said last fall, to which Sullivan responded, “I learned something new today—not to eat any of Mead Treadwell’s sandwiches.”

Then there is Miller, who was raised in Kansas but says he “followed his heart to the Last Frontier” 20 years ago. His candidacy was easy to dismiss last year. In an automated 2013 poll by Harper, a GOP polling firm, Miller was the only potential Senate candidate more Alaskan Republicans viewed unfavorably than favorably—a tectonic shift since his Republican primary victory in 2010. There was no way, it seemed, that he could win it again.

But something else is going on that should delight national Democrats and unnerve national Republicans.

Until this past year, when new chairman Peter Goldberg established calm, fratricidal bickering between Tea Party-style libertarians and everyone else has bedeviled the Alaskan Republican Party. Several chairmen have been ousted since 2010, and at one point the party leadership resembled the medieval papacy, with multiple claimants and no clear pope. The wounds from those intra-party fights are still fresh, and it’s not hard to imagine Miller launching an independent bid should he lose the primary, taking many of his Tea Party supporters with him. After all, “there’s a reason why the party bosses hate him and Washington fears him,” says the voiceover in one campaign ad. In the same clip, Miller says he is sending a message to “big-taxing, big-spending elites that the party is over.”

For the GOP, Miller’s run as an independent would likely be a disaster. In February, a Hays poll hypothetically pitted Begich, Sullivan and an independent Miller against each other (omitting Treadwell—a decision his campaign protested for “ignor[ing] the space-time continuum”), and found 45 percent for Begich, 33 percent for Sullivan and 10 percent for Miller—just enough to prevent a Republican victory.

Miller has been cagey about his plans. When prompted at a University of Alaska speaking event on April 10, he was careful neither to confirm nor deny a possible independent run in November, if he does not win the primary. But he did say that a vote for Treadwell or Sullivan would amount to a vote for Begich, and he did refer to good and “evil” Republicans.

And 10 percent might even be too low, as Miller recently suggested to me. Yes, his 2010 run against Murkowski ended in disaster. But he’s learned a few lessons since then, emerging with better political skills than either Treadwell or Sullivan. He is energetic, clear about his message and engaging in front of an audience. He jokes about the allegations of his misconduct that crippled his campaign in 2010, claiming that he doesn’t need security since his eight children “are all martial arts experts.” He might well persuade a significant portion of the Alaska electorate that it was all much ado about nothing.

Alaskans have not yet heard from Sarah Palin about Joe Miller’s candidacy this year, which is viable only because she endorsed him in 2010. But Miller, once left for dead on the political battlefield, is back in a big way. Incredible as it may seem, that endorsement is likely to haunt Republicans for years to come.

Correction: A previous version of this article said that in 2010 Senator Murkowski ran as a write-in independent, when in fact she ran as a write-in Republican.

Miller moved to Alaska 20 years ago, not 16, as first stated.