‘RINO’ Backlash: Senator Lisa Murkowski Hits Record-Low Approval in Alaska Poll
Senator Lisa Murkowski (R-AK) has suffered a catastrophic collapse in overall favorability as more voters turn against so-called RINOs, according to a new poll conducted by Alaska Survey Research.
Murkowski now finds herself underwater with self-identified conservative respondents by 64 percentage points.
The senator, who is often in the firing line of President Donald Trump’s base for siding with Senate Democrats on numerous occasions, should not be surprised by the poll.
While Murkowski did cast a decisive vote in favor of the Trump-backed Big Beautiful Bill, she also joined Senate Democrats in voting against a key Trump judicial nominee last week.
In 2021, she voted to impeach Trump after the January 6 Capitol protests.
She also voted to extend citizenship to DACA recipients in 2018 and voted to block emergency funding for a border wall in 2019.
Murkowski’s approval rating among conservatives, while extremely low, has not budged compared with the poll’s previous result back in April, according to Alaska Survey Research.
Her approval rating among self-described progressives and moderates has utterly collapsed in that same time period, however.
Murkowski’s net approval rating among moderates has fallen from +28 in April to just two points in the green in the August survey—a decline of 26 percentage points in just a few months.
Her favorability rating among the progressive left also dropped from +54 to an astonishing -21 between April and August.
The result suggests that liberals no longer give Murkowski credit for being anti-Trump.
“You can see what a pariah Lisa had become on the right. Her BASE was comprised of lefty progressives, Dems and left-leaning moderates,” Alaska Survey Research wrote in a summary of the most recent poll.
“So along comes the Big Beautiful Bill. And after a bout of hand-wringing that even Susan Collins would’ve been proud of, Lisa votes yes.”
Murkowski was appointed by her father, then-Alaska Governor Frank Murkowski, in 2002.
She most recently survived a primary challenge from a Trump-backed candidate, which is largely credited to the state’s ranked-choice voting system.
This system allows voters to rank their candidates in order of preference.
If no candidate secures more than 50 percent in the primary, the candidate with the fewest votes is eliminated, and their votes are redistributed to the voters’ next preferences.
Murkowski managed to defeat Trump-endorsed Kelly Tshibaka thanks to the ranked-choice system, as the incumbent received 77 percent of Democratic Party candidate Patricia Chesbro’s second-choice votes.
READ: Anti-Trump Senator Lisa Murkowski Whines She’s “Afraid” of Speaking Her Mind About the President