Sarah Louise Palin ( PAY-lin; née Heath; born February 11, 1964) is an American politician, commentator, and author who served as the ninth governor of Alaska from 2006 until her resignation in 2009. She was the 2008 Republican vice presidential nominee with U.S. senator John McCain.
Palin was elected to the Wasilla city council in 1992 and became mayor of Wasilla in 1996. In 2003, after an unsuccessful run for lieutenant governor, she was appointed chair of the Alaska Oil and Gas Conservation Commission, responsible for overseeing the state's oil and gas fields for safety and efficiency. In 2006, at age 42, she became the youngest person and the first woman to be elected governor of Alaska. Immense legal fees incurred by both Palin and the state of Alaska from her fights against ethics investigations led to her resignation in 2009.
Palin was nominated as John McCain's vice presidential running mate at the 2008 Republican National Convention. She was the first Republican female vice presidential nominee and the second female vice presidential nominee of a major party, after Geraldine Ferraro in 1984. The McCain-Palin ticket subsequently lost the 2008 election to the Democratic Party's then-U.S. senators Barack Obama and Joe Biden. Throughout the race, her public image and experience came under media attention. Although her vice presidential bid alongside McCain was unsuccessful, the 2008 presidential election significantly raised Palin's national profile.
Since her resignation as governor in 2009, she has campaigned for the fiscally conservative Tea Party movement. In addition, she has publicly endorsed several candidates in multiple election cycles, including Donald Trump in his 2016 presidential campaign. She has also led a career as a television personality. From 2010 to 2015, she provided political commentary for Fox News. She hosted TLC's Sarah Palin's Alaska in 2010–11 and Amazing America with Sarah Palin on the Sportsman Channel in 2014–15. From 2014 to 2015, she oversaw a short-lived subscriber-based online TV channel, the Sarah Palin Channel, via TAPP TV. Her personal memoir, Going Rogue, written following the 2008 election, sold more than one million copies.
In 2022, Palin ran in the special election for Alaska's at-large congressional seat that was vacated after the death of Representative Don Young, but lost to Democrat Mary Peltola, who completed Young's unfinished term. Palin faced Peltola and others again in the November general election for the same seat, and again lost to Peltola, who won re-election to serve a full two-year term.
Early life and education
Palin was born in Sandpoint, Idaho, the third of four children (three daughters and one son) of Sarah "Sally" Heath (née Sheeran; 1940–2021), a school secretary, and Charles R. "Chuck" Heath (born 1938), a science teacher and track-and-field coach. Palin's siblings are Chuck Jr., Heather, and Molly. Palin is of English, Irish, and German ancestry.
When Palin was a few months old, the family moved to Skagway, Alaska, where her father had been hired to teach. They relocated to Eagle River, Anchorage in 1969, and settled in Wasilla, Alaska, in 1972.
Palin played flute in the junior high band. She attended Wasilla High School, where she was head of the Fellowship of Christian Athletes and a member of the girls' basketball and cross-country running teams. During her senior year, she was co-captain and point guard of the basketball team that won the 1982 Alaska state championship, earning the nickname "Sarah Barracuda" for her competitive streak.
In 1984, Palin won the Miss Wasilla beauty pageant; she finished third (as second runner-up) in the Miss Alaska pageant, where she won the title of "Miss Congeniality". She played the flute in the talent portion of the contest. Though one author reported that she received the Miss Congeniality award in the Miss Wasilla contest, this was disputed by another contestant and classmate of Palin's. She received a college scholarship.
After graduating from high school in 1982, Palin enrolled at the University of Hawaii at Hilo. Shortly after arriving in Hawaii, Palin transferred to Hawaii Pacific University in Honolulu for a semester in the fall of 1982. She returned to the mainland, enrolling at North Idaho College, a community college in Coeur d'Alene, for the spring and fall semesters of 1983. She transferred and enrolled at the University of Idaho in Moscow, Idaho, for an academic year starting in August 1984. Beginning in the fall of 1985, she attended Matanuska-Susitna College in Alaska. Palin returned to the University of Idaho in January 1986 and received her bachelor's degree in communications with an emphasis in journalism in May 1987.
Early career
After graduation, Palin worked as a sportscaster for KTUU-TV and KTVA-TV in Anchorage and as a sports reporter for the Mat-Su Valley Frontiersman, fulfilling an early ambition.
Political career
Palin has been a Republican since 1982.
Wasilla City Council
Palin was elected to the Wasilla City Council in 1992, winning by a margin of 530 votes to 310.
