Lisa Murkowski

She is the second U.S. senator (after Strom Thurmond in 1954) to be elected by write-in vote.

Lisa Ann Murkowski (born May 22, 1957) is an American attorney and politician serving as the senior United States senator representing Alaska, having held that seat since 2002.

She is the first woman to represent Alaska in the Senate and the Senate's second-most senior Republican woman, after Susan Collins of Maine.

She became dean of Alaska's congressional delegation upon Representative Don Young's death.

Murkowski is the daughter of former U.S. senator and governor of Alaska Frank Murkowski.

Before her appointment to the Senate, she served in the Alaska House of Representatives and was elected majority leader.

She earned a B.A. degree in economics from Georgetown University in 1980, the same year her father was elected to the U.S. Senate.

She is a member of Pi Beta Phi sorority and represented Alaska as the 1980 Cherry Blossom Princess.

She received her J.D. degree in 1985 from Willamette University College of Law.

Murkowski worked as an attorney in the Anchorage District Court Clerk's office from 1987 to 1989.

From 1989 to 1998, she was an attorney in private practice in Anchorage.

She served on the Mayor's Task Force for the Homeless from 1990 to 1991.

In 1998, Murkowski was elected to the Alaska House of Representatives.

Her District 18 included northeast Anchorage, Fort Richardson and Elmendorf Air Force Base (now Joint Base Elmendorf-Richardson, or JBER), and suburban parts of Eagle River-Chugiak.

In 1999, she introduced legislation establishing a Joint Armed Services Committee.

She was reelected in 2000 and, after her district boundaries changed, in 2002.

That year she had a conservative primary opponent, Nancy Dahlstrom, who challenged her because Murkowski supported abortion rights and rejected conservative economics.

Murkowski prevailed by 56 votes.

She was controversially appointed to the Senate by her father, who resigned his seat in December 2002 to become governor of Alaska.

In December 2002, Murkowski—while a member of the state House—was appointed by her father, Governor Frank Murkowski, to fill his own U.S. Senate seat made vacant when he resigned from the Senate after being elected governor.

The appointment caused controversy in Alaska.

Many voters disapproved of the nepotism.

Her appointment eventually resulted in a referendum that stripped the governor of his power to directly appoint replacement senators.

Along with others eligible to be considered, future Alaska governor Sarah Palin interviewed unsuccessfully for the seat.

She was named as House Majority Leader for the 2003–04 legislative session.

She resigned her House seat before taking office, due to her appointment by her father to the seat he had vacated in the U.S. Senate, upon his stepping down to assume the Alaska governorship.

Murkowski sat on the Alaska Commission on Post Secondary Education and chaired both the Labor and Commerce and the Military and Veterans Affairs Committees.

After she resigned to join the U.S. Senate, her father appointed Dahlstrom, the District Republican committee's choice, as her replacement.

Murkowski ran for and won a full term in 2004.

She completed her father's unexpired Senate term, which ended in January 2005, and became the first Alaskan-born member of Congress.

Murkowski was vice chair of the Senate Republican Conference from 2009 to 2010, chair of the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee from 2015 to 2021, and has been vice chair of the Senate Indian Affairs Committee since 2021.

She is often described as one of the Senate's most moderate Republicans, and a crucial swing vote.

After losing the 2010 Republican primary to Tea Party candidate Joe Miller, she ran as a write-in candidate and defeated both Miller and Democrat Scott McAdams in the general election.

According to CQ Roll Call, she voted with President Barack Obama's position 72.3% of the time in 2013, one of only two Republicans to do so over 70% of the time.

In recent years, she opposed Brett Kavanaugh and supported Ketanji Brown Jackson in their respective nominations to the Supreme Court.

On February 13, 2021, she was one of seven Republican senators to vote to convict Donald Trump of incitement of insurrection in his second impeachment trial, for which she was censured by the Alaska Republican Party.

Murkowski was born in Ketchikan in the Territory of Alaska, the daughter of Nancy Rena (née Gore) and Frank Murkowski.

Her paternal great-grandfather was of Polish descent, and her mother's ancestry is Irish and French Canadian.

As a child, she and her family moved around the state with her father's job as a banker.

She was elected to a third term in 2016 and a fourth term in 2022, running as a Republican.