Alaska Senator Lisa Murkowski claims she is a Republican.
Her fans in the press keep calling her the last independent voice in the Republican Party.
And Murkowski answered Trump with one move her own father would never have dreamed of making.
Murkowski Hands Her Blessing to the Lone Democrat
US Senator Lisa Murkowski (R-AK) endorsed Jonathan Kreiss-Tomkins for governor of Alaska in the final stretch before the November 3 election.
Kreiss-Tomkins, a former Democrat state lawmaker from Sitka who goes by “JKT,” is the only Democrat in a four-way race against three Republicans. President Trump endorsed one of those Republicans, Anchorage businesswoman Bernadette Wilson, earlier in October.
Murkowski made her pitch in an interview with Alaska’s News Source. “JKT is a young Alaskan with a view and a perspective that I think Alaska needs right now,” she said.
Then she turned her fire on her own party. “I have found fault. I have found fault with the Dunleavy administration,” Murkowski said of outgoing Republican Governor Mike Dunleavy. “I think that they have left federal money on the table.”
Read that complaint one more time. A Republican senator’s big beef with a Republican governor is that he didn’t grab enough cash out of Washington, DC. Every one of those federal dollars came out of somebody’s paycheck first, and plenty of Republican voters would count leaving some of it alone as a point in Dunleavy’s favor.
The Kreiss-Tomkins campaign followed up with a statement from the senator. “Our future is too important to be hamstrung by partisan divisions,” Murkowski said, adding that Kreiss-Tomkins “understands that governing requires listening to people with different perspectives and finding common ground to solve the problems all of us face.”
But the calendar tells a less lofty story.
Trump tore into Murkowski after she came out against his lawsuit asking a court to hold up certification of Alaska’s Senate race if US Senator Dan Sullivan (R-AK) loses. “Lisa Murkowski is a DISGRACE to Alaska and our Country,” Trump wrote. “You just don’t get any worse!”
Within days, Murkowski lined up behind the Democrat.
A Senate Seat Handed Down From the Governor’s Office
Here’s the piece of history that never seems to make the national write-ups.
Lisa Murkowski didn’t win her way into the US Senate. Her father put her there.
Frank Murkowski held that seat for more than two decades before he ran for governor in 2002 and beat Democrat Lieutenant Governor Fran Ulmer. He resigned from the Senate to take office that December, and less than three weeks later he named his daughter, then a member of the Alaska House of Representatives, to finish out his term.
And Republicans made sure the right governor got to make that call. During the 2002 campaign, the Republican-controlled Legislature rewrote the succession law so outgoing Democrat Governor Tony Knowles couldn’t pick Frank Murkowski’s replacement himself. That rewrite left the choice with whoever won the governor’s race.
But plenty of Alaskans cried nepotism, and the grumbling hung over her like a low gray cloud through her first campaign.
Who did she have to beat in 2004 to hang on to the seat? Tony Knowles.
Now jump ahead to the current race. Knowles, the last Democrat to win the governor’s office in Alaska, endorsed Kreiss-Tomkins back in May. Murkowski now stands in the very same corner as the Democrat she defeated, the one her father’s allies once kept from filling the seat she still holds.
A Republican governor launched Lisa Murkowski’s Senate career. She just endorsed the candidate who would put a Democrat in that office for the first time since Knowles left it in 2002.
Independence That Only Points One Direction
Murkowski’s admirers will call all of this independence. Her voting record points somewhere a lot more predictable.
When Brett Kavanaugh came up for the Supreme Court in October 2018, Murkowski voted against moving his nomination forward and then marked herself “present” on the final roll call instead of voting yes.
In February 2021, she joined six other Republicans in voting to convict Trump at his second impeachment trial, a partisan January 6 exercise House Democrats pushed even after he had already left the White House.
But she wasn’t finished. In January 2025, Murkowski became the first Republican senator to announce her opposition to one of Trump’s Cabinet picks, voting against Pete Hegseth for Secretary of Defense. Her no vote helped produce a 50-50 deadlock that Vice President JD Vance had to break. A few weeks later, she voted against Kash Patel for FBI Director.
And in 2024, she endorsed Democrat Mary Peltola in Peltola’s losing effort to keep Alaska’s only House seat.
That’s an awful lot of independence, and it keeps landing on the same side of the aisle.
The candidate she picked this time fits the pattern. Planned Parenthood’s political arm endorsed Kreiss-Tomkins as a “champion” of abortion access, and the Alaska Beacon reported he repeatedly voted against legislation and budget items aimed at limiting abortion during his decade in the state House. Planned Parenthood, the country’s biggest abortion business, rakes in hundreds of millions of taxpayer dollars a year while ending hundreds of thousands of unborn lives. And Murkowski apparently found nothing in that record worth a second thought.
Kreiss-Tomkins knows how to play the label game, too. During a 2016 state House race, the Juneau Empire noted he left party labels off his campaign signs entirely. And in an August interview with Alaska’s News Source, he paid Murkowski a compliment she must have enjoyed. “If nothing else, Lisa Murkowski is independent-minded,” he said.
Payback Wearing a Bipartisan Costume
Maybe the endorsement barely moves the needle. A New York Times/Siena poll taken in late September and early October put Kreiss-Tomkins at 46 percent among likely voters, with Wilson at 24, Dave Bronson at 17, and Treg Taylor at 13. Three Republicans carving up the vote under Alaska’s ranked-choice system hands the Democrat a big head start no matter what Murkowski says.
So perhaps she simply backed the man leading the polls. Politicians hop on bandwagons all the time.
But a sitting Republican senator has no obligation to pick a side in a governor’s race at all. Murkowski could have stayed on the sidelines. She chose to weigh in days after Trump called her a disgrace. And she chose the Democrat.
Her statement leans hard on the phrase “partisan divisions.” Funny how her cure for partisanship always seems to require a Democrat winning something.
Murkowski belongs to the slice of the Senate Republican conference that never made peace with Trump and spends its energy waiting for the day he leaves office. Voting to convict him, opposing his nominees, and now boosting a Democrat for governor all serve the same goal: a party that looks the way it did before 2016, back when the establishment ran the show and the voters stayed quiet.
Her current term runs through 2028, and by then she’ll have a lot of explaining to do to the Republicans who keep finding her name attached to Democrat causes.
Frank Murkowski used the governor’s office to hand his daughter a seat in the US Senate.
Twenty-four years later, his daughter is trying to hand that office to a Democrat.
Sources: Mediaite, “Republican Senator Lisa Murkowski Endorses Democrat for Alaska Governor”; Alaska’s News Source, “On the record: Q&A with Jonathan Kreiss-Tomkins”; Alaska Beacon, “Where do Alaska’s four candidates for governor stand on abortion?”; The Alaska Current, “Former Alaska Gov. Knowles endorses Kreiss-Tomkins for governor”; Roll Call, “A Tale of Two Governors … And One Daughter”; Fox News, “Alaska Changes Senate Appointment Rule”; Juneau Empire, “As Finkenbinder challenges in Sitka, Kreiss-Tomkins looks to rural district for support”; Juneau Empire, “Murkowski says she will vote against Hegseth, making her first GOP senator to oppose a Trump Cabinet pick”; ABC News, “Hegseth sworn in as defense secretary after narrow Senate vote”; Alaska Public Media, “Alaska’s race for governor picks up 16th candidate, a former state legislator from Sitka”