One of the last moderates in the Senate – Deseret News

Life as a moderate at the highest levels of American politics can be simultaneously frenzied and monotonous. For example: One day in early June, Republican Sen. Lisa Murkowski of Alaska was one of several senators who questioned FBI Director Christopher Wray during a sparsely attended, two-hour meeting of the Senate Appropriations Subcommittee on Commerce, Justice, and Science. Wray was on Capitol Hill making the case that Congress should approve his requested budget of $11 billion for 2025, an expansion of $660 million — making this an opportune time for lawmakers to question the director on the federal law enforcement issues they care about most.

Several Democrats asked Wray about enhanced FBI background checks on gun purchasers and large-scale attacks on America’s infrastructure the FBI says it foiled over the last few years, both of which are touted accomplishments of the Biden-Harris administration. Several Republicans asked about the threat of terrorism, the influence of Mexican drug cartels, and the integrity of the upcoming presidential election — all issues key to former President Donald Trump’s current campaign.

Murkowski, arguably America’s highest-ranking moderate, went in a different direction. Wearing a pink cardigan over a black, flower-print dress, the 67-year-old Murkowski asked Wray about the disproportionate number of fentanyl-overdose deaths in her home state of Alaska and why overdose death rates have dropped in other states but not in hers. Then she asked about the high number of murdered and missing Indigenous people.

“We’ve got one field office in Alaska for the FBI. We have two satellite offices,” Murkowski said. “Do you think that is sufficient resourcing to cover a state that you have acknowledged is one-fifth the size of the rest of the country?”

Wray said he understood the specific challenges of a state as vast as Alaska. “We clearly need more resources,” he told Murkowski.

When the director finished and it was another senator’s turn to ask questions, Murkowski quickly scooped up her papers and grabbed the heavy wooden nameplate at the front of her spot on the dais, then hustled out of the room and down the hall to another hearing happening at the same time. This was the Senate Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions Committee’s meeting on reproductive health care — a packed proceeding focused on abortion access since the U.S. Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade.

Lawmakers listened to testimony from both sides of the issue. When it was the senators’ turn to talk, it went — well, it went about like you’d expect, divided down party lines. Democrats talked about the consequences of closing women’s health care clinics. Republicans showed illustrations of a fetus developing in the womb. Then it was Murkowski’s turn.

“A decision to terminate a pregnancy is deeply, deeply personal. It’s complicated,” she said. “I think the choice to have an abortion should ultimately be in the hands of the individual, not the government. I also believe it is reasonable not to require those who are firmly opposed to abortion to support it with their tax dollars.”

If you were watching these hearings and didn’t know each senator’s political affiliation, they wouldn’t be hard to figure out — except Lisa Murkowski. That’s because Murkowski’s views don’t fall into prefabricated political party-line boxes. She’s been a Republican her entire life, supporting defense spending, tight fiscal policies and Second Amendment freedoms. She voted to put Amy Coney Barrett on the U.S. Supreme Court knowing it could result in overturning Roe v. Wade.

But Murkowski is also pro abortion-rights. She’s a staunch defender of quality public education — and was once a PTA president. She voted in favor of keeping Obamacare. The Heritage Foundation, the think tank responsible for the controversial Project 2025 policy proposals, rates every senator every session. The average Senate Republican score for the current session is 78%. The group gave Murkowski a 32%.

Murkowski also regularly collaborates and socializes with colleagues across the political spectrum. But her most obvious defiance of party dogma has been her repeated criticism of Trump. She’s called him “spiteful” and “flawed to his core.” She said she wouldn’t vote for him in 2016 or 2020 and has already said she won’t vote for him in 2024. She was one of only seven Senate Republicans who voted to convict Trump during his 2021 impeachment trial, saying at the time that she’d seen “clear evidence that he attempted to overturn the 2020 election after losing it.” And she’s the only one of those seven who’s faced voters since then.

Trump has had plenty of high-profile Republican critics through the years, including former Sen. Jeff Flake, former Sen. Rob Portman, former Rep. Liz Cheney and Sen. Mitt Romney. But over time, just about every critic on the Republican side of the aisle has either decided to leave politics or voters have decided that for them. Trump himself repeatedly promised to campaign against Murkowski in 2022, the same way he campaigned against Cheney. But unlike Cheney, Murkowski was reelected that November, with just under 54% of the vote.

