If you’ve found this page through an old link, you can find my current work over at akmemo.com and sign up for the newsletter there. Tune in there for any future posts.

Thanks!

Matt

In this edition: The session is set to get underway next week, the day after President-elect Donald Trump will take office. While there are many unknowns about the years ahead, there are many reasons to be optimistic about the incoming bipartisan coalitions in the House and Senate, which have made addressing working-class issues like education and retirements a key part of their platforms. Alaska’s election system may have allowed more results-focused candidates to run and win, but it’ll now be up to them to show that it was worthwhile. Also, the reading list and weekend watching.

Current mood: 🤞

Pre-session stuff: As we’re heading into the session, let me know what you’re interested in seeing this year and what areas you’d like me to keep an eye on! As always, I read all the comments on these posts and emails (even if it sometimes takes me a while to respond)!

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The new Legislature is a dose of hope

Over the past few months, I’ve worked on a series of stories trying to understand what the combination of Alaska’s multipartisan coalitions and Trump’s return to office might mean for issues like reproductive rights, labor and education in Alaska.

To put it simply, on the Trump front, there are a lot of world-weary shrugs of “here we go again,” “who knows,” “the best we can hope for is the incompetence will outpace the cruelty,” and, perhaps most cynically, “I guess this is what America voted for.”

There has been much navel-gazing and finger-pointing about another unthinkable, yet totally unsurprising, Democratic loss to Trump and the MAGA movement. Some pundits have wondered if Democrats should push more to the right despite broad evidence that progressive issues like raising the minimum wage and reproductive rights are winning issues when put on the ballot. One of the most interesting takes in understanding this political moment I’ve seen comes from Michael Podhorzer, former political director at the AFL-CIO, who wrote in a post crunching the numbers from the past election, “The results are best understood as a vote of no confidence in Democrats, not an embrace of Trump or MAGA. … America didn’t swing rightward, but couchward.”

In it, he noted that much of the “red shift” we saw throughout the country was more a product of voters staying home than a real boost in MAGA support. He, in part, blames this on Democrats’ gestures toward a milquetoast corporate centrism that won few votes and alienated far more working-class voters. As we all contemplate what’s next in a new era of Trump, he argues that the traditional political analysis of right versus left is an overly simplistic view of politics and that we should also consider a third axis of politics: People who choose neither party.

“When we use the wrong tools, we might not just fail to diagnose an illness – we might misdiagnose it, and prescribe a treatment that is actively harmful to the patient. When Flatland analysts argue that America “moved right,” the prescription tends to be that Democrats should also move right, or at least play nice with Trump to avoid alienating the Americans who supposedly granted him a decisive mandate. The same prescription will be dispensed to civil society and the media. … But that diagnosis completely misses the life-threatening illness America is really struggling with: a billionaire-captured system that doesn’t work for most people, and justifiable disaffection and anger at this system. Americans are fed up, and people are perpetually in the mood to throw the bums out, whoever the bums in charge are.”

In Alaska, non-MAGA legislators won in nearly every competitive legislative race, setting up majority coalitions organized around values of public education, stable budgets and worker rights.

Alaska’s fledgling political system of open primaries and ranked-choice voting—which Alaska voters narrowly protected in the November election—helps provide that much-needed dimension to the ballot. Alaska voters are no longer bound by the top-down politics of the national two-party system and the baggage that comes with it but are allowed to express their views with nuance.

We saw that play out in several races over the last two regular election cycles. Voters in reliably Republican districts such as Eagle River, Kenai and South Anchorage are still, by and large, electing Republicans, but they are supporting moderates who broke from the party to support increased education funding and public pensions to slow the state’s revolving door of workers. Those victories were critical for the coalitions to take hold, and a big reason why far-right legislators focused on divisive culture war issues are already pledging to take another run at repealing the measure in 2026.

Which brings me to Alaska’s Legislature and the session ahead.

With coalitions of Democrats, independents and moderate Republicans set to control both chambers (albeit quite narrowly), there’s buzzy optimism that the state can make progress on problems that have dogged it for years. Issues like a decade of outmigration, dire teacher shortages, rising costs and energy instability have festered while the state has struggled to get its fiscal house in order. Education funding and public worker pensions—one of the favored solutions to stem the ongoing exodus of teachers and other public sector workers—are unifying policies for the coalitions.

And, yes, Gov. Mike Dunleavy’s veto pen still looms large over the entire legislative process. Without the votes to override him on bills and budget vetoes, it means some issues like the restoration of pensions for public employees or a permanent boost to education are likely still at least two years away (perhaps sooner if a spot in the Trump cabinet opens up). He’s also suppressing a salary report that legislators funded to help guide work this session.

But judging by the several pre-filed pension bills, a bill to increase the per-student funding formula and other bills like Rep. Maxine Dibert’s universal free meals bill (which I wrote about here), they’re not going to let the process be hung up on whataboutism and hypotheticals.

“That’s what I tell everyone who tells me they’re bummed out about national politics,” Rep. Dibert told me, “Well, at least we’re in Alaska. Good things are happening.”

Stay tuned.

Reading list

Mat-Su Sentinel: School board to consider Mat-Su Central shake-up as district faces $22 million funding shortfall

ADN: Hard work and hope: Ukrainians in Alaska ponder an uncertain future

Alaska Public: Biden's Interior Department, as a last act, proposes subsistence protection in NPR-A

Alaska Beacon: Alaska governor, ally of Trump, will keep flags at full-staff for Inauguration Day

Weekend watching

In a world of pie-in-the-sky Alaska inventions, the Alaska Freight Lines’ experimental Sno Freighter really stands out. Check out this cool video talking about the history of the machine as well as a tour of where it rests off the Steese Highway.

Have a nice weekend, y’all.

In this edition: We’re less than a week from the start of the 2025 legislative session, which will be the first time in recent memory that far-right Republicans will control neither chamber. Alaska’s election of bipartisan coalitions filled with Democrats, independents and moderate Republicans present a fresh opportunity for the state to advance solutions on some of the state’s most pressing needs. In this edition, let’s look at two pre-filed bills and what they show us about what to expect.

Current mood: 🤓

Programming note: Apologies for the longer-than-expected break! After writing solo largely nonstop since June 2017, I really needed to take some time away from things and recharge before the new session. Thank you to everyone who has been so gosh darn understanding and supportive. As a thank-you, I’ve gone ahead and comped all paying members two weeks and set up a two-week trial for those looking to get in on the session wonkery. Thanks a million, Matt.

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Free lunches and free handgun training

For me, one of the lasting moments of the 2024 legislative session was the whole day and change of the final run of the session that House Republicans dedicated to their odious bill to restrict how trans kids are allowed to play sports. It was never going to go anywhere in the Senate—even if the Senate majority was on board with singling out trans kids over an imagined problem, there wasn’t time left on the clock to get it through the process—but the House GOP seemed deadset on making a statement.

Keep in mind, too, that the number of trans kids participating in Alaska sports is few to none. While issues like this are best left to the sports organizations, the bill would have created a process where parents could trigger gender investigations with no sideboards or protections for the accused, who, if we are forgetting, are children (and has been the case in several other states, typically are cis kids who don’t conform to certain gender expressions).

In the grand scheme of public education in Alaska, the hours the House Republicans dedicated to the anti-trans bill did nothing to improve educational outcomes for Alaskan students or expand opportunities for girls’ sports. All it did was single out students who probably already felt out of place and under attack by adults.

It was pure grandstanding.

As we look ahead to this year, the nearly dozen school-related bills released in the first pre-file drop last Friday provide a very on-the-nose illustration of the differences between far-right Republicans and everyone else when it comes to public schools.

The bills pre-filed by members of the bipartisan coalitions—Democrats, independents and moderate Republicans—range from Fairbanks Democratic Rep. Maxine Dibert’s bill making breakfast and lunch in public schools free to bills pushing for courses on civics, financial literacy and the history and contributions of Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders. The slate includes other priorities, such as a ban on non-emergency use of cell phones, CPR training and teacher pensions. All things focused on improving student outcomes.

On the opposite end of the spectrum is the return of far-right Palmer Republican Sen. Shelley Hughes’ legislation that would force schools to allow employees and volunteers to carry handguns on school grounds. And at a time when school resources are stretched thin and districts are under constant pressure to cut and consolidate, the legislation would force districts to foot the bill for concealed handgun training.

Hughes, a longtime purveyor of trans panic in the Legislature, proposed the bill last session, arguing that it was a sensible way to prevent gun violence in schools and going as far as to suggest that legislators would regret it if they don’t arm teachers and volunteers and there was a shooting. Unsurprisingly, it faced considerable pushback from parents, teachers and doctors, like Anchorage trauma surgeon Dr. Charles Ross Baldwin, who warned that the bill was oblivious to the real dangers created by putting a handgun in the classroom.

