Alaska Governor Bill Walker suddenly drops out of reelection race, endorses Democratic opponent

| 7:17 pm EDT October 19, 2018
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There are a few things that make Alaska politics different from that of other red states. For one thing, there are a lot of three-way races, and sometimes the registered Independent wins. For instance, the current Governor of Alaska, Bill Walker, is an Independent – and until just now, he had been facing Republican and Democratic challengers in his reelection bid. Now he’s facing neither of them, because he just dropped out.

Bill Walker lost his running mate earlier this week to a sexual misconduct scandal, and the polls have increasingly suggested that if Walker remained in the race, Republican candidate Mike Dunleavy would win. Walker found this prospect unacceptable, so he’s dropping out and – according to the Anchorage Daily News – he’s informally endorsing Democratic candidate Mark Begich. So what’s going to happen now?

The three-way polling in the Alaska Governor race had Walker and Begich each getting twenty-something percent of the vote, with Dunleavy getting forty-something percent of the vote. So if these numbers are accurate, and if Walker’s supporters take his advice and switch their votes to Begich, there is now the apparently realistic possibility that a Democrat could become the next Governor of Alaska. That said, with this kind of seismic shakeup just two and a half weeks before election day, it’s really difficult to predict what might happen next.

Alaska’s penchant for three-way races has created some interesting results over the years. For instance, longtime Republican Senator Lisa Murkowski lost the Republican nomination to a primary challenger in 2010, but then managed to win a three-way general election race by running as an Independent. And of course Bill Walker ran for Governor as a Republican in 2010, before running as an Independent in 2014, and now he’s dropping out and endorsing a Democrat.