Mayor of Wasilla
Concerned that revenue from a new Wasilla sales tax would not be spent wisely, Palin ran for mayor of Wasilla in 1996, defeating incumbent mayor John Stein by a 651–440 margin. Her biographer described her campaign as targeting wasteful spending and high taxes; her opponent, Stein, said that Palin introduced abortion, gun rights, and term limits as campaign issues. The election was nonpartisan, though the state Republican Party ran advertisements for Palin. She ran for reelection against Stein in 1999 and won, 909 votes to 292. In 2002, she completed the second of the two consecutive three-year terms allowed by the city charter. She was elected president of the Alaska Conference of Mayors in 1999.
First term
Using revenue generated by a 2% sales tax, which had been approved by Wasilla voters in October 1992, Palin cut property taxes by 75% and eliminated personal property and business inventory taxes. Using municipal bonds, she made improvements to the roads and sewers and increased funding to the police department. She oversaw creation of new bike paths and procured funding for storm-water treatment to protect freshwater resources. At the same time, she reduced the budget of the local museum and postponed discussions about a new library and city hall, which some of the council believed was needed.
Soon after taking office in October 1996, Palin eliminated the position of museum director. She asked for updated resumes and resignation letters from "city department heads who had been loyal to Stein", although the mayor's office was considered a non-partisan position. These included the city police chief, public works director, finance director, and librarian. Palin stated this request was to find out their intentions and whether they supported her. She temporarily required department heads to get her approval before talking to reporters, saying they needed to learn her administration's policies. She created the position of city administrator and reduced her own $68,000 salary by 10%. By mid 1998 this action was reversed by the city council.
In October 1996, Palin asked library director Mary Ellen Emmons if she would object to the removal of a book from the library if people were picketing to have the book removed. Emmons responded that she would, and others as well. Palin stated that she had not been proposing censorship but had been discussing many issues with her staff that were "both rhetorical and realistic in nature." No attempt was made to remove books from the library during Palin's tenure as mayor.
Palin said she fired Police Chief Irl Stambaugh because he did not fully support her efforts to govern the city. Stambaugh filed a lawsuit alleging wrongful termination and violation of his free speech rights. The judge dismissed Stambaugh's lawsuit, holding that the police chief served at the discretion of the mayor and could be terminated for nearly any reason, even a political one, and ordered Stambaugh to pay Palin's legal fees.
Second term
During her second term as mayor, Palin proposed and promoted the construction of a municipal sports center to be financed by a 0.5% sales tax increase and a $14.7 million bond issue. Voters approved the measure by a 20-vote margin, and the Wasilla Multi-Use Sports Complex (later named the Curtis D. Menard Memorial Sports Center) was built on time and under budget. However, the city spent an additional $1.3 million because of an eminent domain lawsuit caused by the city's failure to obtain clear title to the property before beginning construction. The city's long-term debt grew from about $1 million to $25 million because of expenditures of $15 million for the sports complex, $5.5 million for street projects, and $3 million for water improvement projects. The Wall Street Journal characterized the project as a "financial mess." A city council member defended the spending increases as being necessitated by the city's growth during that time.
Palin also joined with nearby communities in hiring the Anchorage-based lobbying firm of Robertson, Monagle & Eastaugh to lobby for federal funds. The firm secured nearly $8 million in earmarks for the Wasilla city government, including $500,000 for a youth shelter, $1.9 million for a transportation hub, and $900,000 for sewer repairs. In 2008, Wasilla's incumbent mayor credited Palin's 75 percent property tax cuts and infrastructure improvements with bringing "big-box stores" and 50,000 shoppers per day to Wasilla.
Term limits prevented Palin from seeking a third term in 2002. Palin endorsed Dianne Keller in the election to succeed her. Keller won, defeating three opponents, including Faye Palin (Palin's mother-in-law, the stepmother of Palin's husband).
State politics
In 2002, Palin ran for the Republican nomination for lieutenant governor, coming in second to Loren Leman in a five-way Republican primary. Following her defeat, she campaigned throughout the state for the nominated Republican governor-lieutenant governor ticket of Frank Murkowski and Leman. Murkowski and Leman won and Murkowski resigned from his long-held U.S. Senate seat in December 2002 to assume the governorship. Palin was said to be on the "short list" of possible appointees to Murkowski's U.S. Senate seat, but Murkowski ultimately appointed his daughter, state representative Lisa Murkowski, as his successor in the Senate.
Governor Murkowski offered other jobs to Palin and, in February 2003, she accepted an appointment to the Alaska Oil and Gas Conservation Commission, which oversees Alaska's oil and gas fields for safety and efficiency. While she had little background in the area, she said she wanted to learn more about the oil industry and was named chair of the commission and ethics supervisor. By November 2003, she was filing nonpublic ethics complaints with the state attorney general and the governor against a fellow commission member, Randy Ruedrich, a former petroleum engineer and at the time the chair of the state Republican Party. He was forced to resign in November 2003. Palin resigned in January 2004 and put her protests against Ruedrich's "lack of ethics" into the public arena by filing a public complaint against Ruedrich, who was then fined $12,000. She joined with Democratic legislator Eric Croft in complaining that Gregg Renkes, then the attorney general of Alaska, had a financial conflict of interest in negotiating a coal exporting trade agreement. Renkes also resigned his post.
