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    The Best Sentences of 2023

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    Over recent days, I took on a daunting task — but a delightful one. I reviewed all the passages of prose featured in the For the Love of Sentences section of my Times Opinion newsletter in 2023 and tried to determine the best of the best. And there’s no doing that, at least not objectively, not when the harvest is so bountiful.What follows is a sample of the sentences that, upon fresh examination, made me smile the widest or nod the hardest or wish the most ardently and enviously that I’d written them. I hope they give you as much pleasure as they gave me when I reread them.I also hope that those of you who routinely contribute to For the Love of Sentences, bringing gems like the ones below to my attention, know how grateful to you I am. This is a crowdsourced enterprise. You are the wise and deeply appreciated crowd.Finally, I hope 2024 brings all of us many great things, including many great sentences.Let’s start with The Times. Dwight Garner noted how a certain conservative cable network presses on with its distortions, despite being called out on them and successfully sued: “Fox News, at this point, resembles a car whose windshield is thickly encrusted with traffic citations. Yet this car (surely a Hummer) manages to barrel out anew each day, plowing over six more mailboxes, five more crossing guards, four elderly scientists, three communal enterprises, two trans kids and a solar panel.”Erin Thompson reflected on the fate of statues memorializing the Confederacy: “We never reached any consensus about what should become of these artifacts. Some were reinstalled with additional historical context or placed in private hands, but many simply disappeared into storage. I like to think of them as America’s strategic racism reserve.”Pamela Paul examined an embattled (and later dethroned) House speaker who tried to divert attention to President Biden’s imagined wrongdoing: “As Kevin McCarthy announced the impeachment inquiry, you could almost see his wispy soul sucked out Dementor-style, joining whatever ghostly remains of Paul Ryan’s abandoned integrity still wander the halls of Congress.”Damon Winter/The New York TimesTom Friedman cut to the chase: “What Putin is doing in Ukraine is not just reckless, not just a war of choice, not just an invasion in a class of its own for overreach, mendacity, immorality and incompetence, all wrapped in a farrago of lies. What he is doing is evil.”Maureen Dowd eulogized her friend Jimmy Buffett: “When he was a young scalawag, he found the Life Aquatic and conjured his art from it, making Key West the capital of Margaritaville. He didn’t waste away there; he spun a billion-dollar empire out of a shaker of salt.” She also assessed Donald Trump’s relationship to his stolen-election claims and concluded that “the putz knew his push for a putsch was dishonest.” And she sat down with Nancy Pelosi right after Pelosi gave up the House speaker’s gavel: “I was expecting King Lear, howling at the storm, but I found Gene Kelly, singing in the rain.”Bret Stephens contrasted the two Republicans who represent Texas in the Senate, John Cornyn and Ted Cruz: “Whatever else you might say about Cornyn, he is to the junior senator from Texas what pumpkin pie is to a jack-o’-lantern.”Jamelle Bouie diagnosed the problem with the Florida governor’s presidential campaign: “Ron DeSantis cannot escape the fact that it makes no real sense to try to run as a more competent Donald Trump, for the simple reason that the entire question of competence is orthogonal to Trump’s appeal.”Alexis Soloski described her encounter with the actor Taylor Kitsch: “There’s a lonesomeness at the core of him that makes women want to save him and men want to buy him a beer. I am a mother of young children and the temptation to offer him a snack was sometimes overwhelming.”Jane Margolies described a growing trend of corporate office buildings trimmed with greenery that requires less maintenance: “As manicured lawns give way to meadows and borders of annuals are replaced by wild and woolly native plants, a looser, some might say messier, aesthetic is taking hold. Call it the horticultural equivalent of bedhead.”Nathan Englander contrasted Tom Cruise in his 50s with a typical movie star of that age 50 years ago: “Try Walter Matthau in ‘The Taking of Pelham 123.’ I’m not saying he wasn’t a dreamboat. I’m saying he reflects a life well lived in the company of gravity and pastrami.”And David Mack explained the endurance of sweatpants beyond their pandemic-lockdown, Zoom-meeting ubiquity: “We are now demanding from our pants attributes we are also seeking in others and in ourselves. We want them to be forgiving and reassuring. We want them to nurture us. We want them to say: ‘I was there, too. I experienced it. I came out on the other side more carefree and less rigid. And I learned about the importance of ventilation in the process.’”The ethical shortcomings of Supreme Court justices generated some deliciously pointed commentary. In Slate, for example, Dahlia Lithwick parsed the generosity of billionaires that Justices Samuel Alito and Clarence Thomas have so richly enjoyed. “A #protip that will no doubt make those justices who have been lured away to elaborate bear hunts and deer hunts and rabbit hunts and salmon hunts by wealthy oligarchs feel a bit sad: If your close personal friends who only just met you after you came onto the courts are memorializing your time together for posterity, there’s a decent chance you are, in fact, the thing being hunted,” she wrote.Greg Kahn for The New York TimesIn The Washington Post, Alexandra Petri mined that material by mimicking the famous opening line of “Pride and Prejudice” by Jane Austen: “It is a truth universally acknowledged that an American billionaire, in possession of sufficient fortune, must be in want of a Supreme Court justice.”Also in The Post, the book critic Ron Charles warned of censorship from points across the political spectrum: “Speech codes and book bans may start in opposing camps, but both warm their hands over freedom’s ashes.” He also noted the publication of “Manhood: The Masculine Virtues America Needs,” by Senator Josh Hawley: “The book’s final cover contains just text, including the title so oversized that the word ‘Manhood’ can’t even fit on one line — like a dude whose shoulders are so broad that he has to turn sideways to flee through the doors of the Capitol.”Rick Reilly put Mike McDaniel, the sunny head coach of the Miami Dolphins, and Bill Belichick, the gloomy head coach of the New England Patriots, side by side: “One is as open as a new Safeway, and the other is as closed up as an old submarine. One will tell you anything you want; the other will hand out information on a need-to-go-screw-yourself basis. One looks like a nerd who got lost on a stadium tour and wound up as head coach. The other looks like an Easter Island statue nursing a grudge.”Matt Bai challenged the argument that