“As a trauma surgeon, I see a large number of self-inflicted and accidental gun-related injuries,” Baldwin wrote to the Senate Labor and Commerce Committee. “While there are a lot of emotions around protecting children, the reality of putting guns in schools, in the hands of inadequately trained civilians, would likely increase risk of harm to students more than it would help prevent violence.”

Now compare that to Rep. Dibert’s new universal free meals bill.

As a longtime teacher, Dibert said some people might not understand how critical school meals can be for students — how it can be the only consistent and healthy meal some kids get — recalling how some of her students often were the hungriest after the weekend. She said it’s harder for kids to learn when they are hungry. Early research on universal free meals has found that more kids are being fed at schools, and there could be improvements in student health and attendance along with drops in suspensions. It also suggests it saves families about $11 per student per month.

“We are so concerned about outcomes, a kid’s performance, then people should be for this bill, this legislation,” she said. “If we want good outcomes, we need to feed our kids.”

The existing free and reduced meals system is connected to a family’s eligibility for food stamps, and Alaska’s program has infamously faced massive delays in approving applications and delivering benefits. Legislators approved changes to the program last year that make it harder for families to be bumped out of eligibility by small pay raises or gifts, but Dibert said that it still frequently leaves teachers picking up the slack. She said she has paid for meals out of her account to ensure kids are fed.

She recalled that when meals were made universally free through federal funding, there was a noticeable shift for students and teachers.

“It was just so stress-free, and all kids were happy,” Dibert recalled about teaching during the COVID era when meals were free, and teachers and administrators didn’t have to worry about whether students would be fed. “And I remember when it ended, it returned to being very stressful again. You know, parents had to figure out how to pay their lunches again, and kids couldn't line up and enjoy just going down to get fed.”

Still, despite the bipartisan majorities in the House and Senate, there is the matter of Gov. Mike Dunleavy’s veto pen. Last year, he vetoed a permanent increase to school funding because legislators refused to sign off on provisions that would make it easier for selective public charter schools to be set up. So far, he’s seemed open to additional funding of about $200 million, but he hasn’t said what strings would be attached to it.

That looms over the work for Dibert but won’t stop her from pushing for what she believes can make a meaningful difference to many young Alaskans.

“I can’t speak for the governor, but my colleagues and I committed to supporting our schools. We believe in education, and it’s one of the reasons we have the bipartisan coalitions,” she said. “I think all of our constituents in our coalition want great neighborhood schools more than anything else.”

Stay tuned.

In this edition: It’s starting to feel a lot like almost session time! The governor rolled out his budget proposal this week, calling for the big dividend he’s never been able to deliver and not-my-problem-ing the resulting $1.5 billion deficit. A guy who’d rather be taking meetings with U.S. Senators to lobby for his confirmation in the Trump administration than rolling out a budget legislators won’t take seriously, Dunleavy didn’t have much beyond a concept of a concept of a plan for how to actually address the state’s structural deficit. Insisting that proactive measures aren’t needed, Dunleavy insisted that Alaska needs only to bank on Trump clearing the way for drilling, mining and logging. Ah, how I’ve missed this stuff.

Current mood: 💸

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Dunleavy's budget banks on wishful thinking

On Thursday, two weeks removed from his declaration that he would be sticking out the remaining two years of his term after getting passed over for a spot in the Trump administration, Gov. Mike Dunleavy rolled out his budget with the usual undeliverable promises and not-my-problem approach to the long-term health of Alaska. You can dive into the nitty-gritty of the budget numbers here, but the big takeaway is the governor doesn’t seem particularly interested in doing the job.

There are some knobs turned here and there on various departments, but the elephant in the room he’s once again introduced a budget containing a multi-billion dollar line to pay out a full dividend according to a statute that hasn’t been followed for nearly a decade. At his news conference, the governor insisted it was important to follow the law — which, by the way, the Alaska Supreme Court says doesn’t need to be followed — and was later called out for ignoring another budgeting law.

Having abandoned his cuts-first approach to budgeting, Dunleavy offered no plan or even a concept of a plan for balancing the budget.

Instead, the combination of a largely status quo budget lacking meaningful cuts and a big PFD leaves the state with a roughly $1.5 billion budget gap and no plan beyond drawing down the $2.5 billion Constitutional Budget Reserve (something I can already tell you won’t happen because it’s so obviously unsustainable). His own budget office’s projections illustrate the financial folly of following such a plan in the long term, predicting unfillable billion-dollar deficits that will put the state in the hole by $12 billion over a decade.

As economists, legislators and budgeters have warned for years, Alaska has a structural deficit — its spending as outlined in law doesn’t match its income — that needs to be resolved if we want to follow the laws outlining spending (again, most of that spending is technically all optional because the constitution’s prohibition on dedicated funding bars one generation from binding another into spending). In broad terms, the options are to change the PFD law, increase revenue or cut other services.

But Dunleavy doesn’t seem interested in having a meaningful role in those decisions.

“That’s a discussion the legislators should have,” he said when asked about the massive deficit in his budget during a rollout news conference on Thursday.

And for all of his insistence about following the law on the PFD, a particularly interesting moment came when Neil Steininger — the governor’s former budget director who quietly left ahead of the 2024 session and is now freelancing and serving on the Juneau Assembly — pointed out that the latest budget doesn’t even try to answer long-term budget questions as is also required by law.

“State statute requires that you have the broad strokes within your 10-year plan to avoid the very picture that your 10-year plan shows,” Steininger said. “To balance the collection of revenues and the expenditure of revenues. Your 10-year plan this year and your 10-year plan last year completely omit any discussion on solutions.”

Dunleavy fell back on his hope-and-a-wish approach, insisting that Alaskans don’t need a plan beyond Trump opening up the state to more drilling, mining, logging and carbon sequestration. (It’s also worthwhile to point out that the ANWR lease sales fell apart because the Trump administration’s sloppy, rushed work exposed it to legal troubles.) Resource extraction industries, Dunleavy insisted, are what’s best for Alaska and especially good for those living in rural communities. He warned that more proactive efforts to balance the budget — raising new revenue through taxes or reductions to the dividend — will spur an exodus of Alaskans.

“I believe that the resource base of Alaska is the solution to the future,” the governor said. “I believe an income tax on the people of Alaska, a sales tax on the people of Alaska, taking what’s left of the dividend from the people of Alaska. If that’s going to happen, I would suggest that we all invest in U-haul.”

But as we know all too well, Alaskans are already moving away.

The state has experienced 11 years of net outmigration — kicked off by the collapse in oil prices and ensuing cuts to state services. When combined with an aging population, the state’s demographer issued a new report this year predicting the state’s population will stop growing altogether and will decline nearly 2% by 2050.

Even U-Haul’s own “U-Haul Growth Index” — a real-deal annual index of how many people are moving in and out of a state with U-Haul — paints a bleak picture. In 2022, Alaska ranked 41st, with 51.4% of all customers leaving the state. In 2023, that improved somewhat to 50.7% of customers leaving, ranking Alaska 34th.

To combat those trends, several legislators in the incoming, primarily Democratic bipartisan coalitions in the House and Senate argue that investments in child care, education, housing and workforce development are key to reversing those trends. The argument is that Alaska should invest more in improving the general quality of life to attract and retain people, even if that means growing some areas of the budget. Some have suggested increasing oil and gas taxes or implementing sales or income taxes to raise revenue (support for those items varies). Others have pointed out that the state can avoid taxes and invest in services by reducing dividends — leaving them somewhere around $1,000 rather than the roughly $3,800 payout suggested by the governor (it was about $1,700 this year).

This tug-of-war between the dividend and state services has become particularly evident in recent years, especially with the growing push to increase the state’s per-student funding formula. It doesn’t need to be that way, but that’s the corner legislators have largely been painted into by a governor who may not be particularly engaged in the legislative process but is not shy about lording the veto pen.

It’s also worth noting that the Dunleavy administration teased a sales tax and a special session on the state’s fiscal plan during 2023 (Steininger’s final year with the Dunleavy administration) before abandoning it altogether.

In the big picture, it’s not the first time Dunleavy has ducked responsibility for the state’s challenging financial situation, and legislators have come to put very little faith in his budget proposals. Where legislators may have once at least gone through the motions to entertain a governor’s proposal, legislators have been more likely to openly dismiss proposals like the large PFD as unserious and misleading.

That will likely be the case this year, too.

Stay tuned.

Weekend watching

I’m just about the least musically gifted person out there, but I sure do love some video game music theory.

Stay warm out there!

In this edition: Alaska’s election has wrapped up, setting the stage for bipartisan majorities to hold both chambers of the Legislature and ensuring at least one more election cycle will be conducted under the state’s open primary and ranked-choice voting system. In a time of grim uncertainty, the results inspire much hope in Alaska for the next few years. Look no further than the new House Majority’s committee assignments to see how much of a difference this will make. Meanwhile, fuming right-wing Republicans are preparing for what looks like a bitter, conspiracy-marked recount effort. Oh, and it looks like the governor didn’t get picked.

