The results are in on Tuesday night’s Anchorage Mayoral race, and they aren’t pretty. Aided by the Alaska media and Establishment Republicans, liberal Democrat Ethan Berkowitz won the mayoral runoff handily.

Preliminary numbers showed Berkowitz finishing the night with 59% of the vote. Demboski received just under 41%.

But the larger story of this race was the Alaska media’s slimming of yet another conservative candidate.

After trumping up a story that accused Demboski of implying that Ethan Berkowitz believed in incest, Alaska Dispatch News then fanned the flames of public outrage, while allowing Mr. Berkowitz to brush the suggestion off as a “false and obscene accusation.” Demboski never implied any such thing.

A local talk-radio host ambushed Demboski on air and pressed her to defend Berkowitz against Anchorage Baptist Temple Pastor Jerry Prevo, who merely repeated what he had been told on good authority that Berkowitz himself said, which was that a father should be allowed to marry his own son. Demboski, who heard Berkowitz radio show on which the comments were made, merely declined to speculate on what Berkowitz had said and referred the host to Berkowitz for an explanation of his comments.

Meanwhile the press went on a feeding frenzy, hounding Demboski for an explanation of the Berkowtiz statement, and castigating her for steering the campaign into controversial waters.

But when the tape emerged on Monday afternoon, proving that Mr. Berkowitz had indeed made the controversial statements and had further lied to cover it up, Alaska Dispatch News didn’t even deem the revelation deserving of its own headline.

The local CBS television affiliate, KTVA, never reported the revelation of explosive audio recording, and election morning added insult to injury by announcing in a special segment on endorsements that Republican United States Senator Dan Sullivan had endorsed liberal Democrat Ethan Berkowitz for mayor. Sullivan had publicly endorsed Demboski a week earlier.

Alaska Dispatch News had also written a hit piece on Demboski stemming from an almost 20-year-old divorce. It was completely unsubstantiated, and vicious.

Both Establishment Republicans defeated by conservative Amy Demboski in the April 7th election, Dan Coffey and Andrew Halcro, declined to endorse when Demboski moved to the runoff, despite pre-election promises to do so.

Not only did they decline to endorse, but they openly attacked Demboski in the press, on talk radio, and by social media. Andrew Halcro then endorsed liberal Democrat Ethan Berkowitz just days before the May 5th runoff.

When the history of the 2015 Anchorage mayoral election is written, it will tell yet another sad tale of a corrupt Alaska media, and a divided Republican Party whose faithless Establishment wing once again delivered a victory for liberal progressives.