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The write-in campaign took off with an intensity that fed off Lisa Murkowski's renewed commitment. She never again wavered. Her supporters are certain of that.
She'd come so close to giving up. The day before the incumbent U.S. senator finally announced she was running as a write-in, she was still waffling. She'd even started writing a statement -- her family says "she was preparing for a wake." Even with support pouring in from all corners of the state, even the country, and from strangers as well as friends, still she hesitated.
The Republican Party was not going for it. National GOP leaders had closed ranks behind Joe Miller, her chief opponent, soon after he won the Aug. 24 primary. They vowed to help him with cash and sent top advisers to Alaska. Prominent Republican senators from throughout the country issued endorsements.
In Alaska, the party also stepped away from Murkowski, who had been a loyal member since she was 18. Even state party chairman Randy Ruedrich, who Miller had tried to oust in 2008, stood with the tea party-backed candidate and against Murkowski.
"We couldn't get pollsters or consultants in the Lower 48," says Steve Wackowski, Murkowski's main press spokesman through the primary and general elections. "They couldn't take us on because of the party. We knew that going ahead if we do this we would have no friends. We were going to be alone."
Murkowski had already resigned her post as vice chairwoman of the Senate Republican Conference, a leadership group. And she knew she risked losing one of her strongest political calling cards -- her seat as ranking member on the Senate Energy and Natural Resources committee.
Still, she couldn't get over the hundreds of Alaskans urging her to run anyway. Staff and family passed on dozens of e-mails every day, and not just short notes but messages that came from the heart pleading with her to the right thing for all Alaskans.
Murkowski decided to listen to the people instead of the party. A long talk with her husband, Verne Martell, cemented the decision. Letting her Senate seat go because the party wanted her to didn't make sense. "This feels wrong," she and Martell agreed.
They never looked back.
'The gloves are off'
It was early Friday morning, Sept. 17. She called family and a couple of key staff members. Then she hopped a plane for home.
Her surprised and delighted staffers picked themselves up and braced for more of the same attacks from the Joe Miller camp and Tea Party Express, which had financed a blistering ad campaign against Murkowski in the last week of the primary. Former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin would be weighing in, too, digging at Murkowski on Facebook and Twitter.
Within hours, the staff at Bradley Reid, the venerable Anchorage advertising and media firm, had put together a major announcement event at the Dena'ina Center in downtown Anchorage. Campaign staffers started dialing phones to get people there and word spread via Internet and phone banks.
"That particular day was crazy," says Carol Sturgulewski, Murkowski's older sister. "Everybody was on the phone or the Internet."
By 5 p.m., the third floor of the Dena'ina Center was decked out with signs and balloons. Volunteers manned tables signing up more volunteers and handing out buttons and bumper stickers. A cash bar helped fuel the excitement of the crowd, and just after 6 p.m. Murkowski worked her way through the throng of supporters, stopping frequently to hug people, shake hands and smile a wide smile that came easily and quickly throughout the evening.
"The gloves are off," she vowed that night. Some people cried.
She wrote the speech herself, a call to arms that was full of heart as well as heat.
"When she saw those people cheering for her and she realized the hope that she inspired in them, that is when I saw a change to Lisa Murkowski," says Wackowski.
Finding a cause
At 8 a.m. Saturday morning, staff showed up at campaign headquarters and found people already waiting outside the locked doors. They wanted yard signs, buttons, posters, bumper stickers, anything.
"It's as if people had found a cause," Sturgulewski says.
But the fact was there were hardly any signs or stickers or anything. The campaign had been shutting down since the primary weeks earlier. More than 200 people came by that first Saturday and the staff passed out the last 150 yard signs.
A huge scramble began. More campaign materials were immediately ordered up, and 15,000 pieces eventually went out the door in the six weeks between the announcement and the Nov. 2 vote.
At 11 p.m. that night, Wackowski called his boss. You're on the Candy Crowley show, a CNN political must-do, in four hours, he said. "I know your schedule's free at 3 a.m.," he joked.
But the effort to get national press was serious. The story of her write-in attempt was already captivating the country, not only the media who sent their national political writers to Alaska but pundits and bloggers who saw her run as a direct assault on the tea party craze that Palin and others were fueling in other states. Murkowski had to be the moderate, the reasonable voice, standing up to the tea party.
The time difference between Alaska and East Coast media proved brutal, especially when it had to be squeezed in at the beginning -- or end -- of already very long days. "We drove her into the ground," Wackowski says.
Kevin Sweeney, who had been Murkowski's state director, took over as campaign manger from John Bitney, who'd acknowledged she needed new blood at the top if for no other reason than to send a signal that this was a whole new effort. Bitney ended up running the campaign's "ground game" in the Mat-Su Valley -- Palin's home turf and a region that had trended heavily to Miller in the primary. He brought it back to even in the general.
