Sarah Palin Is a Faux Populist. Alaskans Chose the Authentic One. | #alaska | #politics


EDITOR’S NOTE:&nbspEach week we cross-post Katrina vanden Heuvel’s column from the WashingtonPost.com. Read the full archive of Katrina’s Post columns here.

Back in the halcyon days of 2010, I wrote my first Washington Post column about a hockey mom from Alaska who seemed, at the time, to have a bright future ahead of her in conservative politics.

When Sarah Palin appeared on the national scene in 2008, she represented a then-novel kind of Republican: faux populist and made for reality TV. She has not held office since 2009, but Palin paved the way for the party as we know it today. That is why her second loss in a row to Democrat Mary Peltola in Alaska’s congressional election is a promising sign—for Alaska and for the United States.

Today’s Republican Party is full of would-be Palins—fame-chasing self-dealers for whom truth-telling is optional and apologizing an afterthought. They exist at every level of the party, from election deniers attempting to seize control at the state level to the Emmy-losing former reality show host now seeking reentry into the White House.

On the precipice of yet another election cycle riddled with reactionaries, progressives would do well to emulate the 2022 Democratic strategies that caused a once-rising star of the conservative right to fall flat.

Palin came to prominence in 2008 as the surprise Republican vice-presidential nominee—an evangelical Hail Mary pass from the foundering campaign of John McCain. McCain lost, but Palin leveraged her notoriety to become a leading voice in the tea party movement of 2010, was discussed as a possible contender for president in 2012 and raised eyebrows with an early endorsement of Donald Trump in 2016.

Palin did not attempt a political comeback herself until this year, when she ran to replace the late GOP Rep. Don Young as Alaska’s sole representative in Congress. She had near-universal name recognition in a solid-red state, running for an open seat. And she had the endorsement of Trump—the new ultraconservative standard-bearer—who won the state in 2020 by more than 10 points.




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