candidates for vice president don’t affect the outcomes of presidential races: “I’d argue that Sarah Palin mattered in 2008, although she was less of a running mate than a running gag.”David Von Drehle observed: “Golf was for decades — for centuries — the province of people who cared about money but never spoke of it openly. Scots. Episcopalians. Members of the Walker and Bush families. People who built huge homes then failed to heat them properly. People who drove around with big dogs in their old Mercedes station wagons. People who greeted the offer of a scotch and soda by saying, ‘Well, it’s 5 o’clock somewhere!’”And Robin Givhan examined former President Jimmy Carter’s approach to his remaining days: “Hospice care is not a matter of giving up. It’s a decision to shift our efforts from shoring up a body on the verge of the end to providing solace to a soul that’s on the cusp of forever.”In his newsletter on Substack, Kareem Abdul-Jabbar appraised the Lone Star State’s flirtation with secession: “This movement is called Texit and it’s not just the folly of one Republican on the grassy knoll of idiocy.”In The Chronicle of Higher Education, Emma Pettit experienced cognitive dissonance as she examined the academic bona fides of a “Real Housewives of Potomac” cast member: “It’s unusual for any professor to star on any reality show, let alone for a Johns Hopkins professor to star on a Bravo series. The university’s image is closely aligned with world-class research, public health and Covid-19 tracking. The Real Housewives’ image is closely aligned with promotional alcohol, plastic surgery and sequins.”In The Los Angeles Times, Jessica Roy explained the stubborn refusal of plastic bags to stay put: “Because they’re so light, they defy proper waste management, floating off trash cans and sanitation trucks like they’re being raptured by a garbage god.”In The News & Observer of Raleigh, N.C., Josh Shaffer pondered the peculiarity of the bagpipe, “shaped like an octopus in plaid pants, sounding to some like a goose with its foot caught in an escalator and played during history’s most lopsided battles — by the losing side.”Space Frontiers/Getty ImagesIn Salon, Melanie McFarland reflected on the futility of Chris Licht’s attempts, during his short-lived stint at the helm of CNN, to get Republican politicians and viewers to return to the network: “You might as well summon Voyager 1 back from deep space by pointing your TV remote at the sky and pressing any downward-pointing arrow.”In Politico, Rich Lowry contextualized Trump’s appearance at his Waco, Texas, rally with the J6 Prison Choir: “It’d be a little like Richard Nixon running for the 1976 Republican presidential nomination, and campaigning with a barbershop quartet made up of the Watergate burglars.”In The Atlantic, Tom Nichols observed that many Republican voters “want Trump, unless he can’t win; in that case, they’d like a Trump who can win, a candidate who reeks of Trump’s cheap political cologne but who will wisely wear somewhat less of it while campaigning in the crowded spaces of a general election.”Also in The Atlantic, Derek Thompson needled erroneous recession soothsayers: “Economic models of the future are perhaps best understood as astrology faintly decorated with calculus equations.”And David Frum noted one of the many peculiarities of the televised face-off between DeSantis and Gavin Newsom: “In the debate’s opening segments, the moderator, Sean Hannity, stressed again and again that his questions would be fact-based — like a proud host informing his guests that tonight he will serve the expensive wine.”In The New Yorker, Jonathan Franzen mulled an emotion: “Joy can be as strong as Everclear or as mild as Coors Light, but it’s never not joy: a blossoming in the heart, a yes to the world, a yes to being alive in it,” he wrote.Also in The New Yorker, David Remnick analyzed the raw, warring interpretations of the massacre in Israel on Oct. 7: “There were, of course, facts — many of them unknown — but the narratives came first, all infused with histories and counterhistories, grievances and 50 varieties of fury, all rushing in at the speed of social media. People were going to believe what they needed to believe.”Zach Helfand explained the fascination with monster trucks in terms of our worship of size, noting that “people have always liked really big stuff, particularly of the unnecessary variety. Stonehenge, pyramids, colossi, Costco.”And Anthony Lane found the pink palette of “Barbie” a bit much: “Watching the first half-hour of this movie is like being waterboarded with Pepto-Bismol.” He also provided a zoological breakdown of another hit movie, “Cocaine Bear”: “The animal kingdom is represented by a butterfly, a deer and a black bear. Only one of these is on cocaine, although with butterflies you can never really tell.”In The Guardian, Sam Jones paid tribute to a remarkably durable pooch named Bobi: “The late canine, who has died at the spectacular age of 31 years and 165 days, has not so much broken the record for the world’s longest-lived dog as shaken it violently from side to side, torn it to pieces, buried it and then cocked a triumphant, if elderly, leg over it.”In The Wall Street Journal, Jason Gay rendered a damning (and furry!) judgment of the organization that oversees college sports: “Handing the N.C.A.A. an investigation is like throwing a Frisbee to an elderly dog. Maybe you get something back. Maybe the dog lies down and chews a big stick.” He separately took issue with a prize his daughter won at a state fair: “I don’t know how many of you own a six-and-a-half-foot, bright blue stuffed lemur, but it is not exactly the type of item that blends into a home. You do not put it in the living room and say: perfect. It instantly becomes the most useless item in the house, and I own an exercise bike.”Also in The Journal, Peggy Noonan described McCarthy’s toppling as House speaker by Matt Gaetz and his fellow right-wing rebels: “It’s as if Julius Caesar were stabbed to death in the Forum by the Marx Brothers.” In another column, she skewered DeSantis, who gives off the vibe “that he might unplug your life support to recharge his cellphone.”On her website The Marginalian, the Bulgarian essayist Maria Popova wrote: “We were never promised any of it — this world of cottonwoods and clouds — when the Big Bang set the possible in motion. And yet here we are, atoms with consciousness, each of us a living improbability forged of chaos and dead stars. Children of chance, we have made ourselves into what we are — creatures who can see a universe of beauty in the feather of a bird and can turn a blind eye to each other’s suffering, creatures capable of the Benedictus and the bomb.”Finally, in The Mort Report, Mort Rosenblum despaired: “Too many voters today are easily conned, deeply biased, impervious to fact and bereft of survival instincts. Contrary to myth, frogs leap out of heating pots. Stampeding cattle stop at a cliff edge. Lemmings don’t really commit mass suicide. We’ll find out about Americans in 2024.” More