Current mood: 🦃

Programming note: Like many following the election, I’ve left Twitter/X for Bluesky. For as much as I’ve loved Twitter, its collapse under the new management has left it a troll- and bot-filled husk of what it once was. Bluesky seems to be more user-focused, lacking the algorithm manipulation that ruined Twitter. Alaska Twitter, which has been fractured for much of the last two years, is also having a bit of a reunion, which is great. Find me at mattbuxton.bsky.social and find many Alaskans on this list.

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Bluer skies

Elections have consequences, and one consequence of this election is that far-right Republicans who wielded committee chairmanships in the House during the last session to boost anti-trans bills, “Don’t Say Gay”-style legislation, anti-abortion measures, election “reforms” that seem designed to make it harder to vote and bills proposing to make gold legal tender are now out of power. Key flips by Democrats, independents and bipartisan-minded Republicans mean the House will join the Senate in organizing into a multi-partisan coalition, marking the first time in my time covering the Legislature that both chambers have done so.

It will also be the first time after six years in office that Gov. Mike Dunleavy — who announced he’ll finish out his term after being skipped over for a spot in the Trump cabinet (SAD!) — will not have a Republican majority to back him up in the Legislature.

It’s hard to overstate just how big of a difference this will be for the course of the next two years. We place a lot of attention on who holds the speakership and the makeup of the powerful Finance Committee — which is typically made up of more politically savvy legislators — but so much happens in the largely siloed fiefdoms of legislative committees. Chairs have near-complete say in driving a committee’s agenda, allowing them to promote or kill bills to their liking, and when they’re held by hyper-partisan wackadoos, it rarely goes well.

One of the biggest changes for this next session will be the Education Committee, which is set to be chaired by Southeast Reps. Andi Story (D-Juneau) and Rebecca Himschoot (I-Sitka). Himschoot, a long-time teacher, and Story, a long-time member of the Juneau School Board and other groups, spent much of the last two years butting heads with soon-to-be-former Education co-chair Rep. Jamie Allard. Allard, the extreme-right Eagle River Republican who lost her spot on the Human Rights Commission when she defended Nazi-themed license plates, used the committee to advance anti-trans sports legislation and promote the kind of “school choice” that allows public funds to flow into the private and religious educations of wealthier, whiter families. For school boards and teachers who were frequently ignored by Allard and, in some particularly spectacular cases, were shouted at by Allard, it’s a night and day difference.

In the big picture, though, the biggest consequence of Alaska’s election is the failure of Ballot Measure 2. Failed by a razor-thin 664-vote margin, the conservative-backed measure sought to repeal the state’s open primary and ranked-choice voting system and return to the semi-closed partisan primaries that made it easier for Republicans to weed out anyone unwilling to fall into line. Backers are already talking about another repeal initiative for the 2026 ballot, but the failure of Ballot Measure 2 means that at least one more election cycle — one that will include an open governor’s race and a U.S. Senate seat — will be conducted under the system.

Yes, the measure is headed for a recount — the margin is well within the 0.5% needed for the state to fund it — but it’d take something really wild to flip that many votes. The 2020 hand audit of the initiative that originally instated open primaries and ranked-choice voting, after all, only resulted in a few dozen votes flipping. And while some Republicans, such as Allard, are busy fomenting election conspiracies about the failure rather than accept that it’s one in a long line of close Alaska elections, it’s also hard to ignore the fact that the Division of Elections is literally run by a Trump supporter who refused to say Joe Biden fairly won the 2020 election.

And let’s not forget the Division of Elections was also accused of giving the initiative special treatment to fix otherwise fatal flaws with its signature-gathering effort.

The survival of open primaries and ranked-choice voting will likely be one of those key inflection points in Alaska’s political history, a junction between a system that reinforces the cultish us-versus-them of modern national politics and a system that better reflects Alaska’s refusal to abide by those ill-fitting labels. The open primary system sets up general election contests that are more nuanced than the typical Republican vs. Democrat choice. And while that will still be the key choice for many districts, there are many other districts where the decision should be between different shades of Republican or Democrat. The simple political landscape of some districts means they will always produce Republicans or Democratic legislators. The difference between the old and the new system is that everyone — not just partisan primary voters — will get to make that choice.

And, hey, we’ve seen that when given the choice, voters have generally opted for the more moderate, non-wackadoo candidates.

Stay tuned.

The House Majority

• Leadership: House Speaker Bryce Edgmon (I-Dillingham), House Majority Leader Chuck Kopp (R-Anchorage), House Rules Chair Louise Stutes (R-Kodiak) and Whip Zack Fields (D-Anchorage)

• House Finance: Co-Chairs Neal Foster (bills), Andy Josephson (operating budget), and Calvin Schrage (capital budget), with members Sara Hannan, Alyse Galvin, and Nellie Jimmie.

• Education: Andi Story and Rebecca Himschoot

• Resource Committee: Maxine Dibert and Robyn Burke

• Energy: Donna Mears and Ky Holland

• State Affairs: Ashley Carrick

• Health and Social Services: Genevieve Mina

• Labor and Commerce: Zack Fields and Carolyn Hall

• Community and Regional Affairs: Donna Mears and Rebecca Himschoot

• Judiciary: Andrew Gray

• Transportation: Ted Eischeid and Ashley Carrick

• Military and Veteran Affairs: Ted Eischeid

• Joint Armed Services Committee: Andrew Gray

• Fisheries: Louise Stutes

• Tribal Affairs: Bryce Edgmon and Maxine Dibert

The Senate Majority

• Leadership: Senator Gary Stevens (R-Kodiak) as Senate President, Senator Cathy Giessel (R-Anchorage) as Majority Leader, Senator Bill Wielechowski (D-Anchorage) as Rules Chair, Senator Kelly Merrick (R-Eagle River) as Whip

• Senate Finance: Sen. Bert Stedman (R-Sitka), Sen. Lyman Hoffman (D-Bethel), and Sen. Donny Olson (D-Golovin) as chairs of the Finance Committee. No other members have been announced, yet.

• Community & Regional Affairs: Sen. Kelly Merrick (R-Eagle River)

• Education: Sen. Löki Tobin (D-Anchorage)

• Health & Social Services: Sen. Forrest Dunbar (D-Anchorage)

• Judiciary: Sen. Matt Claman (D-Anchorage)

• Labor & Commerce: Sen. Jesse Bjorkman (R-Nikiski)

• Resources: Sen. Cathy Giessel (R-Anchorage)

• State Affairs: Sen. Scott Kawasaki (D-Fairbanks)

• Transportation: Sen. Jesse Bjorkman (R-Nikiski)

• Legislative Budget & Audit: Sen. Elvi Gray-Jackson (D-Anchorage)

• Legislative Council: Vice-Chair, Sen. Gary Stevens (R-Kodiak)

• Joint Armed Services: Co-Chair - Sen. Scott Kawasaki (D-Fairbanks)

• Special Committee on World Trade: Sen. Gary Stevens (R-Kodiak), Sen. Cathy Giessel (R-Anchorage)

• Special Committee on Arctic Affairs: Sen. Gary Stevens (R-Kodiak), Sen. Cathy Giessel (R-Anchorage)

Weekend watching

Remi Wolf quickly became one of my favorite listens this year, mixing her soulful voice with bright and frequently playful pop music. I got to see her down at the Edgefield Amphitheatre in Oregon this fall, and it was a truly perfect night. Also, her song “Cinderella” is perfect for brightening a dark day. Here’s her Tiny Desk concert:

Have a nice, long weekend, y’all and be kind to one another.

In this edition: With Alaska closing in on finalizing this year’s election results, the initiative to repeal the state’s fledgling open primary and ranked-choice voting system is now narrowly trailing. The conservative-backed effort has had a lead that’s dwindled as votes have been counted, with many prognostications that it would run out before the final votes are counted. There are still about 5,000 votes to tally and a recount to get through before it’s over, but that hasn’t stopped far-right legislators from jumping to election conspiracy because that’s what politics have become.

Current mood: 😤

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Like clockwork

The biggest unknown from Alaska’s election is the fate of the state’s open primary and ranked-choice voting system. Conservatives rankled by the fact that voters opt for the more moderate options when given a choice are banking big on Ballot Measure 2 returning the state to the semi-closed partisan primaries of the past. And things were looking good for the repeal on election night, but its lead has continuously dwindled as more absentee, early and questioned ballots have been counted. The question has been whether the lead or the remaining votes would run out first.

That tipping point came on Monday when about 4,000 ballots were added to the state’s tally, breaking nearly 2:1 against the repeal. The initiative’s nearly 800-vote lead has been erased and was down by 192 votes. On Tuesday, as of writing this, the “no” side’s lead had narrowed to 45 votes.

Given the close margins and trends in absentee, early and questioned ballots, several people with a handle on high school algebra predicted the flip. (I’m not among them because, given the general bleakness of the election, I didn’t want to get hopes up.)