So I wanted to know: What makes Murkowski so different?

The senator, who is famously resistant to national media coverage and seems to especially dislike questions related to Trump, declined my requests for an interview for this story. But after talking to more than two dozen people who’ve worked with her or covered her through her 22 years in the Senate, it’s clear the answer has something to do with both the unique space Lisa Murkowski occupies in the modern political landscape and the unique place she represents.

Trump has had plenty of high-profile Republican critics through the years. But over time, just about every one of them has either decided to leave politics or voters have decided that for them.

Ivan Moore grew up with English parents and lived in both England and Singapore before meeting an Alaskan woman and moving to Anchorage in the mid-1980s. He’s lived in the state known as “The Last Frontier” ever since. In 1996, he started a market research company that does polling about all manner of political and nonpolitical topics. He’s tall, bald and gregarious, and after more than three decades in Alaska, he’s become the most prominent, trusted pollster in the state. (Alaskans mostly forgive his funny accent.)

When I asked him how Murkowski has managed to survive, even thrive, as a moderate, Trump-criticizing Republican, despite our intensely divided times, he offered some polling numbers from late July. Across the political spectrum, 49% of Alaskans have a positive view of Murkowski and 41% have a negative view.

But then Moore broke down the results by political ideology. Among self-described conservatives, a mere 27% have a positive view of Murkowski, and 69% have a negative view. Among moderates, 55% have a positive view. Among progressives? A whopping 72% positive and only 21% negative. So, while many Republicans might not vote for her, she more than makes up for it with independents and Democrats. Moore told me she’s almost certainly the only Republican officeholder in the country who’s more popular among progressives than conservatives.

I asked Moore if Murkowski would have any chance of winning a Republican primary.

“No, none,” he said. “It’s categorically zero.”

But Alaska is a special place. In the summer, the sun barely sets, and in the winter it barely rises. The state has more coastline than the rest of the country combined. It has more than 50 active volcanoes. And the official state sport is — you guessed it — dog mushing. Alaska also has a unique makeup of voters. While Republicans control the state, and Alaska has gone red in every presidential election since 1964, the majority of Alaskan voters are actually independent. The state also has a different voting system. In the 2020 election, the state’s voters approved an initiative to become only the second state that employs ranked choice voting. (The other one is Maine.)

Instead of a primary, voters rank their favored candidates and the top four end up on the ballot in November. Murkowski’s main opposition came not from the Democrats, but from the Trump-endorsed Republican, Kelly Tshibaka, who ended up with 46.3% of the vote in the November 2022 general election.

This means Murkowski has survived by being truly bipartisan in her approach to both campaigning and governing — and that she’s had to deliver for the people of Alaska.

“There are those who come to Washington to make noise, and there are those who come to Washington to make law. Lisa Murkowski, without question, falls into the latter category,” Romney told me. “As our country was in the throes of Covid, Lisa invited a group of us over to her home for dinner and we left having come up with the framework for the bipartisan COVID-19 relief act of 2020 — breaking months of congressional logjam to deliver emergency relief to Americans. Infrastructure modernization, the Bipartisan Safer Communities Act, the Respect for Marriage Act, Electoral Count Act reforms and more — Lisa has been a lynchpin of nearly every major bipartisan effort in Congress over these last few years.”

Jim Lottsfeldt, an Alaskan political consultant who’s worked with politicians of both parties, agrees. Lottsfeldt has known Murkowski and her family for 45 years.

“I don’t think you could take her to Alabama and make her a U.S. senator and have her vote the same way and have the same effect,” Lottsfeldt told me. “I think she gets to do this because it’s Alaska. … Back home we may be on some different teams, Republican versus Democrat versus undeclared. But when it comes to doing the job at the federal level, we’re just on Team Alaska.”

Moore, the pollster, pointed out that for her first 15 years in the Senate, Murkowski had a smooth bell curve of support in the state: She was popular with moderates of both parties. I asked when that changed. Moore looked at me, raised his hand, and gave me a thumbs down.

While Sen. John McCain was the most famous Republican to cross party lines in the 2017 vote to repeal Obamacare — flashing the thumbs down heard from coast to coast — Murkowski also voted to save the health care bill that day. In fact, plenty of people in Alaska believe Murkowski actually persuaded McCain to vote the way he did.