Sweeney led a new team that included Cathy Allen, who generally works for Democrats, as chief strategist. Allen has a long history in Alaska politics, although she lives in Seattle now where she works for campaigns all over the world. In this case, her passion to make sure women are fully represented in elected office trumped the social and political agenda of a Republican. Allen says she didn't want to lose a decent female U.S. senator.
"She called and I immediately said I'll be right up," Allen says. "She announced on Friday, on Sunday she called me and I was in Anchorage on Tuesday."
Hoping to make history
The campaign also picked up a number of former top staffers that had worked for Ted Stevens, who had died just weeks earlier in a plane crash. Wackowski, Stevens' former press secretary who stepped into that role for Murkowski in the primary, says Stevens' people never forgot how Murkowski stood by their boss when he was facing criminal prosecution in 2008 and later lost his bid for re-election, ending his four decades as Alaska's senior senator.
"It's my belief that Ted was a big part of this campaign," Wackowski says now. "The sadness of losing Ted was starting to turn into defiance."
The mission was daunting, the goal of achieving what the experts said was unachievable humbling.
"Going into this we knew we were trying to make history," says Sweeney. "We were trying to do something different that had not been done since 1954 and had never been done in Alaska. So we knew we had an uphill battle."
From the start, the outpouring of support was overwhelming, he says. A thousand people called the campaign in the first week. People who had never worked on a campaign before began putting in 50 to 60 hours a week.
"I started to think not only is this the right thing to do, but we can actually win this," Sweeney says.
The sheer numbers of people who were calling and coming in gave him confidence that he had a volunteer base capable of running a successful grassroots campaign. And they were highly motivated.
Since the primary, Miller had managed to anger Murkowski supporters and raise eyebrows across the country. A few days after she announced her write-in bid, stories of Miller taking farm subsidies broke, and Murkowski supporters blasted him for the hypocrisy of decrying federal handouts while taking them himself. More revelations about Miller's background and previous problems would soon dominate the campaign. Particularly annoying were what Wackowski refers to as "the asinine tweets." In September, Miller took a trip to Washington, D.C., where he met with party honchos and fundraisers. Somebody with Miller's campaign posted a number of messages on his Twitter feed that bordered on bragging, suggesting he ought to look for a house and office furniture while he was back there.
Murkowski's supporters doubled their efforts, and more volunteers streamed in.
Alaskans love an unconventional fight'
Five new field offices opened by the end of September -- in Wasilla, Kenai, Juneau, Ketchikan and Kodiak. All were staffed by volunteers itching to lend a hand if the campaign would give them a place to work out of. That allowed what Sweeney calls "a concerted ground game" and a face for the revitalized campaign in a number of different geographic areas.
Allen landed in Anchorage to find no campaign plan of any kind. She was delighted to discover, however, there was plenty of money in the bank. "For a Democrat, that was hog heaven, to start this thing off with money."
In six days, she crafted a budget of about $1.7 million and created an organizational chart that covered about 20 people.
Certain things were immediately apparent. "The first job we had was to prove to people that this could be done," she says. "We had to convince our own team."
Immediate visibility was critical. Two thousand yard signs went up in seven days. A Democratic phone bank team was put to work and the calls started going out.
The message: It's honorable to challenge the system. More importantly, it's part of being an Alaskan to challenge the system. Murkowski was not breaking the rules, she was off on an adventure that people were clamoring to be part of.
"The ability to come out swinging" also was important, Allen says. "Every time anybody wanted to take a hit at her we had to be able to respond immediately."
A big campaign boost turned out to be "Joe Miller stepping in it every place he went," Allen says.
The communications staff's job soon became one of sending out press releases emphasizing the "stupid things" Miller was doing, she says. "We needed to keep the pressure on him so Alaskans would realize he wasn't a competent alternative, that this guy was not worthy to be part of the team" that had once included Ted Stevens.
Her Democrat opponent, Sitka Mayor Scott McAdams, presented a different strategical challenge. He was a likeable nice guy, but he just wasn't ready to be a U.S. senator, the Murkowski camp argued.
"My job in this campaign was to see to it we didn't say anything negative about Scott," Allen says. "He never did catch fire. He never really moved beyond 26 percent."
The message boiled down to a simple statement about each of the contenders: Joe is not competent to be U.S. senator. Scott is a nice guy but he just can't win. And Lisa can deliver the financial boost from Washington, D.C., that Alaska needs.
Allen sees Alaska as a place where people value hard work and innovative thinking, a place where people love to buck the system. It's what gave rise to Sarah Palin, the tea party and Joe Miller.
"We had to take from Joe the capacity to buck the system," Allen says. "She became a cause. Coupled with the missteps of the Miller campaign, it gave people a reason to want to rally behind her."
"The story about this campaign will be that Alaskans don't just love politics," she says, "they love an unconventional fight."
Part II: 'We had to prove this could be done'
Contact Patti Epler at patti(at)alaskadispatch.com.