From 2003 to June 2005, Palin served as one of three directors of "Ted Stevens Excellence in Public Service, Inc.," a 527 group designed to provide political training for Republican women in Alaska. In 2004, Palin told the Anchorage Daily News that she had decided not to run for the U.S. Senate that year against the Republican incumbent, Lisa Murkowski, because her teenage son opposed it. Palin said, "How could I be the team mom if I was a U.S. Senator?"
Governor of Alaska
In 2006, running on a clean-government platform, Palin defeated incumbent governor Frank Murkowski in the Republican gubernatorial primary. Her running mate was State Senator Sean Parnell.
In the November election, Palin was outspent but victorious, defeating former Democratic governor Tony Knowles 48.3% to 41.0%. She became Alaska's first female governor and, at the age of 42, the youngest governor in Alaskan history. She was the state's first governor to have been born after Alaska achieved U.S. statehood, and the first who was not inaugurated in the capital, Juneau (she chose to have the ceremony in Fairbanks instead).
She took office on December 4, 2006. For most of her term, she was very popular with Alaska voters. Polls taken in 2007 showed her with 93% and 89% popularity among all voters. The Anchorage Daily News and The Weekly Standard called her "the most popular governor in America." A poll taken in late September 2008, after Palin was named to the national Republican ticket, showed her popularity in Alaska at 68%. A poll taken in May 2009 indicated Palin's popularity among Alaskans had declined to 54% positive and 41.6% negative.
Palin declared that top priorities of her administration would be resource development, education and workforce development, public health and safety, and transportation and infrastructure development. She had championed ethics reform throughout her election campaign. Her first legislative action after taking office was to push for a bipartisan ethics reform bill. She signed the resulting legislation in July 2007, calling it a "first step" and declaring that she remained determined to clean up Alaska politics.
Palin frequently broke with the Alaskan Republican establishment. For example, she endorsed Parnell's bid to unseat Don Young, the state's longtime at-large U.S. representative. She publicly challenged then-U.S. Senator Ted Stevens to "come clean" about the federal investigation into his financial dealings. She promoted the development of oil and natural-gas resources in Alaska, including drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge (ANWR). Proposals to drill for oil in ANWR have catalyzed national debate.
In 2006, Palin obtained a passport. In 2007, she traveled to Kuwait, where she visited the Khabari Alawazem Crossing at the Kuwait–Iraq border and met with members of the Alaska National Guard. On her return journey, she visited injured soldiers in Germany.
Budget, spending, and federal funds
In June 2007, Palin signed a record $6.6 billion operating budget into law. At the same time, she used her veto power to make the second-largest cuts of the capital budget in state history. The $237 million in cuts represented over 300 local projects and reduced the capital budget to $1.6 billion.
In 2008, Palin vetoed $286 million, cutting or reducing funding for 350 projects from the FY09 capital budget.
Palin followed through on a campaign promise to sell the Westwind II jet, a purchase made by the Murkowski administration for $2.7 million in 2005 against the wishes of the legislature.
In August 2007, the jet was listed on eBay, but the sale fell through, and the plane later sold for $2.1 million through a private brokerage firm.
Gubernatorial expenditures
Palin lived in Juneau during the legislative session, and lived in Wasilla and worked out of offices in Anchorage the rest of the year. Since the office in Anchorage was 565 miles from Juneau, while she worked there, state officials said she was permitted to claim a $58 per diem travel allowance and reimbursement for hotel. She filed for per diem, claiming a total of $16,951, but rather than stay at a hotel overnight, regularly commuted the 50 miles one way to her home in Wasilla. She did not use the former governor's private chef.
Both Republicans and Democrats criticized Palin for taking the per diem, as well as an additional $43,490 in travel expenses on occasions when her family accompanied her on state business. Palin's staffers responded that these practices were in line with state policy, that her gubernatorial expenses were 80% below those of her predecessor Murkowski, and that "many of the hundreds of invitations Palin receives include requests for her to bring her family, placing the definition of 'state business' with the party extending the invitation."
In February 2009, the State of Alaska, reversing a policy that had treated the payments as legitimate business expenses under the Internal Revenue Code, decided that per diems paid to state employees for stays in their own homes would be treated as taxable income and will be included in employees' gross income on their W-2 forms. Palin had ordered the review of the tax policy.
In December 2008, an Alaska state commission recommended increasing the governor's annual salary from $125,000 to $150,000. Palin said that she would not accept the pay raise. In response, the commission dropped the recommendation.
