Trump Wins Alaska's Electoral Votes, GOP Retains Senate Seat in 'The Last Frontier'
President Donald Trump has won the state of Alaska, and Republican incumbent Sen. Dan Sullivan has also retained his seat.
The Republican president was awarded the state’s three electoral votes, pushing his latest Electoral College tally to 217.
His Democratic opponent, Joe Biden, has 290 electoral votes, but some of that is obviously being disputed in court by the Trump administration.
Incumbent Alaska Sen. Dan Sullivan defeated Al Gross, an independent running as a Democrat. And even though the GOP has now reached 50 Senate seats after the Democrat candidate conceded in North Carolina on Tuesday, neither party can lock the US Senate majority until January runoffs for two Senate seats in Georgia.
The Alaskan Senate race had been determined too early to call on Election Day Nov. 3 due to a large number of outstanding absentee ballots. Election officials began counting more than 150,000 absentee and other ballots on Tuesday.
Indiana Sen. Todd Young, chair of the National Republican Senatorial Committee, congratulated Sullivan in a statement, calling him a man “who has championed the unique needs of his state in Washington.”
The Republicans in the top-tier races on Alaska’s ballot - President Donald Trump, Sullivan and U.S. Rep. Don Young - held largely similar vote counts, and advantages, when Election Day results and early votes through Oct. 29 were tallied. The Associated Press called all three races for the Republican incumbents on Wednesday.
The largest bloc of registered voters in Alaska identifies as independents, though the state has leaned Republican, sending just one Democrat to the Senate since 1980. Mark Begich (D), who served a term, narrowly lost to Sullivan in 2014, which was another year when Senate control was at stake.
Gross and other critics of Sullivan sought to make Sullivan’s ties to President Donald Trump an issue. Sullivan said the Trump administration has been a partner with the state and pointed to investments in the military and rural law enforcement and moves to ease or lift restrictions on federal lands for oil and gas drilling and logging.
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