“Lisa convinced McCain to go with his conscience,” Lottsfeldt told me. “McCain gets all the credit for saving Obamacare, but it wouldn’t have happened without Lisa Murkowski.”

After that vote, the poll numbers in Alaska shifted.

“Republicans here never forgot,” Moore told me. “But neither did anyone else.”

Every day, Lisa Murkowski wears a gold bangle bracelet on her left wrist. It bears the words “Fill it in. Write it in.” The bracelet was a gift from her husband, a reminder of the 2010 election. That year, Murkowski, who’d been in the Senate for eight years at the time, lost her Republican primary race. It could have been the end of her political career.

The same thing had happened to Lisa’s father, Frank Murkowski, a few years before, when he lost the 2006 Republican gubernatorial primary to an upstart conservative named Sarah Palin, a herald of the anti-intellectual era we’re living through now. From 1981 to 2002, Frank held the U.S. Senate seat Murkowski now holds. In 2002, Frank won a race for governor and immediately appointed his youngest daughter, Lisa, to fill his open Senate seat. She was 45 at the time, a former district attorney in Anchorage who served two terms in the Alaska House and had recently been elected the Republican majority leader.

“Above all, I felt the person I appoint to the remaining two years of my term should be someone who shares my basic philosophy, my values,’’ the newly elected governor told reporters at the time.

Less than two years later, in 2004, Lisa Murkowski ran to defend her seat against former Gov. Tony Knowles, a Democrat. Though the term didn’t exist at the time, Murkowski was viewed as the state’s ultimate nepo baby. But she scraped by, winning reelection by three percentage points — heavily aided by the fact that it was a presidential election year and George W. Bush carried Alaska by 26 percentage points.

By Murkowski’s next time on the ballot, though, in 2010, Palin’s failed vice-presidential run had morphed into a wider movement known as the Tea Party. The Palin-endorsed Tea Party candidate, Joe Miller, defeated Murkowski in the Republican primary, but unlike her father, Lisa didn’t give up. Instead, she mounted the largest write-in campaign the country has ever seen. Murkowski crisscrossed the state, often traveling in small prop planes, talking to any group willing to listen. She created a coalition that included moderates, progressives, Native Alaskans, independent women and rural Alaskans who were grateful she’d brought home so much federal money for highways. She needed to educate the public on not only why they should send her back to the Senate, but also how.

“There are those who come to Washington to make noise, and there are those who come to Washington to make law. Lisa Murkowski, without question, falls into the latter category.”

Murkowski voters had to fill in the circle for write-in and spell her name. Thanks to her time in office and her father’s long career, her name was familiar to the public — but it still isn’t exactly easy to spell. So the campaign handed out thousands of plastic wristbands, similar to the Livestrong wristbands that had been popular earlier that decade, each printed with Murkowski’s name along with instructions on how to cast a write-in vote: “Fill it in. Write it in.”

“It’s only nine letters,” she’d tell people. “You can do this.”

Election laws forbid voters from wearing campaign insignia into polling places, so Murkowski’s people encouraged supporters to turn the wristbands inside out, leaving nothing showing. Other voters wrote her name on their hands and arms or got temporary tattoos to ensure they’d spell it correctly when it mattered most.

Murkowski was only the second person in history elected to the U.S. Senate through a write-in campaign. (The other was Sen. Strom Thurmond, who ran as a segregationist in South Carolina after the primary winner died before the general election.)

After her victory, Murkowski’s husband, Verne Martell, had one of those plastic wristbands turned into a gold bangle, a constant reminder that she was able to do something nobody else in modern politics could. She says she’s worn it every day since.

Murkowski didn’t endorse Trump in 2016, even though she was also on the ballot. When the “Access Hollywood” tape came out that October, in which Trump was heard bragging about grabbing women, Murkowski tweeted: “I cannot and will not support Donald Trump for president. He has forfeited the right to be our party’s nominee.”

Murkowski won reelection that year — against Joe Miller again, this time running as a Libertarian — by more than 15 percentage points. Trump won the state by about the same margin.