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      Mary Peltola Wins Bid to Serve Full Term in the House for Alaska

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      Ms. Peltola became the first Alaska Native woman elected to Congress earlier this year when she won a special election in the state.Representative Mary Peltola, Democrat of Alaska and the first Alaska Native woman to serve in Congress, on Wednesday won a full term in the House, according to The Associated Press, holding back three conservative challengers.Ms. Peltola first won the seat in an August special election to finish the term of Representative Don Young, a Republican who died in March. Her victory, which flipped the seat for Democrats for the first time in 50 years, was considered an upset against Sarah Palin, the former governor and vice-presidential candidate. With her latest success, Ms. Peltola has secured a full two-year term as the lone representative for the state of Alaska. The loss for Republicans in the state ensures that they will hold 220 seats in the House — a razor-thin margin with just two races yet to be called — when leaders had hoped to pad that majority with as many additional seats as possible.“WE DID IT,” Ms. Peltola exulted on social media, posting a video of a dancing crab. With 136,893 votes after two rounds of tabulation, Ms. Peltola secured 54.9 percent of the vote, The Alaska Division of Elections said. Ms. Peltola defeated two of her Republican rivals from the special election — Ms. Palin and Nick Begich III, who is part of a prominent liberal political family in Alaska — as well as Chris Bye, a libertarian.Ms. Palin received 45.1 percent support, with a total of 112,255 votes. Mr. Begich received a total of 64,392 votes before being eliminated in the second round, while Mr. Bye was eliminated in the first round with 4,986 votes.State law allows absentee ballots to be counted up to 15 days after Election Day if postmarked by then and sent from outside the United States. Election officials decided to wait to tabulate rounds of ranked-choice voting until all ballots were counted.Because none of the candidates appeared to have secured more than 50 percent of the votes by Nov. 23 — 15 days after Election Day — Alaskan election officials tabulated the next round of votes once all ballots were counted.With the establishment of an open primary system ahead of Mr. Young’s death in which the top four candidates could advance regardless of party, four dozen candidates jumped into the race to replace him. Ms. Peltola was able to secure a spot in the general election, along with Ms. Palin and Mr. Begich.While Ms. Palin and Mr. Begich split the conservative vote, Ms. Peltola assembled a coalition of Democrats, centrists and Alaska Natives behind her “pro-family, pro-fish” platform. A Democrat had not held the seat in half a century, since Mr. Young had replaced Mr. Begich’s grandfather, a Democrat.“Our nation faces a number of challenges in the coming years, and our representatives will need wisdom and discernment as they work to put America on a more sound path,” Mr. Begich said in a statement congratulating Ms. Peltola on her victory. While the majority of his supporters voted for Ms. Palin, 7,460 of them ranked Ms. Peltola and helped push her over the majority threshold.Ms. Peltola worked to highlight her bipartisan credentials, often speaking openly about her friendship with Ms. Palin on the campaign trail. With just a couple of seats determining which party controls the House, she could potentially play a critical role should Republicans seek to win over Democratic votes for must-pass legislation and any effort to approve bipartisan measures.While Ms. Peltola took office only in September, shortly before the midterm elections, she quickly took over pushing for legislation Mr. Young had introduced and hired multiple Republican aides on his staff.Ms. Peltola has also allied herself with her state’s two Republican senators, Lisa Murkowski and Dan Sullivan, to pressure the Biden administration to reconsider a key drilling project in Alaska and ensure more federal support was granted to the state after the remnants of a typhoon damaged some communities.She received an emotional and warm reception at the Alaska Federation of Natives convention last month, where attendees waved cutouts of her face and endorsed her candidacy. Mr. Young’s family also endorsed her and filmed an ad for her, bestowing her with one of his signature bolo ties. More

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      Sarah Palin Loses as the Party She Helped Transform Moves Past Her

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      The former Alaska governor, once the standard-bearer of the G.O.P.’s dog-whistling, no-apologies culture, was no match for the same forces she rode to national prominence.It is hard to overstate just how much of a jolt to the political system Sarah Palin delivered when she defeated her first fellow Republican 16 years ago.He was Frank Murkowski, the sitting governor of Alaska and a towering figure in the 49th state. She was a “hockey mom” and the former mayor of a small, working-class town who vowed to stick it to the “good ol’ boys.” That race put her on the map with the national Republican Party and set her on a path that would change her life, and the tenor of American politics for years to come.Then, Ms. Palin was at the vanguard of the dog-whistling, no-apologies political culture that former President Donald J. Trump now embodies.Today, having lost her bid for Congress after years out of the spotlight, Ms. Palin is a much diminished force.She was, in many ways, undone by the same political currents she rode to national prominence, first as Senator John McCain’s vice-presidential nominee in 2008 and later as a Tea Party luminary and Fox News star. Along the way, she helped redefine the outer limits of what a politician could say as she made dark insinuations about Barack Obama’s background and false claims about government “death panels” that could deny health care to seniors and people with disabilities.Now, a generation of Republican stars follows the template she helped create as a hybrid celebrity-politician who relished fighting with elements in her own party as much as fighting with Democrats — none more so than Mr. Trump, who watched her closely for years before deciding to run for president himself. He ensured this month that he would remain in the spotlight, announcing another bid for the White House in 2024.But as the next generation rose up, Ms. Palin’s brand of politics no longer seemed as novel or as outrageous. Next to Mr. Trump’s lies about a huge conspiracy to deny him a second term, or Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene’s casual allusions to political violence, Ms. Palin’s provocations more than a decade ago can seem almost quaint.The Aftermath of the 2022 Midterm ElectionsCard 1 of 6A moment of reflection. More

