Will Alaskans Welcome Sarah Palin’s Political Comeback?

Greetings from your host Blake Hounshell. Leah Askarinam is off today. We’re joined tonight by our colleague Charles Homans, who writes about Sarah Palin and Alaska’s changing politics.

A decade ago, I caught a ride in a pickup truck on the outskirts of Nome, Alaska, with Bob Hafner, a burly, tattooed gold dredger.

I was working on an article about the boom in reality TV shows celebrating rugged blue-collar jobs, which seemed to be in production in every corner of America’s most rugged state. As Hafner’s truck bounced along the rutted coast road, I asked what he made of it.

He laughed, a little ruefully. “I’m probably partly responsible for it,” he said. “Me and my diving partner, we did that Sarah Palin show.”

“Sarah Palin’s Alaska,” produced by Mark Burnett, had recently run for nine episodes on TLC. Palin was filmed communing with enough commercial fishermen, loggers and bush pilots that the odds of randomly encountering one of them on the road in Nome were probably pretty good.

Later I watched the Nome episode, and sure enough: There was Hafner standing alongside Palin as she admired a gold nugget the size of a fingernail that he and Palin’s brother, Chuck, had sucked up from the seafloor. “That’s neat!” the former governor said.

There was a note of desperation in this strenuous on-screen Alaska-ing, and in Palin’s voice-over declaration during the opening montage that “I love this state like I love my family.”

Four years after the 2008 presidential election and three years after her resignation as governor, the waterfront tourist shops in Valdez hawked “Bailin’ Palin” T-shirts. Only 36 percent of Alaskans viewed her positively, and 61 percent viewed her negatively.

Ivan Moore, a pollster in Anchorage, recalls that when he asked people who viewed her negatively why they felt that way, “the most common response, streaks ahead of the rest, was: ‘She quit. She’s a quitter.’”

Return from the wilderness

The governor’s relationship with her state changed forever with her resignation, which seemed to represent the exchange of Sarah Palin’s Alaska for “Sarah Palin’s Alaska”: a place for a personal brand.

Aside from backing an ultimately unsuccessful challenger to Senator Lisa Murkowski in 2010 (and the same candidate four years later, in the race for the state’s other Senate seat), she was mostly a nonparticipant in Alaska’s affairs. Her political ambitions seemed entirely national, though even these appeared to flag quickly.

Her 2012 presidential campaign ended before it began. Her political action committee still took in millions of dollars, but spent a tiny fraction of the money on candidates or independent expenditures. Her most prominent return to the arena, in 2016, was a stemwinder in service of a politician who would all but supplant her role within the Republican Party. In recent years, she had been in the news most often on account of her libel lawsuit against The New York Times. A jury rejected her claims in February.

So it was a surprise when Palin emerged from a decade in the cable-talking-head wilderness to hint at and, on April 1, announce her candidacy for Alaska’s lone House seat, which had opened up with Don Young’s death in March.

It was more surprising still to see Palin give a lengthy interview to Nathaniel Herz of The Anchorage Daily News, in which she excoriated the “establishment machine” that would oppose her.

“They have a loud voice,” she told Herz. “They hold purse strings. They have the media’s ear. But they do not necessarily reflect the will of the people.”

An Arctic political machine

Republican candidates today frequently denounce a greatly weakened party “establishment,” but the line is more jarring coming from Palin, who in 2006 did fight and beat one of the country’s most entrenched and clubby state-level Republican establishments.

It is a story that has long since grown threadbare from Palin’s own retelling, but if you lived in Alaska, as I did, at the time of Palin’s primary election victory over the incumbent and Alaskan institution Frank Murkowski, it was a genuinely astonishing moment of political transformation.

Alaska in 2006 still possessed something resembling a political machine, which cannily husbanded the state’s all-important relationships with the oil and gas industry and the federal government.

Alaskans did not always love the stalwarts of this mostly Republican machine, but they understood that deposing them would potentially cost the state a great deal, so they kept electing them. Probably only someone like Palin, with her messianic conviction, had a shot at toppling it.

The F.B.I. helped, too, of course, mounting a yearslong investigation of more than half a dozen lawmakers suspected of having taken bribes from the VECO Corporation, an oil-field contractor, that happened to come to a head shortly after Palin’s primary triumph.

Today, Alaskan Republican politics don’t much resemble the hierarchy that Palin tilted against 16 years ago. They look, for better or worse, a lot more like Republican politics everywhere else.

A 48-candidate ballot

Many influential G.O.P. figures in Alaska remain cool to Palin, but over more prosaic matters, like her relative lack of involvement locally over her years as a national celebrity.

“Most serious Republican figures in Alaska, their question is, ‘Where have you been?’” said Suzanne Downing, a former speechwriter for Palin’s lieutenant and successor as governor, Sean Parnell. Downing, who now edits the right-leaning Must Read Alaska blog, added, “She hasn’t lifted a finger for Alaska since she left office.”

