Sarah Palin’s Last Frontier

Five days before a special election for Alaska’s lone seat in the U.S. House of Representatives, I went to a strip mall in Anchorage to look for Sarah Palin. I found her campaign office inside a real-estate agency, next to a diner, in the southern part of the city. A handwritten sign on the door said “be right back,” and, outside the headquarters, Kari James, a landscaper working in the dirt, told me that Jerry Ward, who was lending his space to Palin, had gone out for a sandwich. Nobody was inside.

“The Guardian and the Telegraph already came here,” James said. “One of them was writing an article about . . . keeping bathrooms separate? I told her some places she could go talk to liberals in Anchorage. The other one had already written her story—she just wanted to fill in quotes. Why are so many British papers here asking about Sarah Palin?” James went on, “I started landscaping here yesterday, and Jerry was already telling people I’ve joined the campaign. I haven’t. I’m just landscaping, but I love Sarah Palin.”

Alaska’s House seat is open for the first time in forty-nine years, after the death, in March, of Don Young—the longest-serving Republican in congressional history. Palin, the state’s former governor, led a field of forty-eight candidates in a June primary, and is now facing just two: the Republican businessman Nick Begich, whose grandfather formerly held the seat as a Democrat, and the Democrat Mary Peltola, a Yupik Eskimo from rural Alaska.

James moved to Alaska from Nebraska a few years ago; her family is in the military. “I don’t consider myself an Alaskan yet,” she said. “But I am thinking about this on a national scale. We need to have our own Republican version of the Squad—[Lauren] Boebert, Margie Taylor Greene, and Sarah Palin.”

Ward turned into the parking lot and let me come inside. A framed photo of him shaking hands with Trump was on a side table by his desk. “I know Trump because of Sarah,” he said. “I know Sarah because she knows my kids.” Ward, an Alaska Native and a former state senator, managed Donald Trump’s 2016 campaign in the state, and now runs the real-estate business with his wife. They also live there. “It’s a home, a company, a veterans’ talking circle, a prayer group—we pray for Biden and Trump,” he said. Sean Hannity was on the radio, doing a segment about Clinton’s e-mails. “Sarah was here this morning,” Ward told me. “She sits at the glass table. She was with nurses or veterans, I think. I have no idea.” Hannity went to commercial break; an ad for Palin came on the air, in which she said, “Don’t retreat—reload.”

“She’s got herself a situation,” Ward said. “She’s out with a church group door-knocking. It’s not a good use of her time. Alaska is very spread out.” I wrote down my contact information on a sticky note. Ward took a picture of it. “I sent her your stuff—she’ll call you,” he said. “Or not.”

“I have so many Sarah Palin narratives,” Andrew Halcro, a former Republican member of Alaska’s statehouse, told me. “Which one do you want?” We were in the coffee shop of the ocean-liner-size Captain Cook hotel, in Anchorage. Halcro spent ten months with Palin on the campaign trail when they both ran for governor, a little more than fifteen years ago, and he pointed to the café across the lobby from us, where he and Palin had sat debriefing after an event about agricultural policy. “She was, like, ‘You’re out there spitting facts, Andrew, and I’m looking out at the crowd, and I think, Are all those facts really so important?’ ”

Halcro, who was among the forty-eight candidates who had run for the U.S. House seat, went on: “Throughout the whole luncheon, you literally couldn’t understand a word she was saying, but when she worked the crowd after it was like the Second Coming. She’s good at pep rallies—she makes people feel like they’re on a different plane of existence. As soon as she realized glittering generalities served her better, she was able to float above it all.” At one event, months into the campaign, Palin had demanded that all the candidates give their remarks while seated, because, if she stood, she couldn’t read the talking points on the back of her place card. “When I watch her today and think back, it’s almost as if she was frozen in time and someone went and cracked the tomb open, and here she is, emerging unchanged,” Halcro said.

The current era, at least on the national level, is even more hospitable to Palin’s style. Two weeks ago, at a CPAC convention in Dallas, she lamented that the 2008 Presidential campaign had put “some shackles” on her, because what’s needed now is someone who will “go rogue.” She wore a bejewelled Star of David, a red blazer, and a black sequinned top. “Those Freedom Caucus members—I love them and I hope I hook up with them,” she said. In the 2010 page-turner “Game Change,” John Heilemann and Mark Halperin describe how John McCain’s team, increasingly desperate for a running mate, plucked Palin out of obscurity. They wanted someone who would “shock the world.” Palin was “endlessly watchable,” even “a star”—though a vetting report at the time warned that she was also an “inexperienced beauty queen whose main national exposure was a photo-spread in Vogue in February 2008.” McCain liked that she was an outsider. (At the time, she had an eighty per cent in-state approval rating, the highest of any governor in the nation.) To prep for the media, and to debate her Vice-Presidential opponent, Joe Biden, Palin sat in conference rooms, surrounded by stacks of index cards with information about world affairs. (This was called this her “Eliza Doolittle moment.”)

It didn’t go well. She couldn’t memorize the note cards. She blew her Katie Couric interview. “The McCain people did fail Palin,” Heilemann and Halperin wrote. “They had, as promised, made her one of the most famous people in the world overnight. But they allowed her no time to plant her feet to absorb such a seismic shift.” It was Palin the outsider against the political insiders, who threw her under the bus after summoning her into their midst.