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      The Unruly Heirs of Sarah Palin

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      Whether for her pathbreaking role as the first woman on a Republican presidential ticket or for rapping “Baby Got Back” on the Masked Singer, Sarah Palin has, since her debut on the national scene in 2008, made an art of attracting the spotlight.But fame — even in America — can get you only so far, and Ms. Palin’s campaign this year for Alaska’s only House seat has exposed the limits of her celebrity. Her fund-raising has lagged. Her campaign schedule has been unusually light for a candidate heading into a competitive election. And she announced recently that she’d received “crappy advice” from advisers and was no longer trying to raise money. In an unexpectedly close ranked-choice race, she has had to endure the indignity of encouraging voters to support her Republican opponent, in a last-ditch effort to prevent the Democrat, Mary Peltola, from running away with the seat.Ms. Palin may be about to fade once again from national politics, but the “mama grizzly” brand she invented is here to stay. Already, a group of female leaders is embracing and iterating on Ms. Palin’s trademark mom-knows-best Republicanism. Some are politicians, railing against the powers-that-be; others are activists, speaking out against school closures and vaccine mandates. As these new mama bears enter the political sphere, they are transforming American discourse, harnessing motherhood itself as a political asset, just as Ms. Palin did before them. Even if she loses her battle to make it to Washington next week, in a broader cultural sense, Ms. Palin has already won the war. And a new generation of GOP women stand poised to carry her complex legacy forward.When John McCain chose Ms. Palin as his running mate in 2008, she was in her 40s and had only served less than two years as governor. Her many doubters noted, correctly, that she wasn’t ready for the job of vice president. But their criticisms were often shot through with a condescension and sexism that had less to do with Ms. Palin’s experience than with her looks, clothes and identity as a mother of five.Few female politicians before her had emphasized their lives as mothers to the extent she did. She held her baby onstage right after accepting the nomination, deliberately presenting herself as a down-to-earth “hockey mom” and later on as a protective “mama grizzly.” Ms. Palin’s folksy demeanor was often ridiculed as a gimmick and Ms. Palin herself as an ignoramus. But the course of political events soon proved that she was on to something. The Tea Party wave during Barack Obama’s first term swept Palin imitators like Michele Bachmann and Christine O’Donnell to national prominence, women who were likely to be found in jeans at the gun range, when they weren’t giving a speech in stilettos. Rather than leaving family life at home the way men always had, which a previous generation of women had seen as a necessity to succeed professionally, this new generation saw how womanhood and motherhood added significantly to their brand. By signaling their tenacity in the domestic sphere, they implied their toughness in the political arena. And they increased their populist appeal.Among those who noticed their potential was Donald Trump’s future adviser, Steve Bannon, who made a 2010 documentary called “Fire from the Heartland” glorifying Mrs. Bachmann and other Tea Party women, as well as a 2011 documentary about Ms. Palin herself called “The Undefeated,” framing her femininity and Everywoman image as an unsung asset for the GOP.Of course, Mr. Bannon and the right as a whole eventually found a different champion, and while Mr. Trump left little room for also-rans like Ms. Palin, his time in office helped her particular strain of conservatism mutate and spread — giving rise to a new, Trumpier version of Ms. Palin’s mama grizzly.This new generation’s pugnaciousness makes Ms. Palin’s “Going Rogue” days look subdued. Conservative moms from all over the country have turned local school board meetings into contentious showdowns over policy and curriculum, organized by groups like Moms for Liberty who say they are “on a mission to stoke the fires of liberty.” “We do NOT co-parent with the government,” reads the back of one of the T-shirts for sale in the moms’ online merch store.Shades of Ms. Palin can be seen in Representatives Lauren Boebert of Colorado and Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia, whose gun-toting photo-ops recall Ms. Palin’s rural, hunting-and-fishing image. But Kari Lake, the hard-right former news anchor running for governor in Arizona, is perhaps the paradigmatic New Mama Bear. One moment, she’s literally vacuuming a red carpet for Mr. Trump; the next, she’s calling her Democratic opponent a coward and the media the “right hand of the Devil.” Ms. Lake shares Ms. Palin’s instinct for the spotlight and feel for optics, as well as her affection for copacetic mama bears (Ms. Lake has often used the term). But while Ms. Palin lost control of her image to a skeptical, often condescending news media (remember the infamous Katie Couric interview in which the candidate couldn’t name any newspapers she read?), the steely, intense Ms. Lake has made a sport of antagonizing the reporters on her trail and excelled at turning the exchanges into content. The rise of the New Mama Bear might not have been possible without the fragmentation of a media now more drawn than ever toward controversy and the outrageous.Ms. Lake, who has a knack for generating outrage, stands a very good chance of winning. And she is far from the only one. In the heated conservative debate over schools, the new mama bears have been racking up some important wins, crashing school meetings to protest critical race theory and banning books with L.G.B.T.Q. themes or other content they deem inappropriate from school libraries. Moms for Liberty has claimed huge growth in membership over the past year and made itself a key player in the education battles that have marked this midterm cycle. Top Republicans have embraced the school controversies, showing just how potent this new paradigm has become on a national scale. Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida, who gave the keynote speech at Moms for Liberty’s “Joyful Warriors” conference this summer, endorsed several of their school board candidates, and they went on to win their primaries. The effect could be that the new mama bears see their trademark political issues high on the agenda for the 2024 Republican primary.It’s ironic that Ms. Palin, the mother of mama bear politicking, should be an afterthought during a moment so clearly borne of her own trailblazing prime. But that’s often how it goes in politics, where an innovation’s impact is obvious only in hindsight — once someone else has perfected it.Rosie Gray (@RosieGray) is a reporter who has covered politics for BuzzFeed News and The Atlantic.The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: letters@nytimes.com.Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter (@NYTopinion) and Instagram. More