Palin’s campaign did not respond to emails and phone calls requesting comment. In an interview with The Associated Press this week, Palin objected to the suggestion that she had left the state behind.

“I’m sorry if that narrative is out there, because it’s inaccurate,” she told The A.P., offering by way of bona fides the fact that she had recently been “shoveling moose poop” in her father’s yard.

Early this month, Downing commissioned a poll of the comically large field for the June primary — the ballot for which, with its 48 candidates, looks like a page from a phone book. She concedes to having been shocked when Palin came out in the lead at 31 percent: five percentage points ahead of her nearest rival, Al Gross, an independent who has in past races been endorsed by the state Democratic Party.

And yet when the pollster asked about respondents’ favorable or unfavorable views of Palin, the numbers — 37 percent to 51 percent — were not much changed from when Ivan Moore asked the same question a decade ago. In fact, Moore told me that Palin’s numbers had not moved appreciably in intermittent polls over the intervening years.

This is unusual: For ordinary politicians, favorability and unfavorability tend to soften as time passes and headlines fade. It’s possible — Moore thinks this — that the longer half-life of Palin’s numbers reflects the depth of the betrayal Alaskans still feel about her resignation.

But her most recent national polling — admittedly nine years old — shows an almost identical breakdown of favorable and unfavorable responses. Which raises another possibility: that Palin’s political celebrity is so all-devouring and all-polarizing that even Alaskans, with their very particular history with Palin, can’t see past it.

Can a much-changed state still surprise?

Downing brought up another possible explanation. Alaska, she reminded me, is extraordinarily transient: 12.8 percent of the population turns over in an average year, more than in any other state. Many of the Alaskans taking the measure of Palin today were not Alaskans when she was in office.

They are, in other words, less familiar with Sarah Palin’s Alaska than with “Sarah Palin’s Alaska.” One was a place of heady transformation. The other was a veneer of local particularity, stretched over the same national politics that seemed to offer few potential surprises, only deepening entrenchment.

“I don’t know,” Downing said, “if she can get a single voter that she doesn’t already own.”

What to read

• The Florida Senate passed a congressional map proposed by Gov. Ron DeSantis, which would give Republicans an even greater advantage in the state.

• Herschel Walker, a Republican contender for Senate in Georgia, is a risky candidate for the G.O.P. to run, but he has nevertheless surged to the top of the field, our colleague Maya King reports.

• Barack Obama, who has waded more and more into the public fray over misinformation and disinformation, is expected to give a speech on the subject at Stanford University on Thursday.

briefing book

How Disney got its own state-within-a-state

When Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida urged lawmakers this week to consider ending Disney’s special administrative status, he wasn’t just escalating his cultural standoff with his state’s largest employer.

He was also pulling on a string that threatened to unravel an arrangement the state made with Disney in 1967 that granted the company extraordinary power over a 39-square-mile patch of former swampland in Central Florida — an unusual experiment in local governance that has few American counterparts.

Disney runs everything from the fire department and emergency services to electricity, gas, water and wastewater, subject to the supervision of a five-member board dominated by the company. It decides what is built, and how, and has the power to raise bonds and assess taxes. The charter for the special municipality, the Reedy Creek Improvement District, even allows Disney to build and operate an airport or a power plant using “nuclear fission” if it so chooses.

“It’s almost like a sovereign state inside another state,” said Aaron Goldberg, the author of a book on the origins of Disney World, the company’s Florida resort. Others have called it a “Vatican with mouse ears.”

At the time of the district’s creation, the brothers Walt and Roy Disney were searching for the ideal site for the successor resort to Disneyland, their California theme park. It had to be somewhere warm and near major highways — but not too near the ocean, because the company didn’t want to compete with the beach.

With the help of Paul Helliwell, a lawyer and longtime intelligence operative, they secretly acquired portions of Orange and Osceola Counties. Announcing the project, Disney spoke of his ambition to build a “city of tomorrow.”

To fulfill that vision, Disney demanded sovereignty over its own land and, to make a long story short, Florida said yes.

Disney’s futuristic city never happened. Portions became Epcot Center, and the special district has under 50 residents. And over half a century later, DeSantis is re-evaluating the state’s bargain as he contemplates some grand ambitions of his own.

“Disney has gotten away with special deals from the state of Florida for way too long,” the governor said in an email to his supporters on Wednesday. “It took a look under the hood to see what Disney has become to truly understand their inappropriate influence.”

But taking apart Disney’s magical Florida kingdom might prove complicated. For one thing, The Miami Herald noted on Wednesday that residents of Orange and Osceola Counties might be on the hook for a hefty tax bill should DeSantis get what he wants.

As Goldberg put it, “How do you dissolve a government that’s been there for 50 years?”

— Blake

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