what was jimmy carter's margin of victory in '76?

[fieldmarshaldj]

Ah, OK. The claim in the article that Gravel was an “unknown” wasn’t true. Gravel had been the AK Speaker of the House during the 1965-67 session (as only a sophomore member). They apparently held an all-party primary in ‘66 for the U.S. House seat, and it ended up nearly a three-way tie between incumbent Dem Ralph Rivers (35%), Republican Howard Pollock (34%), and Gravel (31%). Gravel likely weakened Rivers so severely that when it went to the runoff, Rivers lost to Pollock, 52-48% (despite there being a clear 66% preference for the two Dems).

Gravel seemed to have a real desire to run down the old-timer Democrats, so after being partly responsible for taking out Rivers, he set his eyes on the venerable Ernest Gruening. When he ran in the all-party open primary, which featured 4 candidates (2 Dems, 2 R’s), he upset Gruening 34-30%. On the GOP side, former Anchorage Mayor Elmer Rasmuson beat AK House Majority Leader Ted Stevens, 19-17%. Stevens had run in ‘62 and lost to Gruening in the general by a 58-42% margin (Stevens hadn’t held office, yet - but used the exposure to win a legislative seat the following election).

But the Senate was about to have a second new face from AK as Dem incumbent Bob Bartlett died suddenly, just a month after the Nov ‘68 election and Gov. Wally Hickel appointed Stevens (who was about to be an ex-legislator come Jan ‘69). Hickel calculated the younger (45-year old) Stevens would be a better bet to have the seat remain in the “R” column then the older Rasmuson (59). Rasmuson lived until 2000 (91), so that wouldn’t have been too much a worry.

I think the loss of the AK House and losses of GOP seats in the Senate were solely an off-year reaction to Hickel (although the GOP didn’t really establish a solid hold on that body until the ‘90s !), so that’s why I think Nixon still would’ve carried the state absent Wallace, as he did in ‘60 when the state was more Democrat. As for the general in the Senate race, Gravel won by an underwhelming 45-38% over Rasmuson (so great was the anger for unseating Gruening that he got 17% just in write-in votes).

The Gruening family harbored a lot of anger over that loss, and they finally avenged it in 1980 when Ernest’s grandson, Clark (a former AK House member) defeated the nutty Gravel in the primary. But Clark picked a bad year to run as a Dem, and the divisiveness of the primary allowed Frank Murkowski to win, 54-46%.

Murkowski, of course, was the Republican who lost in ‘70 (which was a bad GOP year in AK) to Nick Begich when Rep. Howard Pollock badly miscalculated and opted to mount a losing challenge to incumbent Gov. Keith Miller (Hickel’s former Lieutenant who got the job when Hickel got a Nixon Cabinet position, practically getting raped on tv by national Democrats during the confirmation, and Hickel was a total disaster in that position and resigned after only a year !). Miller lost to Dem ex-Gov. Bill Egan for his swan song. We actually reclaimed the Governorship in the ‘74 Watergate year.

Had Pollock stayed in the House, Begich would never have won, and Pollock would’ve ended up in the Senate instead by ‘80 (or the Governorship in ‘74).

[Impy]

If I reading it right the rats slimed Hickel as anti-environment and then he failed as Interior Sec because he was in fact too liberal on environmental issues? Ha.

It also says he lost his Cabinet post when he criticized Nixon on Nam (which was not really his purview at Interior).

[fieldmarshaldj]

Hickel is an odd man. He followed orders in taking that Cabinet position that he really didn’t want and after his public raping by the media during confirmation, he wanted to appease his leftist critics (the WORST possible thing you can do as a Republican). Personally, I think he was looking for a way out of the job. He didn’t want to leave the Governorship after a scant 2 years.

When he finally won it back as a member of the AIP, ostensibly to the right of the GOP, he seemed Conservative enough as far as I know (and winning as a member of the AIP, he bypassed the incompetent, blundering GOP that nominated a string of subpar candidates for Governor). I see he was a Palin supporter when she, too, also ran as an outsider, but Wikipedia (in their usual hateful attitude towards her), repeated a claim from “Vanity Fair” that he didn’t give a damn what she did now — of course Hickel is 90, and there’s no telling what his mental faculties are, nor did it explain what it was that Palin did to draw such a response of disfavorability.