The age of Trump was different. And it wasn’t always contentious. With Republican control of the presidency and both houses, Murkowski achieved a decadeslong goal of pro-petroleum powers in Alaska. Murkowski quietly lobbied party leaders to open long-protected regions, specifically on the coastal plain of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, or ANWR, to drilling, something state legislators have called the “Holy Grail” for Alaskan politicians.

While the idea of drilling in an Arctic refuge is quite controversial in the lower 48, there are very few elected officials in Alaska who oppose it. Opening up drilling could add tens of thousands of well-paying jobs to the state.

At a celebration of the bill’s passing, Murkowski reportedly told Trump: “This is a bright day for America, so we thank you for that!” At one point, Murkowski also tweeted out a photograph of a Washington Post article Trump had sent her about a wilderness region where she hoped to build a road.

“Lisa,” Trump had written on the clip. “We will get it done.”

According to the political data site FiveThirtyEight, Murkowski voted in line with Trump’s positions roughly 73% of the time, among the very lowest Republicans, but far from a dissenter. Interestingly, if you search her name and the word pragmatic during this time, there are dozens of news stories and videos.

Murkowski has made it clear that she believes climate change is real and already affecting Alaska. (This year was one of the worst in memory for floods and mudslides.) Plenty of people would call this hypocrisy. But again, she doesn’t seem driven by fealty to any single ideology.

“Her motivation,” Romney told me, “has been the needs and well-being of Alaskans. With Lisa in Washington, Alaskans have a fierce advocate, a woman of high character and a tireless champion.”

But of course, Murkowski was also critical of Trump long after most of her Republican colleagues quelled public dissidence. When Trump tweeted in 2017 that “Morning Joe” co-host Mika Brzezinski had been at Mar-a-Lago and that she was “bleeding badly from a face-lift,” Murkowski tweeted back: “Stop it! The Presidential platform should be used for more than bringing people down.”

A year after evoking the ire of MAGA-world for voting against the repeal of Obamacare, Murkowski lit the fires again during the confirmation hearings of Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh. Knowing Murkowski might be swayed, the American Civil Liberties Union paid for more than 100 Alaskan women to fly to Washington, D.C., and share their experiences of sexual assault with the senator.

Lottsfeldt, the campaign consultant and longtime friend of Murkowski’s, helped arrange the meetings. He says the women were divided into groups of roughly 20 to fit in the senator’s office.

“Lisa must have spent an hour and a half with each group of 20 women,” Lottsfeldt told me. He says he talked to the women afterward. “They all felt heard. They didn’t know how she was going to vote, but they all felt like she heard them.”

In the end, Murkowski effectively voted “no” to Kavanaugh’s nomination, though ever the student of procedure, she technically voted “present,” taking advantage of an arcane Senate policy that paired with another Republican senator whose daughter was getting married the day of the vote.

In a statement from the Senate floor, Murkowski explained that the Kavanaugh vote had been the hardest of her career, but that she ultimately thought he was “not the right man for the court.”

People who’ve worked with her say that Murkowski has deep affection for procedure and decorum. She’s also something of a policy wonk, known to send her friends and family photos of paperwork and legislation she’s reading and considering.

State Rep. Zack Fields is one of a handful of Democrats in the state Legislature who endorsed Murkowski in her 2022 reelection campaign. “What surprises people who haven’t yet gotten to know Lisa Murkowski is her incredible depth of knowledge on a very wide range of public policies,” Fields told me. He recalled a meeting with Murkowski and a group of officials in Anchorage about how money from the Cares Act was being used to put people to work on public lands and public-use cabins and trails.

“Local officials were using money that was appropriated by Lisa Murkowski,” Fields told me. “But she knew the trail, the federal fund source, the local government decision that made the project happen. She knew how many unemployed people were being put to work during a period of high unemployment.”

The Trump years culminated in his second impeachment, when Murkowski voted to convict him — even though she knew there weren’t enough other Republicans willing to cross party lines and ban him from running for office again.

“His course of conduct amounts to incitement of insurrection,” she said in a statement at the time.

“When she had the courage to stand up for the integrity of our democratic system of government,” Fields told me, “that’s when I thought: I will always support this person because democracy itself is what’s at stake.”

The Republican Party in Alaska strongly disagreed. Republican officials there then voted to censure Murkowski. After she won reelection anyway in 2022, several Republicans have promised to overturn ranked choice voting and return to the old, divided primary system.