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      Murkowski Says She Will Rank Peltola First on Her Ballot in Alaska

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      ANCHORAGE — Senator Lisa Murkowski of Alaska, a centrist Republican facing a tough re-election campaign, plans on ranking Representative Mary Peltola, a Democrat, first on her ballot this November, crossing party lines to back the incumbent in her race to serve a full term in the House.Sitting in a quiet backstage corner behind exhibitions and vendors at the Alaska Federation of Natives convention this weekend, Ms. Murkowski confirmed to The New York Times on Saturday her support for Ms. Peltola, who earlier this year overcame a chaotic field of four dozen candidates to finish the remainder of Representative Don Young’s term after he died in March.Ms. Murkowski declined to say whether or how she would rank Ms. Peltola’s challengers: Sarah Palin, the former Republican governor and vice-presidential candidate, or Nicholas Begich III, a conservative member of an Alaskan liberal dynasty, both registered Republican candidates, or Chris Bye, a libertarian. Under Alaska’s new ranked-choice system, voters can rank their preferred candidates, which are counted until at least one candidate wins more than 50 percent of the vote.Ms. Murkowski brushed off the significance of her comment, describing it as “Lisa being honest” and adding that she was primarily focused on her own race, where she is fending off Kelly Tshibaka, a right-wing challenger endorsed by former President Donald J. Trump and the state’s Republican Party. Ms. Murkowski has also retained broad support from Alaska Native voters in the state, and they proved crucial to her write-in campaign in 2010. (Ms. Peltola told The Washington Post she also planned on voting for Ms. Murkowski, and they posed together for a photo at the convention.)“Alaskans are going to go through the same process that I am, which is evaluating people, looking at their values and whether they represent them, and they will make that determination going forward,” Ms. Murkowski said.But the comment underscored the broad coalition Ms. Peltola is assembling in her bid to remain the sole representative for the state’s 734,000 people, after being sworn in last month as the first Alaska Native to serve in Congress. At the convention, Ms. Peltola was feted with raucous cheers and emotional prayer songs and tributes, as attendees rang cowbells and waved cutouts of her face at the very mention of her name.“We are in Mary’s house, and I know this,” Ms. Palin proclaimed at a candidate forum at the convention. “Doggone it, I never have anything, like, to gripe about — I just wish she’d convert on over to the other party.”Ms. Palin, while quick to lavish Ms. Peltola, her longtime friend, with praise, made no mention of Mr. Begich, who also appeared and who siphoned away some conservative voters in the primary. More

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      Sarah Palin Lost a Shot at a House Seat, but She Has a Second Chance