Federal funding
In her State of the State address on January 17, 2008, Palin declared that the people of Alaska "can and must continue to develop our economy, because we cannot and must not rely so heavily on federal government [funding]." Alaska's federal congressional representatives cut back on pork-barrel project requests during Palin's time as governor.
While the state has no sales tax or income tax, royalty revenues from the Prudhoe Bay Oil Field (consisting mostly of state-owned lands) have supported large state budgets since 1980. The exact amounts have depended on the prevailing price of petroleum. As a result, state revenues doubled to $10 billion in 2008. Despite this, for the 2009 state budget, Palin gave a list of 31 proposed federal earmarks or requests for funding, totaling $197 million, to Alaska's senior U.S. senator Ted Stevens. This was a major decrease from earlier years. Palin has said that her decreasing support for federal funding was a source of friction between her and the state's congressional delegation; Palin requested less in federal funding each year than her predecessor Frank Murkowski requested in his last year.
Bridge to Nowhere
In 2002, it was proposed that a for-profit prison corporation, Cornell Corrections, build a prison on Gravina Island. To connect Gravina with nearby Ketchikan, on Revillagigedo Island, it was originally planned that the federal government spend $175 million on building a bridge and another $75 million to connect it to the power grid with an electrical intertie. The Ketchikan Borough Assembly turned the proposal down when the administration of Governor Tony Knowles also expressed its disfavor with the idea. Eventually, the corporation's prison plans led to the exposure of the wide-ranging Alaska political corruption probe, which eventually ensnared Alaska's U.S. senator Ted Stevens. The bridge idea persisted through the administration of former U.S. senator and then-governor Frank Murkowski. The 2005 Highway Bill provided for $223m to build the Gravina Island Bridge. The provisions and earmarks were negotiated by Alaska's Rep. Don Young, who chaired the House Transportation Committee, and were supported by the chair of the Senate Appropriations Committee, Ted Stevens. This bridge, nicknamed "The Bridge to Nowhere" by critics, was intended to replace the auto ferry that is currently the only connection between Ketchikan and its airport. While the federal earmark was withdrawn after meeting opposition from Oklahoma senator Tom Coburn, the state of Alaska still received $300 million in transportation funding, with which the state of Alaska continued to study improvements in access to the airport, which conceivably could include improvements to the ferry service. In 2006, Palin had run for governor with a "build-the-bridge" plank in her platform, saying she would "not allow the spinmeisters to turn this project ... into something that's so negative." Palin criticized the use of the word "nowhere" as insulting to local residents and urged speedy work on building the infrastructure "while our congressional delegation is in a strong position to assist." Despite the demise of the bridge proposal, Palin spent $26 million in transportation funding for the planned 3-mile access road on Gravina island that ultimately had little use. A spokesman for Alaska's Department of Transportation said that it had been within Palin's power to cancel the road project but noted the state was considering cheaper designs to complete the bridge project, and that in any case the road would open up the surrounding lands for development. As governor, Palin canceled the Gravina Island Bridge in September 2007, saying that Congress had "little interest in spending any more money" due to "inaccurate portrayals of the projects." Alaska did not return the $442 million in federal transportation funds.
In 2008, as a candidate for vice president, Palin characterized her position as having told Congress "thanks, but no thanks, on that bridge to nowhere." A number of Ketchikan residents said that the claim was false and a betrayal of Palin's previous support for their community. Some critics said that her statement was misleading, as she had expressed support for the spending project and kept the federal money after the project was canceled.
Gas pipeline
In August 2008, Palin signed a bill authorizing the State of Alaska to award TransCanada Pipelines—the sole bidder to meet the state's requirements—a license to build and operate a pipeline to transport natural gas from the Alaska North Slope to the continental United States through Canada. The governor also pledged $500 million in seed money to support the project.
It was estimated that the project would cost $26 billion. Newsweek described the project as "the principal achievement of Sarah Palin's term as Alaska's governor." The pipeline also faces legal challenges from Canadian First Nations.
Predator control
In 2007, Palin supported a 2003 Alaska Department of Fish and Game policy allowing the hunting of wolves from the air as part of a predator control program intended to increase moose and caribou populations for subsistence-food gatherers and other hunters. In March 2007, the department offered a bounty of $150 per wolf would be paid to the 180 volunteer pilots and gunners in five areas of Alaska to offset fuel costs. In the preceding four years, 607 wolves had been killed. State biologists wanted 382 to 664 wolves to be killed by the end of the predator-control season in April 2007. Wildlife activists sued the state- A state judge declared the bounty illegal on the basis that a bounty would have to be offered by the Board of Game and not by the Department of Fish and Game. On August 26, 2008, Alaskans voted against ending the state's predator control program.