There’s still quite a bit left before we know that Alaska’s experiment in carving out a space for bipartisan-minded centrists will live on. There are still another 5,800 ballots to tally (mostly from Anchorage and rural Alaska, which have trended toward no so far), and an automatic recount is ahead. Regardless of the outcome, it’ll be another consequential Alaska race decided by the narrowest of margins.

…or, if you’re a far-right Republican, it’s another sign of a grand conspiracy against far-right Republicans because of course. Why wouldn’t it be?

Like clockwork, two of the Legislature’s most extreme Republicans (especially now that Rep. David Eastman looks headed to defeat) blamed the initiative’s apparent loss on hackers and “illegal aliens” in the hours following Monday’s update.

Eagle River Rep. Jamie Allard, who was kicked off the state Human Rights Council after she defended Nazi references in state-issued license plates, took to X to claim that “illegal aliens in Alaska” could be responsible for the passage of a ballot measure raising the minimum wage and the failure of another to repeal open primaries.

While Ballot Measure 2 is currently failing by 45 votes, Ballot Measure 1 — which raises the minimum wage and guarantees paid sick leave for most workers — passed with a nearly 40,000-vote margin. Coincidentally, the minimum wage initiative’s margin is much smaller than when voters approved the last minimum wage hike a decade ago.

The Alaska Beacon also reported in October that there’s no evidence of widespread noncitizen voting or registration in Alaska. And there’s also the small fact that the Alaska Division of Elections is led by a Trump-supporting director in Carol Beecher, who refused to say Joe Biden fairly won the 2020 election.

Meanwhile, Homer Rep. Vance—who drew headlines after she derailed a hearing on tribal justice because it didn’t cater to white women — expressed her dissatisfaction with the results by penning an op-ed claiming Alaska has an “election integrity crisis” and insisted that the certification of the state’s election be delayed.

Her claim isn’t fixated on immigrants but on a 2020 breach that revealed the personal data of about 113,000 Alaskans. She doesn’t have any evidence that it affected this election. Still, she says it warrants putting the certification on hold as they complete a “comprehensive audit” of all 113,000 voters. At the time of the hack, the state said it didn’t affect the voting systems and “the purpose of the unlawful access was to spread propaganda and shake voter confidence — not to impact the election results.”

And judging by Vance’s reaction, it’s done precisely what it was intended to do.

The breach has been a critical tool for Vance and other conservative Republicans to drive their election agenda and rile up the base. It hasn’t produced serious election integrity efforts but, by and large, has fueled renewed GOP efforts aimed at making it harder to vote by hastening voter roll purges and ending automatic voter registration. Meanwhile, meaningful reform efforts, such as addressing the state’s high rejection rate of rural voters’ ballots, were blocked because House Republicans feared it would help Democratic U.S. Rep. Mary Pelotla (who, judging by Republican Nick Begich’s big lead, must have been left out of the hackers and “illegal aliens” plans).

In the big picture, the claims mirror the tactics of right-wing election deniers, who have been quick to blame losses on baseless conspiracies rather than accepting they might just not be that popular with voters. As Alaska’s open primary and ranked-choice voting system has shown, voters typically opt for the more moderate legislators when given a choice between a moderate Republican and a far-right Republican.

Those dynamics explain why Alaska’s Legislature will have two bipartisan majorities when it convenes in January.

Stay tuned.

In this edition: The president-elect is getting underway with forming his cabinet, and it’s Juneau’s “worst-kept secret” that Alaska Gov. Mike Dunleavy would like a part in the circus, which played right into a mysterious late-night teasing of an announcement that never came. Meanwhile, U.S. Sen. Lisa Murkowski and her centrist colleagues are meeting some of the nominations with the concern that might matter more if there wasn’t already a plan to circumvent them. Finally, about 38,000 of an undetermined amount of uncounted ballots were counted this week, inching us closer to what looks like Republicans’ defeat of Democratic U.S. Rep. Mary Peltola while open primaries remain too close to call.

Current mood: 😬

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‘Not on my bingo card’

So, what does the election outcome mean for a litany of issues important to Alaska? It’s hard to say, but there’s plenty of intrigue around the president-elect’s cabinet.

As detailed by The Alaska Beacon’s James Brooks, the “worst-kept secret” in Juneau is that Gov. Mike Dunleavy could soon be headed to Washington, D.C., to join the Trump administration in some form. Head of the maybe-soon-to-be-extinct Department of Education? Giving the Pebble Mine new life at the Department of Interior? Perhaps, as I’ve heard in passing, the Department of Agriculture? Who knows!

And it seemed like something might be happening when he posted late Tuesday that “Lt. Gov. Nancy Dahlstrom and I will be going live on Facebook with an announcement later tonight. See you then!”

Only to, as one Redditor noted, post .0037 Scaramuccis later that “Update: We will not be going live tonight on Facebook. Have a great night, Alaska.”

There’s been no word about what it was going to be.

Also, because this has come up in conversations if Dunleavy were to step down, there wouldn’t be a special election. Under the Alaska Constitution, the lieutenant governor fills a vacancy in the governor’s office until the end of the term.

From what I’ve heard, all the Dunleavy-to-the-Trump-Administration talk is only concentrated in Alaska. There’s been very little, if any, chatter outside about him being tapped for a cabinet position. But then again, there probably wasn’t a whole lot of chatter ahead of Trump announcing controversy-pocked Florida Creep Matt Gaetz as his pick for U.S. Attorney General, either.

That news appears to have landed with pretty widespread shock in Congress, with even some Trump-y legislators questioning the wisdom of the nomination and the chances of its success under the normal confirmation process. We also got the usual round of shock from Congress’ ever-shrinking number of Trump-skeptical legislators, of which Alaska’s U.S. Sen. Lisa Murkowski is a member.

“I don’t think it’s a serious nomination for the attorney general. That’s Lisa Murkowski’s view,” she told reporters, according to The Washington Post. “This one was not on my bingo card.”

Alaska Public Media’s Liz Ruskin reported this quote: “Is he a serious candidate? Not as far as I’m concerned.”

Murkowski’s colleague in consternation, Maine Sen. Susan Collins, shared similar sentiments and said she was looking ahead to questions in the nomination process.

All of the concerns may be for naught, though, as Trump has leaned on Republicans to pick a leader who would allow him to make recess appointments—which ended up being South Dakota Sen. John Thune. Thune has wholeheartedly backed Trump, making clear he’s open to abdicating the Senate’s oversight responsibilities if Trump’s nominations come up against resistance.

More ballots counted

The state tallied a little more than 38,000 votes on Tuesday—coincidentally, waiting to post results until after Dunleavy’s tease came and went—that bring Republican congressional candidate Nick Begich a step closer to defeating U.S. Rep. Mary Peltola.

While the results shrank Begich’s lead slightly—from about 10,000 votes to 9,500 votes—the dwindling number of uncounted ballots means Peltola’s path to victory is narrowing. To win, she will have to way overperform with the remaining ballots or win an impossibly high number of second-place votes from the third-and fourth-place candidates in the race.

Tracking the vote counting this year has been more opaque than I’ve seen in the past, and it doesn’t appear that there’s a firm number out there of how many votes are left to count. The Alaska Beacon’s James Brooks broke this down in his report, doing some math to get to a ballpark estimate of about 33,000 ballots left to be counted.

Peltola would have to win those remaining votes by about 2-1 to pull ahead of Begich, a tall order. And if Begich pulls ahead of 50%, he’d win the race outright without ranked-choice voting coming into play. He’s currently at 49.1%.

Meanwhile, the fate of Alaska’s open primary and ranked-choice voting system remains too close to call. The yes/repeal side of Ballot Measure 2 is still leading, but the lead has shrunk from about 4,200 votes to about 2,800, which amounts to a 1% margin.

The next round of ballots is expected on Friday, with the final tally set for next Wednesday.

Down the ballot, the legislative races remain essentially unchanged. Most legislators who will be critical to the already-announced bipartisan majorities have extended their leads with the latest counts.

Stay tuned.

Current mood: 😵‍💫

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The silver linings election

Welp. That didn’t go as I was expecting.

But as I’ve done several times in the moments and days following stinging elections, I’m reminded that the most impactful politics happen on our state and local levels. On that front, Tuesday’s election brought a big silver lining: resounding victories for Alaska’s bipartisan-minded legislative candidates.

Though there are still many ballots to be tallied, a coalition of Democrats, independents and moderate Republicans will flip Alaska’s Republican-led House and maintain the bipartisan majority in the Senate. It’s the first time in my time covering the Alaska Legislature that bipartisan coalitions will control both chambers (though, if we’re being fair, several Republican-led majorities have technically been bipartisan with their reliance on rural legislators, but you know what I mean).

The newly minted bipartisan majorities will importantly take the committee gavels out of the hands of far-right legislators, who had used them to advance divisive culture-war-type issues in the recent session. It will also likely hamper much of the worst impulses of Republican Gov. Mike Dunleavy, who has proved incapable of working with legislators who aren’t already in lockstep with him. That said, Dunleavy’s time in Alaska may also be cut short given all the talk that he may join the Trump administration. Silver linings.