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      Sarah Palin’s bid for a political comeback just got a lot harder.Ms. Palin, a household name and former Republican Party vice-presidential nominee, lost a special House election this week that will send Mary Peltola, a Democrat, to Congress until January. But she will enter a rematch with Ms. Peltola and other opponents this fall as they seek to fill Alaska’s lone congressional seat from 2023 onward.Ms. Palin failed to consolidate the support of Republican voters, contending with low approval ratings and a ranked-choice system that favored moderate candidates. The question is whether she can overcome the same challenges in the fall.Former President Donald J. Trump had endorsed Ms. Palin, 58, a former Alaska governor, but she came in second behind Ms. Peltola by a few percentage points late Wednesday after two rounds of tabulations in a new election system that allowed voters to rank their top three choices in order of preference. Ms. Peltola will now finish the term of Representative Don Young, who died in March after serving in Washington for nearly 50 years.After the results were released Wednesday, Ms. Palin appeared stunned and frustrated in a video filmed at her campaign headquarters in Anchorage.“When it comes down to second- and third-place votes, that’s going to decide who’s going to win?” she asked, criticizing the election system as she raised her arms in exasperation.For Ms. Peltola and Alaska, her win is historic, if temporary.Mary Peltola will be the first Alaska Native to serve in Congress.Ash Adams for The New York TimesMs. Peltola, 49, a former state lawmaker who is Yup’ik, will become the first Alaska Native to serve in Congress and the first woman to hold the House seat. It also will provide a significant boost of momentum for Democrats, who have not notched a major statewide victory since Mark Begich defeated Senator Ted Stevens, a Republican, in 2008 after Mr. Stevens’s tenure was marred by a conviction on corruption charges.Ms. Peltola’s victory adds to a string of strong showings for Democrats, most recently in the special election for New York’s 19th Congressional District. Democrats have grown more confident about their chances of holding on to the Senate in November as debate over abortion has energized their voters and President Biden’s approval ratings have ticked up slightly. Still, most Democrats acknowledged that retaining control of the House will be more difficult.The general election in November for the House seat in Alaska, a conservative-leaning state with a strong libertarian and independent streak, is considered a tossup, in part because of the uncertainties of the ranked-choice system. Candidates still have a chance to revise their strategies, and the ballot will include a fourth top candidate to rank, the largely unknown Christopher Bye, a combat veteran who is running as a libertarian. (In the special election, the fourth candidate, an independent named Al Gross, dropped out and expressed support for Ms. Peltola.)“Sarah Palin still has a path forward because it was still quite close,” a Republican pollster, Matt Larkin, said. “It will come down to how she and the other candidates adapt.”In the special election, roughly 60 percent of Alaskans listed a Republican as their first choice on the ballot. Ms. Peltola and Ms. Palin earned the top two spots, but neither had 50 percent of the vote. So votes from the ballots that had ranked Nick Begich III, also a Republican, as first choice were then allocated between Ms. Palin and Ms. Peltola based on whether either woman had been listed second.That tally showed that Ms. Palin had not united Republican voters behind her: Of the ballots that ranked Mr. Begich first, only about half listed her as a second choice. Roughly 30 percent ranked Ms. Peltola second, and a further 21 percent were considered “exhausted,” or inactive — meaning they had no second choice or they listed a candidate who had already been eliminated.The numbers suggest that thousands of Republican voters cast their second-choice votes for a Democrat, another candidate or no one, rather than Ms. Palin.In the end, Ms. Palin drew nearly 86,000 votes, or roughly 48.5 percent, coming nearly three percentage points behind Ms. Peltola, who won more than 91,000 votes, or 51.5 percent, according to the Alaska state election results that are expected to be certified this week.Sarah Palin’s campaign headquarters in South Anchorage. On the trail, she told voters to rank only her on the ballot. Ash Adams for The New York TimesMs. Palin’s campaign on Thursday did not respond to multiple requests for interviews.In early signs, Ms. Palin did not seem willing to change or moderate her tone or strategy. Videos of her reaction to the results at her campaign headquarters captured her renewing criticism of the system, saying she had long encouraged supporters not to comply. On the campaign trail, she told voters to rank her and her alone.Ms. Palin’s attempt at a political comeback had stirred wide debate among Alaskans from the beginning over whether she was interested in public service or in seeking more celebrity. She has so far run a campaign that leans on a solid base of support among evangelical conservatives and Trump supporters. In the final weeks before the Aug. 16 special election and primary, she sparred heavily with her top Republican opponent, Mr. Begich, shunned the establishment and mostly ignored the press.In interviews in Anchorage, Palmer and her hometown, Wasilla, her most ardent supporters were often conservative women who had long tracked her political rise and wished to see her tussle with powerful Democratic women like Speaker Nancy Pelosi. “It would be so fun to watch Nancy Pelosi swear her in,” said T.J. DeSpain, 51, an art therapist who attended an outdoor concert in Palmer days before the Aug. 16 special election.But several voters complained Ms. Palin had spent most of her time on the reality TV circuit or in the lower 48 states after she resigned from the governor’s office in 2009 while facing ethics complaints and legal bills. Alaska Survey Research found in late July that 31 percent of registered Alaska voters viewed her positively and 61 percent viewed her negatively. In a different analysis, Mr. Larkin, the Republican pollster, argued that it was most likely that Ms. Peltola or Mr. Begich would win the special election, based on Ms. Palin’s low approval numbers.Nick Begich III with supporters in Anchorage last month. He sought to define himself as a young and idealistic fiscal conservative.Ash Adams for The New York TimesMr. Begich, 44, the founder and chief executive of a software development company, criticized his opponent for what he described as her failure to campaign more aggressively in the state. He sought to define himself as an idealistic fiscal conservative, despite sharing a last name with the best-known Democratic family in the state, including his uncle, former Senator Mark Begich.In an interview Thursday, Mr. Begich said he had told his supporters to rank Ms. Palin second,but that she did not reciprocate the call.“I think Alaskans have made clear that they don’t want to see Sarah Palin in office again,” he said. “Poll after poll showed that Sarah Palin would be unable to beat a Democrat in Alaska, and now that has been proven by the result we saw yesterday.”The refrain was echoed by Ms. Peltola’s supporters, who argued that their top choice captured the energy of Alaskans and the independent-streak legacy of Mr. Young, who was close friends with her father. Ms. Palin “is so played out, and that shows in the results,” said Amber Lee, a Democratic strategist who is backing Ms. Peltola.Ms. Peltola, who is friends with Ms. Palin, ran a largely positive campaign that sharply diverged from her Republican opponents in substance. She strongly championed abortion rights, called for higher taxes on the wealthy and sought an approach to development of Alaska’s resources focused on sustaining communities over corporate interests.Heather Kendall, who is Athabascan and a retired lawyer with the Native American Rights Fund, called Ms. Peltola’s victory “a combination of an earthquake and a tsunami for Alaskan politics all at once.”In the undertow of the electoral contest has been Mr. Trump, who made a rare visit to Anchorage in July to hold a rally for Ms. Palin, whom he hailed as “legendary.”Mr. Trump won Alaska by 10 percentage points in 2020, but those results represented a drop from his 15-point victory in 2016 as he has alienated thousands of moderate Republicans and independents. Before Ms. Palin’s loss this week, some analysts had speculated that Mr. Trump’s endorsement of Ms. Palin could push those Republicans who did not favor him away from her, even as it might have drawn others to her side.For now, her defeat in the special election calls into question whether she retains a strong political base in the state that powered her political rise. She served as mayor of Wasilla, a city of about 10,000 people, before becoming governor and then contending for a job in 2008 that would have put her second in line to the presidency.After Barack Obama defeated Ms. Palin’s running mate, Senator John McCain, in that presidential election, Ms. Palin faced a reckoning from Republican Party leaders who attributed his defeat to her uneven political performance and lack of deep policy knowledge.Tell-all books from that campaign mocked her verbal blunders and dished on her rough treatment of staff, who clashed frequently with her over issues as varied as her aggressive political rhetoric and her wardrobe.Mr. McCain, who died of brain cancer in 2018, grew estranged from his former vice-president-to-be in his later years. The two stopped speaking to one another, and Ms. Palin was not invited to Mr. McCain’s funeral at his family’s insistence.But it was Ms. Palin who better represented the mood and style of the angry, growing base of Republican voters — a group that would later become the molten core of Mr. Trump’s stunning upset against Mrs. Clinton eight years after the defeat of Mr. McCain and Ms. Palin.As news broke that Ms. Peltola had defeated Ms. Palin late Wednesday, the longtime conservative radio host Mike Porcaro fielded reactions from Republicans who seemed to find no middle ground on Ms. Palin. “She is loved or not,” he said.One caller stuck with him in particular, a 30-year-old Republican who said he had ranked Mr. Begich first and Ms. Peltola second because he had grown tired of Ms. Palin and Mr. Trump. “It is pretty obvious the Republicans have more people, but they seem to be at odds with each other, and it opens the door for the Democrat,” Mr. Porcaro said.Blake Hounshell More

