Alaskans go to the polls Tuesday to decide, among other things, whether to send former governor and Republican vice presidential nominee Sarah Palin to Congress.

The right-wing Republican is among three candidates in a special election for Alaska’s sole U.S. House seat. Palin is up against Republican Nick Begich III and Democrat Mary Peltola in the first test of Alaska’s new ranked-choice voting system.

The winner will serve until the end of the year, finishing the term of GOP Rep. Don Young. He died in March after serving 49 years.

Begich is a wealthy tech entrepreneur. He was co-chair of Young’s 2020 campaign but turned on the incumbent the next year and ran to Young’s right. He comes from a family of prominent Democrats and is named for his grandfather, the congressman who held the seat before Young.

With two conservatives splitting the vote, Peltola, a salmon advocate and former state legislator from western Alaska, is likely to gain the most first-choice ballots. But the winner of the special election won’t be known until the end of August, after all the mailed ballots arrive. That’s when the Alaska Division of Elections will tabulate the rankings. The third-place finisher will be eliminated and the ballots that went to the candidate will be reallocated according to the voters’ second choices.

Palin has called it the “screwiest system” that “makes no sense to most voters.”

A slim majority of Alaska voters adopted the new method in 2020. It pairs a nonpartisan primary with ranked choice voting in the general.

To win the special general, one of the conservatives would have to get enough second-choice votes from the other to overcome Peltola’s likely lead in the first round of counting.

The two Republicans have been attacking each other for weeks while leaving Peltola alone.

Palin recently called the Democrat a “sweetheart,” even as she attacks Begich for supporting Democrats in past races.

Begich has called Palin a “quitter,” tapping into the disappointment many Alaska Republicans felt when she resigned as governor in 2009 in the wake of her unsuccessful campaign as John McCain’s vice presidential running mate in 2008.

“We picked her to do a job, and she didn’t bother to finish it. Because she wanted to go out there and get rich and famous,” a Begich ad says.

While they need second-choice votes, Begich and Palin have a more immediate concern.

“Game No. 1 has to be that you don’t come in third,” said Art Hackney, a Republican consultant working for Begich. “Because if you come in third, you are, you know, moot to the whole thing, and it becomes your second-choice votes that are the things that matter.”

To complicate this election day for voters, it is also the day of the regular primary.

Sen. Lisa Murkowski, a moderate Republican who supports abortion rights, is on the ballot for reelection with 18 challengers. Among them is attorney and evangelical pastor Kelly Tshibaka. She, like Palin, has the endorsement of former President Donald Trump.

The Alaska Republican Party would like to punish Murkowski for voting to convict Trump at his second impeachment trial, but the new system eliminates the partisan primary. The top four vote-getters will advance to the November ballot. Murkowski and Tshibaka are both sure to make the cut, along with Democrat Pat Chesbro, a retired educator.

Also at stake this election season: Who will serve the next full term in the U.S. House. Begich, Palin and Peltola are all in that race, too.

Earlier this week in Russia, there was a televised funeral for Daria Dugina, just days after she was killed in a car bombing in Moscow.

Dugina was a Russian propagandist who supported her country’s invasion of Ukraine, both on TV and online. Her death made global headlines, both for its violence and because of the political prominence of her father, Alexander Dugin.

It also signaled that Moscow’s elite may not be safe in their own city, said Marlene Laruelle, the director of the Institute for European, Russian, and Eurasian Studies at George Washington University.

“The war is progressively coming to them in the Russian territory,” she said.

“The message the killing is sending, even if we cannot interpret exactly who did that and who the actual target was, is that if you can have a terrorist act in Moscow, in the middle of the war, it means elites are suddenly not feeling secure anymore.”

Laruelle joined All Things Considered to discuss Alexander Dugin’s rise and waning influence, how he spread his ideology across the world, and what Daria Dugina’s death may mean politically.

This interview has been lightly edited for length and clarity.

Interview Highlights

On Alexander Dugin’s origins

He was pretty famous in the ’90s because he was one of the first ones in Russia to formulate a kind of political language of Russia’s great power and empire. But in the 2000s, he really lost some of his prominence, and there are many other ideologies who appeared who are much more influential on the regime’s kind of strategy. He has been pretty marginalized inside Russia. He’s more famous abroad than in Russia itself.

On his beliefs towards Ukraine

He has had very anti-Ukrainian ideology since the beginning, which is some of his most famous work in the mid-90s. He was saying that Ukraine doesn’t exist as a state, as a nation, that it’s a construction of the West as a kind of anti-Russian strategy.

And that’s something that was not so common at that time. But after that, he really has been working on many other countries, creating a big geopolitical vision for Russia as an empire, and he has always been very anti-Ukrainian, to the point that Ukraine has forbidden him from entering Ukrainian territory already for about 15 years. In the mid-2000s he was already persona non grata in Ukraine.

On whether there is any knowledge of Dugin’s influence on Vladmir Putin

No, we’re not even sure they have met. Putin has never quoted Dugin, Dugin is not part of any official institution, like several other ideologies. He’s only on the small internet channel, the far right, orthodox channel. So he’s not among the classic propagandists that are actually invited on talk shows.

His daughter was, and that’s what is interesting. His daughter was more mainstream in a sense, and she was able to be invited to all of these provocative talk shows. He has been pretty marginal, because his thinking is not an easy one to follow. It’s super philosophical, and religious, so it’s not something you can air on television very easily and get a big audience for.

On Dugin’s popularity among international far-right communities

He’s really a big name in contemporary far-right thinking. First, because he has been speaking a lot of foreign languages, so he was able to read all of the European far-right productions, to translate in Russia, and also to translate his own work in English, French, German, Italian, Arabic, and Iranian.

So he has really been able to develop networks of international, transnational, far-right people, up to Latin America. He was able to articulate a narrative of this new empire of conservative values against the so-called decadent West and liberal culture and so on. It’s really a narrative that has resonated with a lot of European interests among the far right groups.

On what Daria Dugin’s death may mean politically

I think her death will be used by the conservative reactionary groups to kind of create a martyr out of her. She was a young, good looking woman, so that will help to create the myth of her martyrdom. I think her death will be used globally, not only by the conservative circles but also by the regime, for some kind of domestic repression. The regime will have to showcase that it can answer to a terrorist act, and that will probably mean higher repression.

This story was adapted for the web by Manuela Lopez Restrepo.