In the House, the bipartisan coalition will net three seats. Four seats are set to flip out of the hands of conservative, party-loyalist Republicans, while just one flip will occur in the other direction.

• In South Anchorage, independent Ky Holland has a six-percentage-point lead over Republican Lucy Bauer (53.08-46.68) in a race to fill an open seat held by Republican Rep. Laddie Shaw, who declined to seek re-election.

• In West Anchorage, moderate Republican Chuck Kopp—a former representative—repeated his primary election trouncing of GOP Rep. Craig Johnson, beating the once-powerful Rules Chair by a whopping 23 percentage points (60.91-37.91).

• In East Anchorage, the second time was the charm for Democrat Ted Escheid in his race against Republican Rep. Stanley Wright. Escheid, who lost narrowly to Wright in 2022, now holds a roughly 3-point lead (51.28-48.46).

• On the North Slope’s House District 40, Democrat Robyn Burke holds a commanding lead over Republican-turned-independent Rep. Thomas Baker. With 15 of 20 precincts reporting as of Wednesday afternoon, Burke has 56% of the vote in the three-way race for the seat. Baker and Democrat Saima Chase each have about 21% of the vote. Baker was appointed by Republican Gov. Mike Dunleavy and has been a reliable ally, frequently splitting with other rural legislators on issues like education funding and election reform.

The lone flip in the other direction—barring any last-minute flips (I’d be watching Anchorage’s House District 18, where Democratic Rep. Cliff Groh has a 28-vote lead over Republican David Nelson, and the Peninsula’s House District 6, where extreme-right Rep. Sarah Vance could be vulnerable depending on how ranked-choice voting plays out)—is down in Southeast Alaska, where Republican Jeremy Bynum holds an outright majority in the race to fill the open seat held by retiring independent Rep. Dan Ortiz. With 51.5% of the vote, Bynum won’t have to sweat the potential consolidation between independent candidates Agnes Moran and Grant Echohawk, who received about 24.5% and 23.7% of the vote, respectively.

That said, those bipartisan-minded legislators have seen enough to have already laid claim to the House Majority.

On Wednesday afternoon, the newly minted majority announced Dillingham independent Rep. Bryce Edgmon will be its next Speaker, returning to the role he held for two sessions. Kodiak Republican Rep. Louise Stutes will round out his leadership team as Rules Chair, and Rep. Kopp will be Majority Leader.

“Alaskans have spoken clearly, and we will work together, representing residents of all regions, to stabilize public education funding, develop affordable energy, and fix Alaska’s workforce crisis,” said Rep. Edgmon in a prepared statement.

The coalition laid out four legislative priorities for the upcoming session: Balanced budgets that stay within the spending limits laid out in state law, stable education funding with a goal of reduced class sizes and improved outcomes, retirement reform for public employees and energy development.

The worker-focused policies also coincide with the passage of Ballot Measure 1, which will raise the minimum wage to $15 per hour and guarantee paid sick leave for most workers.

The Senate Bipartisan Majority lives on

The Senate’s 17-member bipartisan majority made it through the election largely unscathed despite heavy Republican spending to unseat a trio of senators seen as the most vulnerable.

The results show Fairbanks Democratic Sen. Scott Kawasaki and moderate Republican Sens. Kelly Merrick of Eagle River and Jesse Bjorkman of Nikiski have leads over their opponents. Kawasaki has an outright lead over Republican candidate Leslie Hajdukovich, who was pitched at the GOP’s latest best shot at unseating the Democrat, with 50.27% to 49.48%. Merrick and Bjorkman faced similar races with far-right challengers and Democrats with suspicious ties to the far-right. In both cases, they are a few percentage points of an outright majority but I’d expect them to close it out with ranked-choice voting.

Partyline Republicans had to make inroads in those races if they hoped to crack the core of the Senate’s bipartisan majority.

Without that, the next Senate is set to look a lot like the current one.

Senate President is set to be Kodiak Republican Sen. Gary Stevens, who will hold an unprecedented fourth term in the role. Anchorage Republican Sen. Cathy Giessel and Anchorage Democratic Sen. Bill Wielechowski will round out the leadership team, reprising their roles as majority leader and rules chair. The powerful Senate Finance Committee will also be a rerun with Sens. Bert Stedman (R-Sitka), Lyman Hoffman (D-Bethel) and Donny Olson (D-Golovin) helming the committee.

Further positions and membership in both majorities will be announced once more votes are counted, and internal organizational meetings are held.

One last thing

Extreme-right Wasilla Republican Rep. David Eastman is currently lagging far-right Republican Jubilee Underwood, 47.7-51. Eastman, a dependable voice of racist and inflammatory comments, has long been a thorn in the side of Republicans, in large part because he has refused to play nice with other conservatives. Heading into the 2022 election, he faced an effort to disqualify him for being an anti-government Oath Keepers group member and attending January 6, but the judge stopped short of barring him from running for office. He was not part of the House Majority this past session and ultimately lost his one committee seat.

Underwood, meanwhile, played a key role in book bannings as the president of the Mat-Su School Board.

Stay tuned!

Current mood: 🤢

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Another election, same old problems

When I left the Fairbanks Daily News-Miner and embarked on this weird journey known as political blogging in 2017, it was in large part because I felt that the bounds of traditional journalism weren’t well equipped to handle a political world that was rapidly becoming anything but traditional. Trump and Trump wannabes like Gov. Mike Dunleavy have warped our politics in what one good friend likes to call “goalposts on rocket skates,” but traditional media has continued to treat them as if they are two ends of an even playing field.

Things that were once disqualifying—moral failings, open bigotry, cronyism and rank incompetence—seemed to be the point rather than a flaw in the system.

As the nation hurtles toward whatever electoral outcome we have tonight, I’ve been thinking a lot about the guiding statement I posted when I first started at The Midnight Sun. It said something to the effect that I don’t care so much about the political parties in charge as I care about good government with fair and equitable systems that create opportunities for the many, rather than siphon away resources to the well-connected.

In other words: To hell with politics, do what’s right for Alaska.

And it’s with that that I say something is seriously broken with Alaska’s elections.

I’m not talking about open primaries and ranked-choice voting—two systems that seem to have given new space for reasonable-enough moderates to operate—but the systems by which Alaskans cast their votes… or, more precisely, can’t cast their votes.

Namely, the Alaska Division of Elections has a long and troubling history with voting in rural communities that seemingly has been allowed to fester with a shrug.

They seem to always be caught off guard by unopened or late-opening polling places in rural communities. Several didn’t open during the primary election, and at least two didn’t open on time today. In the run-up to the election, at least 91 voters in Dillingham, Aniak and King Salmon were given the wrong ballots for their regions. And that’s not to mention a long-running issue with translating election materials into Alaska Native languages, chronic understaffing and other delays.

“Can you imagine if the Valley or South Anchorage or Kenai was suffering this exact kind of problem? Could you imagine a voter’s response to this delay in accessing our constitutional right?” Get Out the Native Vote Director Michelle Sparck told me earlier this year. “Because it’s in remote Alaska and far removed from their eyes and their frustrations, it’s easy to say, ‘Oh well, we checked the boxes off and did our due diligence.’”

But, as we’d come to find out, some of that is by design.

I’m talking about the witness signature requirement on by-mail absentee ballots.

While the signatures are ostensibly an anti-fraud measure, the state has acknowledged that they have never been used to identify fraud, as they don’t have a cross-check system akin to the city of Anchorage. In essence, it’s election security theater. But it has had severe consequences for rural communities.

It’s been one of the leading causes of ballot rejections for rural voters, with some districts in Region IV seeing nearly 17% of by-mail absentee ballots rejected during the 2022 special election, which was conducted by mail due to the snap turnaround. And because Alaska has no ballot curing provisions on the books, those voters were left with no recourse toward having their votes counted.

What’s frustrating about all of this is that there’s a solution right in front of us. The year that rejections for by-mail ballots were the lowest they’ve ever been for all Alaska legislative districts, rural or not, was the 2020 election when the requirement was put on hold due to the pandemic.

The Legislature had the opportunity to repeal the requirement this year in an eleventh-hour vote on an election reform measure, but House Republicans quashed the bill with somewhat understandable worries about legislating at the last minute.

In stunning comments from House Speaker Cathy Tilton last month, she admitted that the high rejection rate of rural votes is not a flaw but the point. 

“The changes in that bill definitely would have leaned the election towards Mary Peltola, to be quite honest,” she told host Michael Dukes, “with no signatures on ballots in, you know, in rural areas.”

While the comments drew quick derision from groups throughout the state, we should be clear that these kinds of voter disenfranchisement efforts have been going on for a long time. The original version of the election bill they killed mainly focused on purging voters from the rolls faster—a Republican favorite. Tilton went on to say that voting reforms are needed, but, to her, that would mean ending automatic voter registration.