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      With Peltola’s Defeat of Palin, Alaska’s Ranked-Choice Voting Has a Moment

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      Mary Peltola, whose victory in a special election on Wednesday makes her the first Democrat in nearly half a century to represent Alaska in the House, won the contest for the remainder of Representative Don Young’s term with an upbeat campaign that appealed to Alaskan interests and the electorate’s independent streak.But Alaska’s new voting system also played a big role in Ms. Peltola’s three-percentage-point victory over former Gov. Sarah Palin, her Republican opponent.Ms. Peltola, who will become the first Alaska Native to serve in Congress and the first woman to hold the House seat, won at least in part because voters had more choices. While more voters initially picked a Republican candidate, that didn’t matter. Given a second choice, many Republican voters opted for a Democrat — Ms. Peltola — over Ms. Palin.Speaking to reporters on Wednesday night, Ms. Palin criticized the new voting system as “weird.” Senator Tom Cotton of Arkansas called the system a “scam to rig elections” against Republicans.But proponents of systems like Alaska’s say this is how it is supposed to work. When voters have more choices, they’re less likely to vote along strict party lines, reducing polarization and giving independent-minded or more centrist candidates a better shot.The changes to how Alaskans choose their representatives in state and federal elections were decided on in 2020, when allies of Lisa Murkowski — the state’s senior senator, who ran in 2010 as a write-in candidate after losing that year’s Republican Party primary — promoted and bankrolled a ballot initiative that passed by a narrow margin — precisely 3,781 votes, out of more than 344,000.The consequences for Alaskan politics, and for the country, could be seismic. New York, Maine and Utah also have some form of ranked-choice voting, as do dozens of American cities. But the Alaska approach — which combines ranked-choice voting across party lines with an instant runoff between several top candidates — goes further in disrupting political parties’ influence.Second choices matterIn the first stage of the complex new system, voters in a primary pick from a list of candidates from all parties and ideological stripes.The top four finishers then make the ballot for the general election, when voters rank up to four choices in order of preference: first, second, third and fourth — or none at all.Over multiple rounds of what is known as instant runoff or ranked-choice voting, election officials first eliminate candidates with no chance of winning and then reallocate the second, third and fourth choices of their voters to others.Former Gov. Sarah Palin of Alaska doing interviews at a rally hosted by former President Donald J. Trump in Anchorage in July.Ash Adams for The New York TimesNicholas Begich III, a Republican, failed to meet the threshold, meaning his votes were reallocated based on their second choices. But 15,000 voters who preferred Mr. Begich crossed party lines to select Ms. Peltola as their backup pick instead of Ms. Palin. A further 11,000 Begich voters opted for no second choice or another candidate. In total, that meant that nearly half of Mr. Begich’s voters, presumably Republicans, did not vote for Ms. Palin.Scott Kendall, a leading proponent of the Alaska system, said in an interview on Thursday: “The campaign that Nick Begich ran was a clinic in how to have your party lose a ranked-choice election.” More

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      Mary Peltola, a Democrat, Defeats Sarah Palin in Alaska’s Special House Election

