Joe Miller files papers for Senate
By: Alexander Burns
May 28, 2013 06:28 PM EDT
It looks like it’s time to stop calling Joe Miller a former Senate candidate.
The Alaska conservative activist who lost a 2010 bid for the Senate after besting incumbent Sen. Lisa Murkowski in a GOP primary, has filed a form indicating he intends to run for Senate again in 2014, according to documentation from the office of the Secretary of the Senate.
On May 2, Miller filed a Federal Election Commission Form 2 stating his intent to run for Senate next year. It’s a document that any candidate must complete upon receiving more than $5,000 in contributions to a political campaign or authorizing another party to take in over $5,000 in contributions.
The form states that Joseph W. Miller of Fairbanks, Alaska, plans to run for Senate as a Republican in 2014, and that Citizens for Joe Miller has been designated as his principal campaign committee.
A phone call to Miller’s office and an email to his spokesman were not immediately returned.
Miller has made no secret of his interest in a possible challenge to Democratic Sen. Mark Begich, but has maintained a public pose of indecision on the race.
In April, Miller wrote on his website that he was considering a 2014 campaign against Begich and throwing an elbow at his old opponent, Murkowski, at the same time.
“Serious times call for bold measures. With the re-election of Barack Obama, our very way of self-government is in peril,” Miller wrote. “Though I was labeled an ‘extremist’ by the likes of Lisa Murkowski and Mark Begich for telling the truth, both of our sitting senators now routinely engage in such ‘extremist’ rhetoric with respect to federal overreach, government spending, and entitlement reform. Yet they are still unwilling to tackle the tough issues.”
He met earlier this year with National Republican Senatorial Committee Chairman Jerry Moran about a potential campaign.
Miller is a divisive figure among Republicans in Alaska and Washington D.C. He ran a hard-right primary campaign against Murkowski in 2010 and won with support from the Palin family and conservative outside groups, but then lost in the general election after Murkowski mounted a write-in bid as an independent Republican.
The fallout from that race has continued to ripple in Miller’s present-day career. In mid-May, an Alaska judge ordered Miller to pay over $85,000 to the news organization Alaska Dispatch due to a drawn-out lawsuit over the publication’s attempts to reveal records of Miller’s time as a government lawyer.
A poll taken the first week of May by the Republican group Harper Polling found Miller’s personal image in strongly negative territory. Forty-nine percent of respondents had an unfavorable opinion of the Yale Law grad, versus 34 percent who had a favorable impression and 17 percent who had no opinion of Miller or had not heard of him.
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Originally Posted by Warlord
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