In the big picture, these efforts do little to increase the election security that Republicans like Tilton claim to care so much about. If they were serious, they’d be looking at a signature verification system akin to Anchorage’s that can catch suspicious activity rather than just reject ballots of people they think don’t vote the right way. There’s nothing fair and equitable about it.

At least they’re saying the quiet part out loud.

Stay tuned.

In this edition: We’re into the final stretch of the election season, so let’s get into gear with one of my favorite ongoing threads in Alaska politics: the ever-deepening rifts between Alaska Republicans. There are the loyalists, the extreme right and a growing cohort of moderates willing to buck their party. I recently talked with two such moderate candidates in head-to-head races with incumbent Republican loyalists about how politics have changed and what’s motivating them to run.

Current mood: 🐘

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For the moderates in Alaska’s legislative races, good policy trumps party

The general election is just three weeks away, and one of the big storylines underlining this entire election cycle is the ongoing push and pull between the various factions of the Alaska Republican Party. Once relatively united, the last decade has seen deepening rifts between extreme-right Republicans who don’t play nice with others, moderate Republicans who play nice with independents and Democrats, and party loyalists who seem to be members of the Alaska Republican Party first and foremost. While it’s an issue that has long simmered around the edges of state politics, the adoption of open primaries and ranked-choice voting has pushed it into the forefront of this year’s election cycle.

This year, some of the most hot-button and consequential races in shaping the Alaska Legislature are intra-party challenges between moderate Republicans open to forming centrist coalitions across the political aisle and loyalists for whom bipartisanship and compromise are bad words.

In Anchorage, moderate Republican former Rep. Chuck Kopp returned to politics to wipe the floor with Alaska Republican Party Rep. Craig Johnson in the open primary, finishing 20 points ahead of the House Rules Committee chair who has been one of the key GOP loyalists. In Fairbanks, moderate Republican Joy Beth Cottle—a badass long-time firefighter—is pushing to unseat extreme-right Republican Rep. Frank Tomaszewski after debuting just a few points behind him in the primary election. And there are moderate Republican Sens. Jesse Bjorkman and Kelly Merrick, who face tight challenges from extreme-right and party loyalist Republicans (along with some questionably Democratic Democrats).

Plenty of other races still break down along traditional lines, but these are some of the most interesting races to me because they showcase how much Republican politics has changed over the last few years.

As former Rep. Kopp told me in an interview last week, the old semi-closed partisan system made getting elected as a Republican a cakewalk in most districts, producing outright bad candidates in some cases. All you had to do was appeal to Republican primary voters for a free pass in the general election.

The open primary system shortcuts that leverage for the parties, meaning candidates—and their politics—must appeal more broadly. It’s the big driving reason behind the right-wing effort to repeal it via initiative.  

“The voters are empowered now. They all have to be listened to,” Kopp said. “It has empowered candidates in a way to run for office who, before that, knew that the closed political primaries made it possible to elect a ham sandwich or an inanimate object who agreed to toe the party line.”

He said the impact it had on legislating is also hard to overlook. Legislators keen on keeping their jobs in safely Republican districts had to maintain their appeal to the party lest they fall out of favor and draw a challenger. That threat of a primary, he said, was one of the party’s most potent tools to instill and maintain loyalty.

“If your highest priority is to be elected and re-elected, you can’t make the tough decisions,” he said. “I’m very willing to not be re-elected, and that’s what makes some Republicans not like me. They know that’s the least of my fears.”

That said, defining what it means to be a moderate Republican in today’s political climate isn’t exactly straightforward. As I’ve come to say, “moderate” should be treated as shorthand for moderate-by-comparison, as the Republicans’ goalposts seem affixed to rocket skates. The rightward shift is like the tide going out, leaving those willing to buck the party standing alone in the moderate shallows.

“I think most people consider me a moderate,” Kopp said. “I’ve been a lifelong registered Republican, and I think the party has changed dramatically. This is not the party of Ronald Reagan or George Bush I or II; it’s almost unrecognizable to me some days. ... I do not believe times have become too desperate for the Constitution, and I don’t like it when I see the hardliners turn against First Amendment principles. ... I think we have a drift toward authoritarianism that concerns me.”

The one policy thread that seems to unite moderate Republicans is the fight for a pension system for public employees. Once one of those issues that Republicans reflexively opposed, Republican Sen. Cathy Giessel successfully carried a public pension bill to passage in the Senate this session.

The measure never got meaningful traction in the House.

Kopp says the House’s refusal to take up the measure, which Rep. Johnson played a crucial role in stymieing as House Rules Chair, was a key reason he entered the race. A former police officer, Kopp says he supports the pension system as an investment in Alaska’s present and future.

The same goes for Joy Beth Cottle, a long-time Fairbanks firefighter challenging Rep. Tomaszewski. I also talked with her last week, and she said the lack of a predictable retirement has contributed to a revolving door of firefighters that has undermined public safety while racking up training costs for the city. It, along with education funding, is why she’s running.

“I’ve seen the employee turnover increase dramatically since 2006,” she said, referring to the year the state did away with pensions in favor of a 401k-style retirement plan. “It’s the top and highest quality employees who realize they can make a life for themselves and have a defined benefit pension in other places.”

For her, her experience of seeing talented firefighters leave for greener pastures trumps whatever the party would have her do and believe in pensions. And that perhaps is one of the most precise ways to define just what it means to be a moderate Republican in today’s political climate.

“I don’t tolerate bullies in the workplace,” Cottle said, “and I’ll stand up to them wherever I am.”

Stay tuned.

In this edition: As the election season kicks off in earnest, Alaska’s top conservative isn’t exactly beating the “Republicans are just kinda weird” allegations. This week, the governor issued a series of vetoes that reminded us precisely what kind of politics conservatives would enact if they win a trifecta. Oh, and the administration also mysteriously shortchanged a library grant program, leaving public libraries throughout the state scrambling to keep the doors open. Whew. Also, the reading list and weekend watching.

Current mood: 😬

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Dunleavy's vetoes highlight the right's weird agenda

The primary election results were certified this week, kicking off the final run to the general election. The certification came with about a dozen candidate withdrawals, almost all Republicans, as conservatives look to consolidate their support in crucial races. The ultimate goal is to dismantle the Senate’s bipartisan coalition while holding onto the House, capturing the trifecta that removes any pesky roadblocks to enacting their right-wing agenda.

And as if to put a fine point on what that agenda is, Gov. Mike Dunleavy was surprisingly active this week:

• He vetoed a broadly popular bill to ease access to birth control in Alaska. The measure, House Bill 17 by Fairbanks Democratic Rep. Ashley Carrick, would have required insurance providers to cover up to a year’s supply of prescription birth control at a time. It was a long-sought change that advocates say is much needed in Alaska, where many women living and working in rural and remote areas don’t have regular access to pharmacies. It also passed with overwhelming bipartisan backing — with several Republicans even speaking to their strong support on the floor. Dunleavy, however, couldn’t be bothered to provide a meaningful explanation beyond calling any requirements on insurance companies “bad policy.” It should be noted that the bill’s main opposition came from Republican men, who repeatedly made false statements claiming that it might cover abortion-inducing abortifacients and whined that it was unfair that women would be getting special treatment.

• He vetoed a workers' rights bill that would have laid out more transparent safety rules for workers in large warehouses, allowing them to request details on productivity quotas and prohibiting restrictions on bathroom breaks. According to ADN’s reporting, House Bill 88 was inspired by the experience of Sutton Republican Rep. George Rauscher’s father, who saw an older man collapse from the summertime heat while working in a warehouse. “It just gives the worker a chance to think about whether or not they’re going to be able to keep up with what’s required of them,” he told the paper. In his veto statement, Dunleavy said the protections are excessive, “thereby thwarting business development and economic opportunities in Alaska.”

• Libraries around the state are scrambling after the Dunleavy administration mysteriously slashed funding for the state’s library grant system. According to reporting by KDLL, the Department of Education and Early Development slashed the budget for library operating grants from more than a half-million dollars to $150,000, a 75% reduction, despite the money being allocated by the Alaska Legislature. The state apparently tried to bury the news in an update wishing seasons’ greetings to libraries and has not been forthcoming about where the money went. “We have not been able to identify why that money left that program or where it went to only that the money was not given initially to that grant program,” Sen. Jesse Bjorkman, R-Nikiski, told the station.

In the big picture

It’s important to note the governor’s administration has—probably just coincidentally—employed several men with disturbing attitudes and behavior toward women and deployed policies that are weirdly fixated on what it means to be a woman. He’s had two attorneys general resign—one over harassing a junior state employee and another who is accused of sexually abusing a teen that he coached. His pro-family advisor resigned last year when his misogynistic podcast, in which he said “divorce is worse than rape,” came to light. The governor also vetoed funding for the Alaska Court System because it overturned an anti-abortion law he supported (something it did again this week). He also platformed an anti-trans activist, calling gender-affirming care a “pseudo-science that has lifelong debilitating impacts on children” while also secretly rolling back anti-discrimination protections for LGBTQ Alaskans. Like most of the anti-trans animus, most of it revolves around what a “proper woman” is, and it seems fixated on childbirth.

