Sarah Palin loses comeback bid as Democrat wins in Alaska

Former US Republican vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin has been defeated in her attempt to return to national politics.

In a significant upset, Ms Palin lost to Democrat Mary Peltola in a special election to fill the seat for Alaska in the US House of Representatives.

Ms Palin, who was also a former governor of Alaska, had been strongly backed by former president Donald Trump.

Ms Peltola’s victory means Democrats will now hold a seat that had been in Republican hands for decades.

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She will serve the remainder of a term left open by the sudden death of Republican Don Young who had represented Alaska in Congress for 49 years.

Ms Peltola won the seat under a new “ranked choice” voting system.

Elections in Alaska now start with an “open” primary, in which candidates of all parties compete and people vote for their preferred candidate. The top four vote-getters, regardless of party, advance to the general election. In the general election, rather than voting for one of the top four candidates, voters rank their preferences in order.

There will be a further vote for the seat in November as part of the overall midterm elections to the US House of Representatives.

Ms Palin was chosen by Senator John McCain to be the republican candidate for the vice presidency in the 2008 election.

The election was won by Barack Obama, and in 2009 Ms Palin resigned as governor of Alaska. She later became an author and television personality. She was endorsed by Mr Trump earlier this year in her bid to return to national politics.

Ms Peltola’s victory will add to a growing confidence among Democrats that they will do better in the forthcoming midterm elections than had been predicted earlier in the summer.

Ms Peltola (49), who is who is Yup’ik, will become the first Alaska native to serve in Congress. In her campaign she supported abortion rights. She also spoke of her concern about climate change and called for the development of Alaska’s resources with greater sensitivity to the needs of local communities.

Separately on Wednesday, in a new court filing, Mr Trump played down the significance of classified material being found at his home in Florida.

The former president wants a court to appoint an independent assessor, known as a special master, to go through documents seized by the FBI in a raid on his Mar-a-Lago residence in Florida last month.

The US Department of Justice said in a court filing on Tuesday that it came to believe that government records had likely been “concealed and removed from the storage room” and that efforts may have been taken “to obstruct the government’s investigation”.

Mr Trump in his submission to the court on Wednesday night said: “The purported justification for the initiation of this criminal probe was the alleged discovery of sensitive information contained within the 15 boxes of presidential records.”

“But this ‘discovery’ was to be fully anticipated given the very nature of presidential records. Simply put, the notion that presidential records would contain sensitive information should have never been cause for alarm.”

Mr Trump’s lawyers argued that left to their own devices and in the absence of an independent third party, “unchecked investigators” would selectively leak bits of their investigation with no recourse for the former president.

The justice department had opposed the appointment of a special master in its filing to the court on Tuesday.