On Tuesday, as anyone who turned on the television news lately is aware, Massachusetts elected a Republican, Scott Brown, to the United States Senate.

This is the first time the Bay State has sent a Republican to the upper house of Congress since Edward Brooke in the 1970s. (And Brooke, who supported abortion rights, fought for Title IX, called for Nixon to resign after Watergate and befriended Nelson Rockefeller, would hardly be recognized by as a Republican in today’s GOP.)

Writing in Slate, Christopher Beam points out that the notable absence of exit polls in Massachusetts on Tuesday means the reasons behind Brown’s victory will remain murky, and subject to a lot of guesswork. “Everyone has his or her own interpretation of why Brown won and Coakley lost,” Beam writes. “Which is why the aftermath of this election is likely to be as acrimonious as the election itself: No one can prove or disprove anything. Even more than usual, the pundits and analysts don't really know what they're talking about.”

Beam, writing Tuesday evening while the news was still fresh, offers a rundown of the theories already emerging: That the Democrat in the race, Martha Coakley, had botched a race that was hers for the taking through a combination of laziness and blunders; that Coakley had been left with underwhelming support from the White House and national Democrats; that Americans—even those in liberal Massachusetts—hate the impending health care reform so much, they were willing to elect anyone to stop it; or still more sweepingly, that “it was an across-the-board repudiation of Obama’s agenda.”

But Beam’s analysis discounts the explanation I like best, from this vantage point a few thousand miles to the northwest; it’s the one I heard from a friend Wednesday morning, who called the Brown victory “cosmic comeuppance for Mark Begich winning in Alaska.”

Joking aside, though, there’s a kernel of truth here. Not that the cosmos cares about maintaining the balance of one nation’s two-party system so much as that the underlying attitudes of voters in such a two-party system occasionally demand these kinds of counterintuitive shifts. Red states like Alaska are never quite as red as they seem, and a certain number of conservatives will always make their home in “Tax-a-chusetts” (as right-wing talk show hosts have grown fond of calling it).

Begich—an anomaly himself as a pro-ANWR drilling, pro-gun rights Democrat—seems to understand this. Although his statement in the wake of Brown’s election didn’t explicitly state it, you can sense his kinship with Brown on these matters: “I congratulate Scott Brown on his victory in Tuesday’s special election for Massachusetts’ Senate seat. Senator-elect Brown assembled an impressive coalition of supporters from both political parties and independent voters, much like I did in my own Senate race,” the release reads.

“I look forward to working with Senator-elect Brown and introducing him to issues that are important to Alaska. Our states share common ground on matters that affect our military and America’s coasts and we must work across party lines to address them.”

In fact, our states share fairly little common ground when viewed, like this, as discrete constituencies within the Union. The common ground we do share is the ordinary people of both states, neither of whom are as monolithically liberal or conservative as Election Day maps and talking heads suggest, or true believers on either end of the political spectrum would like to think.

None of this means that such tensions aren’t strong, though, and Alaska’s become a microcosm of this lately.

On the one hand we’ve elected centrist Democrat Mark Begich to replace centrist Republican Ted Stevens, continuing a tradition of sending ideologically neutral representatives to Washington.

But on the other, we’ve played host to a portion of the drama associated with the national movement that’s built up around the Tea Partiers and their far right conservative agenda—thanks mainly to the star power lent by our one-time governor, now Wasilla memoirist and Fox New analyst, Sarah Palin. (She’ll be headlining next month’s Tea Party Convention in Nashville.)

Where Alaska shakes out along this spectrum—whether we stick with our libertarian-tinged, centrist leanings, which aren’t so different from most of the rest of the country, or follow a lonelier path toward the far right—will be an important subtext in this fall’s federal elections and in the actions of those who win. (There are state races, too, of course, but those will follow—and reflect—a politics of their own.)

For all his bluster, Republican Don Young has mostly fit the centrist mold, doing more to bring back pork for the state than to secure favors for ideological allies. If he’s replaced by either Republican Andrew Halcro or Democrat Harry Crawford—both of whom are running for the seat—it seems likely that our lone seat in the House of Representatives will remain more closely aligned with Alaska’s voters than ideological interests.

More interesting is the transformation of Lisa Murkowski. Murkowski has no announced challengers yet, and she’s made a name for herself as a moderate. But she’s also been appointed to the post of Republican Conference secretary in the Senate, a prime party leadership position. And whether coincidentally or not, she’s grown more vocal in her stands on issues where the parties differ.

It would be a stretch to assert that leadership in the party has made Murkowski more beholden to that party or more extreme in her ideology. And regardless of any opponent that might emerge, she’s likely to enjoy an easy reelection campaign. But Alaskans should use it as an opportunity to ask her to reaffirm her commitment to those who elected her.

After all, there might not be such as thing as cosmic comeuppance, but as the victories of Mark Begich and Scott Brown suggest, voters are less predictable than polls imply. And they rarely suffer being taken for granted.

krestia.degeorge@anchoragepress.com