Weird, right?

We also can’t forget that the governor’s main agenda regarding education—beyond proposing and promptly dropping a Florida-style “Don’t Say Gay” bill—is to allow public education dollars to flow unchecked to private and religious schools, flouting the Alaska Constitution’s abundantly clear prohibition on just that. He notoriously vetoed a broadly popular education funding bill because it lacked his proposal to expand the public charter school system, a significant change that the governor never explained in any meaningful detail. That lack of detail on what he plans on doing with the powers if he gets them has been a running trend in his career.

Much of the governor’s pulled-from-the-national-culture-wars agenda has been stymied by various legislative coalitions of Democrats, independents and moderate Republicans. While the Republican-led House gave new life to right-wing legislation in the last session—highlighted by the full day Republicans spent pushing through a bill limiting how trans girls and women are allowed to play sports at all levels in Alaska—much of that agenda was always dead on arrival with the Senate’s bipartisan coalition.

Alaska is facing big problems that deserve meaningful attention. The combined hard work of reasonable legislators has produced many sensible solutions to Alaska's challenges and given new life to other issues that were once thought insurmountable.

Many of those solutions are contained in the absurd number of bills the governor has let become law without his signature. This year, the governor has allowed 17 bills to go into effect without the traditional bill-signing celebration. Whether it’s laziness or pettiness, it’s hard to overlook that many of those bills are sponsored by legislators who have refused to stroke his ego. Those bills even included one of his own, House Bill 344, which was amended to include much-needed reforms to the state’s hapless food stamp program that were initially sponsored by Democratic Rep. Genevieve Mina and Republican Sen. Cathy Giessel.

Bipartisan support also saw the public sector pension bill pass the Senate, marking the most progress the measure has made since the state eliminated the system in 2006.

But as is the case with birth control and workers’ rights, many of these issues will likely not see significant progress as long as Dunleavy and his backers have the veto pen and a large enough legislative plurality to ensure those vetoes stick. That extends to things like election reform, e-bike regulations, or, heck, even the oft-vetoed Alaska Long Trail project.

Dunleavy and the conservative movement, as a whole, have shown little interest in compromise and collaboration, instead viewing obstinance as a virtue.

Former Rep. Chuck Kopp, a moderate Republican who trounced conservative GOP Rep. Craig Johnson in the primary, put it well in a recent op-ed.

“Consensus requires a measure of death to personal and partisan ambition, grace towards those who oppose you, and a firm resolve to debate issues on the merits without stooping to misinformation and slander,” he wrote. “The outcome is laws and policies that undergird the next generation.”

In other words, everything that Dunleavy is not.

Weekend watching

The cooling weather has me thinking about Alaska’s seasons.

Have a nice weekend, y’all!

In this edition: The long fight over the conservative-led effort to repeal Alaska’s open primaries and ranked-choice voting reached the Alaska Supreme Court on Thursday, with the court ultimately upholding the state’s approval of the initiative, clearing it to appear on the 2024 general election ballot. While the outcome was apparent in the opening moments of the oral arguments, it still highlights a bigger problem with the enormous amount of flexibility the Division of Elections has given itself to shape the state’s elections. Also, some thoughts on who’s “perennial” and who’s not.

Current mood: 😤

Also: Landslide destroys multiple homes, prompts evacuations in Ketchikan

‘The danger in the discretion’

It was pretty clear from the get-go of last week’s oral arguments that the Alaska Supreme Court wouldn’t throw out the initiative seeking to repeal Alaska’s open primary and ranked-choice voting system. The rules for state initiatives are muddy to the point that it’s unclear what is and isn’t allowed, so the justices were not about to take the extraordinary step of throwing out the initiative that tens of thousands of Alaskans signed.

Still, the oral arguments—like much of the legal challenges against the right-wing effort to return the state to the traditional partisan primary system—documented the latest in a long string of shady-but-not-illegal behavior that will bring the issue to the general election ballot this year. We’ve had a litany of campaign finance violations that resulted in unusually high penalties, nearly totaling $100,000. The messy signature-gathering campaign led a Superior Court judge to throw out over two dozen petition booklets over glaring problems.

In the latest round of oral arguments, the focus was on the Alaska Division of Elections.

Attorney Scott Kendall argued that the state gave the initiative campaign—which is favored by conservative Republicans—special treatment that helped it paper over glaring defects with some 60 booklets that had invalid certifications when submitted. In those booklets, the notary’s commission had expired, and thus, the certification was no good. In previous years, that would have led to the initiative’s rejection and caused the group to miss the deadline to appear on the 2024 general election ballot. Instead, the state allowed the group to retrieve the defective ballots, fix the errors and return them well after the deadline to complete them.

Whether any of that was actually allowed is unclear. State law allows corrections to petition booklets, but the extent to which they’re allowed and the timeline under which they must be completed isn’t spelled out. Instead, it’s left up to the discretion of the Division of Elections in an opaque process that seems to shift based on internal emails. Kendall argued that allowing such flexibility raises the specter of political bias, allowing political appointees to help and hurt different causes.

“To give the Division that much latitude could be decisive. It was decisive in this case,” he said. “So, you have a division that maybe they’ll bend over backward for a particular petition, maybe they’ll just follow (the regulations) and disqualify it. We can’t allow the Division of Elections to have that kind of latitude.”

He also noted that the allowances could lead to even more shady actions, noting that a group could get away with filing petition booklets certified by “Mickey Mouse” and get an additional 60 days to fix it.

“That’s the danger in the discretion,” he said.

Repealing Alaska’s open primary and ranked-choice voting system has been a major priority for conservative, party-aligned Republicans. The system, which ended the practice of state-backed semi-closed partisan primaries, has opened new lanes for moderate Republicans to run and win in districts that once produced reliable Republican team players. That helped lay the foundation for a bipartisan majority in the Senate, which has been a significant headache for Gov. Mike Dunleavy and his Republicans.

Kendall argued that a strict application of the rules would have disqualified the initiative and questioned whether the state would have made the same allowances for a measure supporting abortion access.

It should be noted that this is not at all theoretical.

The Alaska courts have already ruled the Division of Elections has impermissibly put its finger on the scales with progressive causes, such as the 2020 initiative to raise oil taxes or the many roadblocks it set in the way of the effort to recall Gov. Mike Dunleavy (which delayed the whole effort long enough that the pandemic snuffed it out). Much of that has been guided by sketchy legal opinions from the Department of Law, which has not been shy about putting its thumb on the scales.

State attorney Kimber Rogers told the court that what mattered was that the state had been “diligent” about working with the sponsors. However, she acknowledged that very little of the Division of Elections’ correction policy had been spelled out.

“We don’t really know what the division’s practice was at the timeframe,” she said when questioned about a Division of Elections brochure that said initiative sponsors cannot fix problems with their initiatives after submission. She said they didn’t keep such records.

When justices discussed the possibility of the state not allowing a group to correct its errors, Rogers said the groups could simply sue the state if they felt the treatment was unfair. When asked about the Division’s decision to throw out a booklet for the same issues that were allowed to be fixed with the 60, Rogers again fell back to the flexibility allowed to the Division of Elections. She said the initiative had already qualified without that booklet, so it didn’t matter.  

“It seems like a lot of mush in there,” said Chief Justice Pete Maassen of the state’s process for correcting errors with initiative petitions.

The problem, however, is that despite all the mush, the justices weren’t particularly convinced that they should apply the deadlines as strictly as Kendall insisted. He argued that a strict reading of the state’s laws and regulations would have disqualified the initiative. Justices doubted the framers of the rules had intended them to be so strict as to effectively make the correction process impossible to implement.

The justices issued their order, upholding the Division of Elections’ approval of the initiative shortly after the oral arguments. It’ll be interesting to see if the full opinion is to see if the justices weigh in on the Division of Elections’ behavior.

Stay tuned.

Perennial (derogatory)

In last Friday’s roundup, I used the word “perennial” to describe several candidates. While it’s undoubtedly a fair label for candidates like Anchorage “Democrat” Dustin Darden, a friend pointed out that Abbott Loop/Hillside Democrat Janice Park doesn’t deserve the derogatory connotation that comes along with “perennial.”

I agree.

Park has thrown her hat into tough South Anchorage races for several cycles now, and I’ve heard her speak at several candidate forums over the years. She’s leagues different from candidates like Darden and has a compelling message around key progressive issues like education funding, child care and organized labor. It also seems like groups and politicians are catching on, with Park racking up a who’s-who of endorsements in this cycle. (Plus, her win with the Alaska Supreme Court in the adverse possession case is precisely the kind of wonkiness that I love.)

Park won 48.4% of the vote in the primary election, leading Republican Sen. James Kaufman, who got 45.8%. The third candidate, Republican Harold Borbridge, got about 5.7%.

