Something Awry In Anchorage

Nate Silver of FiveThirtyEight.com is reporting of some extremely unusual voter trends in Alaska, trends that might shed some light on the surprise upset of Democrats Mark Begich and Ethan Berkowitz. It seems that Alaska turnout was actually down, in stark contrast to the rest of the country, to the tune of better than fourteen percent.

That's a dramatic decrease in statewide voter participation, in a year with an extremely close Senate race as well as the appearance of the highly popular governor as a candidate for the Vice-Presidency. Just as confusing is the fact that these voters consistently told pollsters that they intended to swing the other way. So, is this then some sort of "Stevens Effect," where voters were unwilling to tell pollsters that they had no compunction voting to reelect a convicted felon?

That doesn't appear likely. The problem is that it wasn't just the Stevens race that defied gravity. It seems that the polling was also dramatically wrong about the race for the state's at-large congressional district. And it understated McCain's victory margin almost two-fold. Indeed, in all the national contests, Alaska Republicans picked up roughly 12-14 points more than their polling averages indicated should receive on election day, at the same time that tens of thousands of usually good voters stayed at home, leading to the lowest turnout for a presidential election in Alaskan history.

Silver suspects that this could be a result of Democrats deflated by Obama's certain defeat in the state, yet complacent about the leads that Berkowitz and Begich had racked up. I'm not so sure. More to follow.