In early 2016, Palin endorsed Trump, and she has done many of the typical Trump-world rotations—Fox, “The Masked Singer,” Cameo, CPAC, reality shows, her own YouTube channel. She’s made a lot of money. But she might lose her new bid for office to Nick Begich, a man with three hundred and eighteen Twitter followers. Palin played on the outsider “maverick” theme when she first came onto the national stage, but now her position as an outsider in her own state is a liability. On Sunday, Begich flew to Kodiak Island, one of Alaska’s fishing hubs, to shake hands at a brewery; sometimes he goes to the airport just to say hello to people. “Sarah left Alaska” is one of his campaign mainstays. “All of her money comes from outside,” Halcro told me. “People in Oklahoma see her on TV, think she’s the cat’s pajamas, and decide to donate.”

During the Vice-Presidential run, Palin worried that Alaskans would turn on her for losing touch with the state. Now she’s fully embraced the national and the online. Earlier this month, she skipped a candidates’ forum on the Kenai Peninsula for a fund-raiser in Minneapolis. Participants addressed questions to her empty chair. “Sarah knows how to work a crowd, how to understand crowd vibes—but it’s Sarah, Inc.,” Suzanne Downing, the publisher of the conservative news site Must Read Alaska, told me. “She’s a populist, not a conservative.” I met Downing at the Alaska headquarters of Americans for Prosperity, an advocacy group funded by the Koch brothers, in a strip mall next to a military-recruitment center. We sat in a conference room near a plastic box of materials used to visually explain the new ranked-choice voting system that Alaskans would utilize when casting their ballots. (The controversial system, approved in 2020, is almost farcically confusing; a recent event in Juneau, titled Drag Out the Vote, featured a mock election in which drag queens tried to explain it.) The Americans for Prosperity PAC endorses Begich, as do the Alaska Republican Party, FreedomWorks for America, and the Anchorage Young Republicans; Palin’s endorsements include Trump, Bikers for Trump, Ben Carson, and Rick Perry. The goal of the populist isn’t necessarily to win elections; her ambition may be more about re-laundering her celebrity. “Sarah’s like A.O.C., but for the right,” Downing said. “All of the mayors and elected officials and leaders of the state have endorsed Begich. And then Palin’s out there with Glenn Beck and Charlie Kirk backing her.”

Wasilla, where Palin lives, is peppered with signs for her opponent. Main Street bisects a strip mall, which has a row of frontier-style shops. At the turnoff for the Best Western, across the road from dismantled shipping containers and a construction site, a lone “Sarah for Alaska” sign was weighed down with sandbags. This was the entrance to her property. Down the driveway, at an unoccupied guard station, a pile of discarded antlers sat on the ground next to a flowerpot. The Best Western and Palin’s house have adjacent docks on Lake Lucille, near a seaplane-landing area. Much of the reality show “Sarah Palin’s Alaska”—produced by Mark Burnett, who also did “The Apprentice”—was filmed in the house. She wasn’t there. I went back to the Best Western and tried to find the transcript of Palin’s recent “tele-rally,” her only scheduled campaign event the week before the election, which took place on the day of the F.B.I. raid at Mar-a-Lago; Trump called in to tell Palin’s supporters that it had been “another day in paradise.”

At night, I went to a fund-raiser, in Wasilla’s Mat-Su Valley, for Begich. The event was co-hosted by Palin’s former in-laws, Faye and Jim, who have become strong public supporters of Begich, at least since Palin announced her candidacy. “There’s a lot of things Sarah hasn’t shown up to,” Jim told me. “We’ve got grandkids and we want to remain positive with them. But the bottom line is we just feel Nick is the most qualified. He wants the best for Alaska and for America. We do our best to avoid any conflict.” (In 2008, Faye told the New York Daily News that she was considering voting for Obama, instead of her daughter-in-law: “I’m not sure what she brings to the ticket other than she’s a woman and a conservative.” In this race, the family drama isn’t unique to Palin. Begich’s own grandmother has said that she wouldn’t vote for him, and his uncle Mark has put on fund-raisers for Peltola, the Democratic candidate.)

Attendees—a mayor of a nearby town, longtime local residents—took snacks from a table with chili, croissant sandwiches, and desserts; the plastic cutlery was in a mug that read “Let’s Go Brandon.” Ashley Reed, a state lobbyist for Wells Fargo and various natural-gas interests, sat at the door, asking people to sign their names. “I know Sarah,” he said. “That’s why I don’t support Sarah. We only have one seat, so the person we send there needs to actually show up. She’s trying to pump up the brand again.” Out on the porch, Eric Koan, a co-host of the fund-raiser, who was wearing a Hawaiian shirt, sat at a round table looking out over the valley. A retired federal-loan officer for rural Alaska, Koan got involved with Begich’s campaign because his wife is in Republican women’s clubs. Of Palin, he told me, “We don’t see her anywhere.”

The theme of Palin bailing out of Alaska came up all night. “She lost her Fox News deal, she doesn’t have a reality show anymore—she’s just trying to get her celebrity status back,” Truman Reed, Begich’s campaign manager and a former legislative assistant to Don Young, said. As the conservative columnist Paul Jenkins put it to me, “Alaska is a cheap political date. If you have something you want to push, this is a good place, because there aren’t that many people. But it also means people feel taken advantage of.”