Alaska Sen. Lisa Murkowski is used to the political pressure and “battle scars” that come with being a swing vote.

But the four-term senator said she has never faced a more “agonizing” legislative negotiation than the 24 hours leading up to her suspense-ending decision to support President Trump’s “big, beautiful bill.”

Without Ms. Murkowski’s vote, the bill would have failed in the Senate, and Vice President J.D. Vance’s tiebreaking vote would not have delivered the 51-50 win for Mr. Trump.

Goodies for Alaska typically go a long way for Ms. Murkowski. This time, she got quite a few in exchange for agreeing to help the bill speed through the Senate before July 4, when Mr. Trump wants to sign the bill. 

“We were operating under a timeline that was basically an artificial timeline,” Ms. Murkowski told reporters after the vote. “And I think rather than taking the deliberative approach to good legislating, we rushed to get a product out.”

For Ms. Murkowski, however, good legislating also means securing assistance for her state, which she argues has unique economic conditions because of Alaska’s remote location and infrastructure challenges. 

“I committed myself and my team from the very get-go of this process that we were going to try, every day, to contribute to a better outcome for the people in the state,” she said. 

She weighed the good of the Trump agenda bill — a permanent extension of the 2017 tax cuts and funding for the Coast Guard and Federal Aviation Administration — against their offsets. 

The bulk of the offsets came from spending cuts to Medicaid and the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, known as food stamps, that Ms. Murkowski worried would harm Alaska and other states.

“I struggled mightily with the impact on the most vulnerable in this country,” she said.

Ms. Murkowski is not a fan of new work requirements for Medicaid and stricter work requirements for SNAP because of the “unique conditions” in her state.

“What I tried to do was to ensure that my colleagues understood what that means when you live in an area where there are no jobs,” she said. “It is not a cash economy. And so I needed help.”

GOP leaders provided it, giving noncontiguous states with unemployment rates at least 1.5 times the national average the ability to request a waiver of SNAP work requirements. 

Any state, including Alaska, can request an exemption from the Medicaid work requirements if it can demonstrate “a good-faith effort to comply.”

Ms. Murkowski particularly opposed a provision to shift some SNAP benefit costs — currently funded 100% by the federal government — to states that have high payment error rates. 

“We have a higher error rate when it comes to SNAP benefits that was going to penalize us,” Ms. Murkowski said. 

Alaska’s 25% payment error rate is the highest of any state by far.

Beginning in fiscal 2028, any state with error rates above 10% would have had to pay 15% of SNAP benefit costs under the original Senate proposal.

An amended version designed to appease Ms. Murkowski originally sought to provide a two-year waiver for noncontiguous states, meaning Alaska and Hawaii.

That was rejected under the Senate rules, so Republicans broadened the waiver to the 10 states with the highest error rates.

Democrats unsuccessfully tried to remove the waiver, even though they had the most states that stood to benefit. Minnesota Sen. Amy Klobuchar, the top Democrat on the Agriculture Committee, argued it sends a message to states to raise their error rates, instead of lowering them as Republicans claim they want.

The temporary waiver for SNAP cost-sharing was not the only Alaska-favorable provision that helped earn Ms. Murkowski’s support.

She said she still secured a Medicaid funding match for her state, although the original provision she designed violated Senate rules.

Ms. Murkowski convinced GOP leaders to double a rural hospital fund designed to provide relief from some of the Medicaid cuts from $25 billion to $50 billion, after another GOP senator’s amendment to do so failed on the floor. 

The bill even includes an increase from $10,000 to $50,000 for a charitable tax deduction that benefits Native Alaskan “subsistence whaling,” which is the hunting of whales by indigenous communities to meet nutritional and cultural needs.

Alaska also benefits from oil and gas leasing provisions in the bill. 

Senate Majority Leader John Thune would not detail his negotiations with Ms. Murkowski but called her “a very independent thinker and somebody who studies the issues really, really hard and well.” 

“I’m just grateful that at the end of the day, she concluded what the rest of us did — or at least most of the rest of us did — and that is that this was the right direction for the future of our country,” the South Dakota Republican said. “We set the stage for strong growth in our economy through the tax policies and then hopefully a more sustainable fiscal future for our children and grandchildren with some things that we did in the area of spending and debt.” 

While Ms. Murkowski won a lot of sweeteners in the bill, she was still not satisfied. She said she hoped the House would halt the rush on the artificial deadline and form a conference committee with the Senate to negotiate differences between the two versions of the bill.

If that were to happen, she’d have another opportunity to fight for Alaska priorities that were left out of this version.

“Did I get everything that I wanted?” she said. “Absolutely not.”

• Lindsey McPherson can be reached at lmcpherson@washingtontimes.com.