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      In an upset with the potential to reverberate nationally, Mary Peltola has won a special House election in Alaska, according to The Associated Press, and will finish the remaining few months of the term of Representative Don Young, who died in March after serving nearly 50 years as his state’s lone congressman.Ms. Peltola, a Democratic former state lawmaker and Alaska Native, defeated two other candidates who survived the raucous special primary election in June: Sarah Palin, the former Alaska governor and Republican vice-presidential nominee, and Nicholas Begich III, a Republican from the state’s most prominent Democratic political family. Voters participated in a new system, ranking the three in order of preference.Ms. Peltola’s victory adds to a series of recent wins for Democrats, most notably the special election for New York’s 19th Congressional District. Democrats have grown more confident about their chances of holding on to the Senate in November as Republicans squabble among themselves, although most acknowledge that retaining control of the House will be more difficult.David Axelrod, a former adviser to President Barack Obama who is now the director of the Institute of Politics at the University of Chicago, said Ms. Palin’s defeat and the Republicans’ loss of Mr. Young’s seat “would be read as a huge victory for Democrats and defeat for MAGA Republicans.” He added: “Obviously, there are mitigating factors that should temper the impulse to generalize.”At 49, Ms. Peltola will become the first Alaska Native to serve in Congress and the first woman to hold the House seat, albeit only temporarily — unless she wins a full term in November.She ran a relentlessly upbeat campaign that implicitly contrasted her reputation for kindness with the bombast and penchant for drama associated with Ms. Palin, even though the two women have been friends since serving together in the Statehouse as expectant mothers. They even exchanged text messages on the day of the general election for the temporary seat, with Ms. Palin advising Ms. Peltola to dress warmly for her final round of canvassing.“I think respect is just a fundamental part of getting things done and working through problems,” Ms. Peltola told reporters as the first votes rolled in on Aug. 16.Al Gross, an independent candidate who previously ran for Senate in 2020 against Dan Sullivan, a Republican, dropped out after the primary and endorsed Ms. Peltola, who also finished ahead of write-in candidates, including Tara Sweeney, a former Trump administration official.Ms. Peltola cobbled together a winning coalition in the special election by appealing to the same independent streak and devotion to Alaskan interests that Mr. Young was known for. Her father and the longtime congressman were close friends, and, as a young girl, she would tag along as he campaigned for Mr. Young. But she sharply diverges from Mr. Young and her top Republican opponents, including Ms. Palin, in her support for abortion rights, her concern about climate change and her calls for developing Alaska’s resources with greater sensitivity to the needs of local communities.Ms. Peltola has sought to highlight her Native roots in a state where more than 15 percent of the population identifies as Indigenous. As a Yup’ik woman, she said, she has sought to use the teachings of her community in her broader appeals for bipartisanship. “Dry fish and pilot bread — that is how I got other legislators in the room when I was rebuilding the bipartisan Bush caucus,” she said in an ad introducing herself to voters. (“Bush caucus” refers to a group of legislators from rural Alaska.)Ms. Peltola served in the Alaska House from 1999 to 2009 before becoming the executive director of the Kuskokwim River Inter-Tribal Fish Commission, which works with tribes to manage salmon resources. She has also served as a councilwoman in Bethel, a small city in western Alaska, and as a judge on the Orutsararmuit Native Council Tribal Court.She made that experience central to her campaign message, a uniquely Alaskan appeal to voters in a state where many rural communities depend on reliable stocks of fish for their very subsistence. Ms. Peltola’s ads were critical of out-of-state trawlers — high-volume fishing ships, often from China or Russia, that sweep up prized salmon and halibut along with lower-value species such as pollock.The Supreme Court’s move in June to overturn Roe v. Wade was another major theme of Ms. Peltola’s campaign. More than 60 percent of Alaskans favor abortion rights, breaking with the position held by Republicans like Ms. Palin, who hailed the decision as a victory for states’ rights. Abortion remains legal in Alaska, though the law requires that a patient receive counseling intended to discourage the practice.Ms. Peltola will face voters again this fall as she tries to retain the seat in Congress beyond the remainder of Mr. Young’s term.Voters in November will rank their choices from the top four finishers of the regular primary on Aug. 16. Ms. Peltola finished ahead of Ms. Palin in that primary, followed by Mr. Begich.Ms. Palin’s defeat in the special election is likely to raise doubts about her viability in November.Former President Donald J. Trump visited Anchorage in July to hold a rally for Ms. Palin, whose campaign was being managed by one of his longtime political lieutenants, Michael Glassner. Mr. Trump hailed her as “legendary.”At that rally, Ms. Palin attacked Mr. Begich, her chief Republican opponent, as a “RINO,” or Republican in Name Only. And she nodded in jest to the complaints of her critics, who have accused her of erratic behavior and of abandoning the state after her 2008 loss.“We have been mocked and ridiculed and falsely accused and told to sit down and shut up,” she said. “The stuff that you’ve heard about me — it’s a lie. I’m way worse than what you’ve heard.”Mr. Trump expended most of his energy at the rally attacking Senator Lisa Murkowski, who broke with him frequently on abortion and other issues and who voted for his impeachment after the assault on the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021.Both Ms. Murkowski and Kelly Tshibaka, whom Mr. Trump endorsed, advanced in the state’s Senate primary race and will face off again in November.Mr. Trump is a divisive figure in Alaska, which has long had an independent streak. He remains highly popular among hard-core Republican voters but has alienated thousands of more moderate Republicans and independents.Although Mr. Trump won Alaska by 10 percentage points in 2020, besting Joseph R. Biden Jr., those results represented a decrease from his commanding 15-point victory over Hillary Clinton in 2016.Mr. Trump’s waning overall popularity has led some analysts to speculate that his endorsement of Ms. Palin could do as much to mobilize his political opponents against her this fall as it could to help her. And Ms. Palin’s starkly low approval ratings in her quest to win Mr. Young’s former seat permanently indicate that another candidate might squeak through in November. If the special election and Aug. 16 primary results are any indication, Ms. Peltola appears well positioned to do so.Jazmine Ulloa More

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      The Party of Trump

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      A look at the latest results from last night’s primaries, and their larger meaning for the Republican Party.Last night offered the latest evidence of Donald Trump’s continued influence over the Republican Party. In today’s newsletter, we’ll give you the results and also offer some larger perspective on the overall success rate of Trump’s endorsements this year.First, here are the main results:Liz Cheney — Trump’s highest-profile critic within the party — resoundingly lost her primary race for Wyoming’s lone House seat. Cheney received 29 percent of the vote, compared with 66 percent for Harriet Hageman, the Trump-endorsed candidate who has not held elected office before. (Here’s a Times profile of Hageman, and an analysis about what Cheney’s loss means for the G.O.P.)In Wyoming’s Republican primary for secretary of state, the office that oversees elections, the winner was Chuck Gray, a state legislator whom Trump endorsed. Gray, like Trump, has falsely claimed that the 2020 presidential election was fraudulent.In Alaska, Sarah Palin, the state’s former governor whom Trump endorsed, and two rivals — Mary Peltola, a Democrat, and Nick Begich, a Republican — advanced to the November election for Alaska’s open House seat to replace Don Young, who died in March.Alaska also held a Senate primary, but its results are unlikely to matter much. The state uses open primaries in which the top four vote getters advance to the general election. Both the incumbent — Lisa Murkowski, who voted to convict Trump in his impeachment trial for the Capitol attack — and Trump’s preferred candidate, Kelly Tshibaka, advanced. Alaska uses ranked-choice voting, which may favor a moderate like Murkowski.Here are the latest vote counts from Alaska and Wyoming.Trump’s 2022 recordThe 2022 primary schedule is winding down, with only six states yet to hold elections, including Florida next week. The full picture of Trump’s influence is becoming clear.He has become the rare defeated president to wield enormous sway over his party, with the ability to end careers (like Cheney’s, perhaps) and to turn once-obscure candidates into winners. Trump even persuaded other top Republicans, like Representative Kevin McCarthy and Senator Ted Cruz, to endorse Cheney’s opponent.But Trump’s influence is not complete. The success rate of his endorsements in competitive elections hovers around 80 percent, and some incumbents (like Murkowski, perhaps) have proven strong enough to overcome his criticism of them.The Times’s Maggie Haberman notes that Trump sometimes makes endorsements without thinking them through, including in multicandidate races with more than one candidate who supports his agenda. “Trump tends to treat politics like a scoreboard, as opposed to a strategic effort,” Maggie said.This chart, by our colleague Ashley Wu, summarizes Trump’s record in the 2022 primaries so far.Primary election outcomes for Trump-endorsed 2022 midterm candidates More