Thread by @jbendery

Local Alaska interviewer: We're doing ranked choice voting now. It's very different. People might get confused by the ballot. What's your campaign strategy gonna be?

Lisa Murkowski, who won Senate reelection in 2010 via a fuckin write-in campaign: Hold my beer.

"This is going to look a little bit different," Murkowski says of ranked choice voting ballots. "Just looking different shouldn't intimidate anybody."

"Our effort needs to be to make it more familiar to people, to be there to answer the questions they have."

Murkowski talks a bit about her 2010 write-in campaign, which remains one of the most incredible political comebacks I've ever seen.

The two-step strategy was to get people to 1) spell her name right and 2) fill in the oval.

"Our campaign motto was 'fill it in, write it in.'"

"We had to not only remind people why they wanted to vote for me, what I had done for them ... but we had to teach them how to do a write in," she says.

"If you spelled my name 100% correctly but didn't fill in the oval, it didn't count. That was one of our big fears."

Murkowski won her 2010 Senate reelection against the odds and with no support from the Republican Party which dropped her like a hot potato after the primary.

She was the first candidate to win a write-in Senate campaign since South Carolina’s Strom Thurmond in 1954.

I think Murkowski being dropped by her party in 2010 after the primary, and having to fend for herself, shaped a lot of how she operates today as a politician.

It also helped cement the bipartisan coalition of Alaskans that continues to reelect her now. huffpost.com/entry/lisa-mur…