Do It Write

Photo by Arthur Chapman. Some rights reserved.

Though she was elbowed out of the race by a Tea Party-backed candidate, current Alaska senator Lisa Murkowski is not giving up yet.  She has announced her intentions to run as a write-in candidate in the general election next month.

If this seems like a rare move, that’s because it is: only two people have ever been elected to the Senate on a write-in campaign.  One was for a special election in 1946: the candidate, one William Knowland, a Republican from California, served all of two months.  The other is slightly better known: it turns out that South Carolina Republican Strom Thurmond had to pencil his name in back in 1954 to get started on being the (now second-) longest serving senator in US history.

Keep up with Senator Murkowski’s progress on the Congress panel of our Keep Current page.