Alaska Primary Update: Lisa Murkowski Leads Kelly Tshibaka at Half Way

Alaska's Republican Senator Lisa Murkowski and Trump-endorsed fellow Republican Kelly Tshibaka have advanced to the general election from Tuesday's primary, according to preliminary results.

While the votes are still being tabulated, the two GOP candidates have clearly earned two of the slots in the race that will see only the top four vote-getters among a total of 19 candidates in Alaska's open primaries advance to the November election.

Murkowski leads ahead of Tshibaka with 42.7 percent of the vote against the former commissioner in Alaska's Department of Administration's 41.4 percent, according to the latest results from the Associated Press.

The two other slots have not yet been decided, but at the moment it appears that Democrat Patricia Chesbro has the next highest number of votes, at 6.2 percent.

It's the first time that the state is implementing the nonpartisan pick-one primary election system voters approved in the 2020 general election.

This new system likely favored Murkowski, a moderate Republican who voted to convict former President Donald Trump in his impeachment trial and who has frustrated conservative Republicans for years. In contrast, her rival Tshibaka has rallied with Trump and has the support of Alaska's GOP.

In a traditional GOP primary, Murkowski might have been defeated by Trump's pick Tshibaka, like Liz Cheney's loss to Trump's revenge candidate Harriet Hageman in Wyoming—a defeat that would have been unthinkable only two years ago, when Cheney received 73.5 percent of the vote at the GOP primary.

But Alaska is a very different state to Wyoming: while Trump only had a 10-point advantage over Joe Biden in 2020, 70 percent of Wyoming's voters supported the former president.

The fact that Murkowski seems likely to finish first in Tuesday's primaries could be a sign that she might be the voters' favorite in the fall.

Earlier on Tuesday, Murkowski told reporters that "what matters is winning in November," while Tshibaka has described the results of the primary as "the first step in breaking the Murkowski monarchy's grip on Alaska."

Murkowski has held Alaska's Senate seat since 2002, taking over from her father Frank Murkowski who had held it since 1981.

The general election in November will be conducted by ranked-choice voting.

Update, 8/17/2022 4:45 a.m. EDT: This article has been updated to offer more context on the story.