How Sarah Palin could decide Alaska's race for Senate

To take control of the U.S. Senate in January, in the November general election the Republican Party needs to win six of the eight seats that Charlie Cook, Stu Rothenberg, and other pundits who pay attention to such things say are up for grabs. One of those seats is occupied by Mark Begich, Alaska’s first term Democratic senator.

Those same pundits say that the likelihood that Begich will be reelected in November is a toss-up. Except for Nate Silver, the wunderkind du jour of algorithms, who last month gave Begich a slight statistical edge. But Silver rightly cautioned that the outcome of the Alaska Senate election may be “the hardest race to forecast” because, with voters scattered in villages and small towns from Barrow south to Ketchikan, polling on the nation’s Last Frontier “is often erratic.”

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Because the outcome of the Senate election in Alaska may well decide which party controls the U.S. Senate, the NRSC, whose chairman and vice chairman unofficially support Dan Sullivan, and the super-PACs with which the NRSC is connected will have two months to try to transform Joe Miller into the mainstream conservative Republican candidate he’s not in order to try to make him acceptable to the center-right, but not completely crazy, independent voters who in the 2010 general election abandoned Joe in order to help re-elect Lisa Murkowski.

And while that’s happening, the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee and the super-PACs connected to it will be spending who can only guess how many millions of dollars to help Mark Begich try to marginalize Joe the way that prior to the 2010 general election Harry Reid and Christopher Coons marginalized Sharron Angle and Christine O’Donnell, the Tea Party upstarts who upset the establishment candidates in the 2010 Republican Senate primary elections in Nevada and Delaware.

For those of us sitting in the ringside seats, it’s going to be quite the show.