“When she had the courage to stand up for the integrity of our democratic system of government, that’s when I thought: I will always support this person because democracy itself is what’s at stake.”

So why is Lisa Murkowski still a Republican? Over the last few years, two other senators, Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema, have left the Democratic Party and officially become independents. So why hasn’t Murkowski done the same thing?

Our nation is obsessed with party affiliation, so of course she’s been asked if she’d consider leaving the Republican Party many, many times over the last few years. Usually she has a quick, smart quip, like when a CNN reporter asked earlier this year if she’d ever consider becoming an independent.

“Oh, I think I’m very independent minded,” Murkowski said. “I just regret that our party is seemingly becoming a party of Donald Trump.”

James Brooks is a longtime political reporter in Alaska. He writes for the Alaska Beacon now, but also covered Murkowski for the Anchorage Daily News. A few days after the Jan. 6, 2021, riot at the Capitol, he flew to Washington to interview Murkowski — and her anger at Trump was palpable.

“He’s not going to appear at the inauguration,” Murkowski said of Trump. “He hasn’t been focused on what is going on with Covid. He’s either been golfing or he’s been inside the Oval Office fuming and throwing every single person who has been loyal and faithful to him under the bus, starting with the vice president. He doesn’t want to stay there. He only wants to stay there for the title. He only wants to stay there for his ego. He needs to get out.”

Brooks asked her if she was considering leaving the Republican Party.

“Well, you know, there’s a lot of people who actually thought that I did that in 2010,” Murkowski told him. “I didn’t have any reason to leave my party in 2010. I was a Republican who ran a write-in campaign and I was successful. But I will tell you, if the Republican Party has become nothing more than the party of Trump, I sincerely question whether this is the party for me.”

Right now, Murkowski believes that caucusing with Republicans best helps her achieve her goals, but she’s consistently left open the possibility that this won’t always be the case.

“She’s from a long-term political family and she’s pragmatic,” Brooks told me. “It’s state above party for her.”

She’s frequently talked about how much she enjoys the nights when all the women in the Senate get together for dinner. No staff, no agendas, no note-taking. Just talking and getting to know colleagues of all political stripes, including Kamala Harris.

Ivan Moore, the pollster, has his own completely unsubstantiated — but also totally reasonable — theory about why Murkowski maintains the capital R next to her name.

“As long as Daddy’s still alive, she ain’t switching,” Moore told me, referring to the 91-year-old Frank Murkowski, a lifelong Republican. “I think Daddy would be very disappointed.”

At the moment, it doesn’t matter too much which party she affiliates with. She won’t be up for reelection again until 2028, another presidential election year. Murkowski will be 70 then, practically adolescent by the modern standards of the Senate. Still, it sounds like most people around her wouldn’t be surprised if she chooses to retire.

“She has a full life here in Alaska,” Brooks, the political reporter, told me.

So maybe she’ll hang it up. Or maybe she’ll run again as a Republican and win without much fight, something she’s done a few times throughout her career. Or maybe she’ll switch parties and get on the ballot as a Democrat, knowing she can draw enough votes from across party lines to win. Or maybe she’ll surprise us all yet again, with some new, utterly pragmatic decision.

The truth is nobody knows what Alaska will look like politically by then. Nobody knows what our country will look like. But moderacy like Murkowski’s is something our nation could do again. It’s something we’ve had, not so long ago. There was a time when politicians didn’t exclusively hold their party lines, when they didn’t constantly demonize the people across the aisle. There was a time when it seemed like politicians stood up to their own parties, when they were happy to work with people who weren’t in their party if it meant getting something done for the people back home.

Politics used to be about relationships, about knowing the people you represent and knowing the people you work with. That made it harder to publicly ridicule a colleague. It seems strange to think about now, but politicians used to negotiate and trade and argue for what they thought was best for a majority of their constituents, even when that meant accepting half a loaf and continuing a conversation.

It feels like that’s becoming more and more rare.

So maybe by electing Murkowski, Alaska is a throwback to a different time in America, a time when priorities were different. Maybe the entire state is a nod to a time that has all but passed us by.

Maybe Lisa Murkowski is, too.

This story appears in the September 2024 issue of Deseret Magazine. Learn more about how to subscribe.