GOP is going to suffer forever for betraying murkowski.
Murkowski will be there for 30 years and it is all thanks to Joe Miller bungling a winnable race.
Republicans did not "betray Murkowski". Alaska Republican primary voters got sick of being run by crooked nepotists whose only reason for being in office was who her daddy was and how much money she gets/got from big oil and other business interests.
Only once both Sarah Palin and Joe Miller proved to be out control and extreme, did people like Murkowski manage to surge back and regain control. A direct result of that was the Republicans loss of the Governorship to Walker. Alaska wants independent reformers, not insider hacks who happen to be moderate.
Murkowski has managed to boost her personal popularity since losing her primary. So people forget how she got there. But never forget, the reason she lost was not "Republicans betraying her" (which is almost as bad as Don Young saying "Don't criticize my pork, it is my money" when it comes to a sense of entitlement for AK GOP establishment types), but voters objecting yet again to having a Senator appointed by her father who was ridden out of the Governorship on a rail for corruption subsequently with a 15% approval rating and even placed third in a GOP primary behind Sarah Palin and another candidate. She also to that point had done little to establish herself and didn't build much of a record, and her approvals were low. She almost lost the general election in 2004 despite Bush winning 64% at the same time.
Murkowski the moderate hero, boldly fighting extremists is a 2010's PR invention that has done well to remake her image, but the prior decade she was the poster child of a corrupt old order that was being dismantled by voters tired of a culture of corruption.
