“It’s going to come down to the ground game.”
Most of the time, this isn’t really true. Fundamentals such as party registration numbers and the state of the economy usually play a larger part in election outcomes than the campaigns’ respective efforts to ensure that their voters actually vote.
But suddenly there’s reason to believe that the ground game is going to matter more in this year’s Alaska Senate contest between Democratic incumbent Mark Begich and Republican challenger Dan Sullivan than it has mattered in pretty much any other major race in recent memory.
In fact, what’s happening on the ground in Alaska — the nitty-gritty work of identifying friendly voters in the farthest-flung corners of the Last Frontier, then turning them out on Election Day — may ultimately force the rest of us to wait well into November before we find out whether Republicans or Democrats will control the U.S. Senate in 2015.
There are two reasons for this.
The first is the polling. For months, the Alaska Senate race has been frozen in place, statistically speaking. Nine mainstream surveys were released between Aug. 20 and Oct. 12 — and all nine showed Sullivan, a Harvard-educated Marine, leading Begich by roughly 4 or 5 percentage points. The polling was so consistent that analysts began to turn their attention to harder-to-call races in Georgia, Iowa and Kansas, writing off Alaska as a fairly likely flip for the GOP.
This brings us to the second reason why Alaska may be turning into a nail-biter: Because if anyone has the kind of ground game in place that could make these numbers come true on Nov. 4 — at least in part — it’s Begich.
Begich hasn’t really out-campaigned Sullivan in recent weeks, at least not to the tune of a 10-point jump in the polls. At first Begich attacked his rival — an Ohio native and longtime Maryland resident — for not being Alaskan enough; it didn’t give him the lead. Lately, Begich has been hammering away at the point that he isn’t really as Democratic as he seems — a necessary message in a conservative state, but not exactly an inspiring one. In fact, he’s often behaved as if he were running against President Barack Obama rather than, say, Sullivan. “I don’t care to have [Obama] campaign for me,” Begich recently told Politico. “His policies aren’t working.”
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