The Useless Clown Party, Petersburg Dan Sullivan and waiting

ANCHORAGE, Alaska (KTUU) - In one of the most dramatic races for the U.S. Senate, expect more changes this afternoon.

The Alaska Division of Elections will release a new batch of votes Tuesday. Neither Sen. Dan Sullivan nor Mary Peltola’s campaigns have returned requests for an interview or statement.

Still, it hasn’t stopped either from claiming they’ve won. But it’s more complicated than that.

“The contrast between our campaign and her campaign couldn’t be more clear,” Incumbent Senator Dan Sullivan said Election night. “We know it, and the Alaska people know it, and that’s why we’re going to win this race.”

By the morning, Mary Peltola had pulled slightly ahead in the numbers.

“This whole room, winners, winners, we are winning our state back,” Peltola told her supporters Election night.

The big races in Alaska are too close to call, and may not be decided any time soon.

To win the race outright without ranked choice tabulation, a candidate would need to receive more than 50% of first-choice votes, a threshold that hasn’t been met. If that continues to be the case in subsequent ballot counts, the winner of the race may not be known until Nov. 18, when ranked choice tabulation is scheduled to take place. The results of the election are set to be certified Nov. 25.

As of noon Tuesday, 220,853 ballots had been counted. There are 605,433 registered voters. The race the world is watching, of course, is the Senate.

Peltola, Mary (DEM) 48.6% 106,321

Sullivan, Dan S. (REP) 47.5% 103,804

Heikes, Gerald L. (REP) 2.2% 4,865

Sullivan, Daniel J. Jr. 1.7% 3,651

Alaska can be a quirky place, with most people not registered to a party, which includes the UCES (Useless Clown Electoral Society) and the Prohibition Party.

When you break down the race by precinct, Peltola pulls ahead in western and more rural parts of the state, while Sullivan holds the larger cities.