In this edition: Alaska’s primary election wrapped up this week, providing a few more surprises than you might expect from a night where just three of more than four dozen races had anything at stake. U.S. Rep. Mary Peltola cleaned up, Lt. Gov. Nancy Dahlstrom dropped out along with a couple of other Republicans, who seem hellbent on not learning from the past, and the legislative races are a bit of a scattershot. Anyone can read anything from the results… so let’s do that! Also, the reading list and weekend watching.

Current mood: 🤓

Let’s overreact to the primary election

Examining the results of Alaska’s primary election this week comes with many caveats. The top-four open primary means most candidates in most races will advance to the general election, and as such, the campaigns aren’t entirely spun up. Turnout currently sits at a pretty dismal 16%. But then again, it wouldn’t be politics if we didn’t take a moment to overreact to the results. So, in this edition, let’s run down some of the big surprises and how they’re already impacting the race.

The U.S. House Race

After vaulting into the spotlight in the chaotic 2022 special election to replace the late U.S. Rep. Don Young, Democratic U.S. Rep. Mary Peltola has been unfailingly centrist, making plenty of moves that have frustrated progressives. That included her mealy-mouthed weigh-in on the presidential race, which (rightly so) left reporters with the impression that the candidate who capitalized on an image of likable decency could be open to supporting convicted felon and former President Donald Trump. She ultimately walked that back, leaving her in an awkward position of not endorsing and not supporting Trump.

All that to say. If the primary results are anything to go by, it looks like she’s doing something right.

According to the latest primary results, Peltola received an impressive 50.4% of the vote. Repeating that in the general election will spare her any uncertainty about how the Republican side of the ticket might behave under ranked-choice voting.

However, much of that uncertainty was eliminated on Friday when Republican Lt. Gov. Nancy Dahlstrom announced she was dropping out of the race following a disappointing third-place finish, where she got about 20% of the vote. This leaves third-time Republican candidate Nick Begich III as the lone major challenger in the race. Begich, who finished behind Peltola and former Gov. Sarah Palin in the 2022 special and regular elections, got about 27% of the primary vote.

Dahlstrom’s lackluster finish was largely to be expected from the low-profile politician, whose last-minute ad blitz touting her endorsement from President Trump didn’t convey a whole lot of confidence. While she didn’t agree to the drop-out pledge that Begich and some other Republican legislative candidates have made (and, in several legislative races, made good on), the conservative media machine spun up to pressure her out of the race with warnings about her political future if she “cost” the Republicans the race by staying in.

Still, it’s hard to overlook that Dahlstrom was, by and large, the establishment choice for the race and had the backing of national Republicans like House Speaker Mike Johnson (who was among those she thanked in her statement (Begich was not)).

While that helps consolidate the Republican side of the ticket, it doesn’t mean it will immediately be a neck-and-neck race for the seat. As the results of ranked-choice voting show in the 2022 elections, the voters backing one candidate will not always neatly coalesce behind a candidate from the same party. Some voters will cross party lines, and others will not vote in the race at all. To be sure, Dahlstrom’s withdrawal likely minimizes those camps.

Republican drop-outs

After more reflection on the Republicans’ pledges to drop out if they’re not the top-performing conservative candidate in the race, I think it’s landing more on the “shrug” end of political strategies that tips the fact their hand may not be that great in the first place. The open primary system is designed to give voters a broader set of options in who will represent them in Juneau, which in 2022 translated to a lot more moderate and centrist candidates winning. In each one of these pledges, the only signers are conservative, party-beholden Republicans. If they want to treat the open primary as the old partisan primary to ensure there’s just one hand-picked party favorite on the ballot, that doesn’t change the fact that voters have been opting for more moderate and centrist Republicans at every opportunity.

As moderate pension-backing former Republican Rep. Chuck Kopp told the Alaska Beacon after walloping establishment Republican Rep. Craig Johnson by more than 20 percentage points: “It tells me that there’s a fresh breeze blowing through the political air in Alaska.”

That said, following the primary election, a handful of Republicans have dropped out, but one stands out to me.

That’d be Republican Rep. Tom McKay, who couldn’t help but run to the far right after narrowly winning his 2022 election and couldn’t win re-election, so he opted for a face-saving run for West Anchorage’s state Senate seat. He made the call on Friday after finishing in a dismal third place… SECOND PLACE?!? West Anchorage Democratic Sen. Matt Claman cleaned up with nearly 60% of the vote to McKay’s 21% and Republican former-legislator-turned-perennial-candidate Liz Vazquez at 19.4%. According to the Anchorage Daily News, McKay had a dour reading of the results and said there was no path to victory. While Vazquez said they could have used ranked-choice voting to their advantage, essentially doubling up campaigns against Claman, McKay insisted that convincing voters to rank is impossible.

Which, hey, is weird because that’s precisely how McKay won the election in 2022. He was initially in second place behind Democrat Denny Wells and only pulled off the razor-thin victory because most of the Republican votes consolidated around him. That anti-RCV Kool-Aid must be something if it can make you discount your first-hand experiences.

The political winds

As I said up top, you can read pretty much whatever you want with these results.

If you’re on the side of conservative Republicans, I think there’s some good news:

• The swap from Rep. Tom McKay to Republican former legislator Mia Costello looks wise in House District 15. She has 51.4% of the vote to Democrat Denny Wells’ 44.3%, with the significant caveat that perennial not-a-Democrat-Democrat Dustin Darden drew 4.3%. That said, Wells has raised a massive amount of money that has yet to be deployed, while Costello’s fundraising has been anemic (though it’s been propped up with Americans for Prosperity spending).

• Almost everything in the last bullet point also applies to the race for Anchorage’s House District 11. Republican Rep. Julie Coulombe leads well-funded independent Walter Featherly 53%-47%.  

• Leslie Hajdukovich, Fairbanks Republicans’ latest best chance at beating Democratic Sen. Scott Kawasaki, has a narrow lead in the primary, 51% to 49%. Kawasaki has, so far, fended off every one of Republicans’ “best chances” to beat him, so there’s a lot of room left, but it’s competitive.

• In the race to replace moderate Republican Sen. Click Bishop, right-wing Rep. Mike Cronk is in the lead with about 43.4% of the vote to undeclared candidate Savannah Fletchers’ 42.75%. Both are competitive, but Cronk has the upper hand, given that the other two candidates in the race (drawing about 14% combined) are to his right.

If you’re everyone else (bipartisan-minded Republicans, independents and Democrats), then there are probably more races that are promising:

• As mentioned above, Kopp is walloping Rep. Johnson 60.79% to 39.21%.

• In East Anchorage, Ted Eischeid has a nearly 2-point lead over Republican Rep. Stanley Wright. Wright narrowly won the election in 2022 and had flashes of more moderate politics than his fellow Republicans, but was still reliably Republican.

• Several typically close races throughout Anchorage don’t look nearly as competitive this time. Previous election cycles would have made for tough challenges for Democrats like Reps. Andy Josephson in Midtown and Donna Mears in East Anchorage, but they have nearly 15-point leads over their Republican challengers. Others are in the 20-point-plus range.

• Longtime South Anchorage Democratic candidate Janice Park is racking up the Ws this year. Not only did she finish ahead of Republican Sen. James Kaufman 48.5-45.8, but the Alaska Supreme Court also ruled in her favor in an interesting-in-the-wonkiest of-ways adverse possession case. Park has been running without much meaningful party support in several elections, but is a much better candidate than the “perennial” label would suggest. Perhaps it’s time to rethink that backing. While a Republican took the remaining 5.7% of the vote, suggesting there’s still a big block of Republican voters, it’s looking like it could be competitive.

And who really knows?

• Moderate labor-friendly Republican Sens. Kelly Merrick and Jesse Bjorkman are probably the two biggest targets of conservative Republicans in this election, as the competitive primaries show. Bjorkman finished with a solid edge over extreme-right Rep. Ben Carpenter, and Merrick is neck-and-neck with Republican challenger Jared Goecker. With it not looking like any candidate is a lock to seal up 50% of the vote, ranked-choice voting will likely be important here. Ranked-choice voting will also undercut whatever advantage Republican operatives were hoping to get out of the “fake” Democrats I discussed earlier this week.

And, at the end of the day, there’s still a fair bit of time left, a lot more voters who will ultimately weigh in and a whole big presidential election that will suck all the air out of the room.

Stay tuned!

Reading list

• Matt Salisbury is the No. 4 candidate in Alaska’s U.S. House voting. Who is he?

• 2 rural Alaska precincts fail to open for primary voting after workers don’t respond to state

• Community calls for hope and healing after police kill 16-year-old: ‘This is Anchorage’

• Alaska Supreme Court weighs claim that Division of Elections gave ranked-choice repeal special treatment (and upholds it)

• ‘We kind of got our students back’: Some Anchorage schools are rethinking phones

• Palmer’s new city manager says his past controversies won’t be a problem here

• Alaska appeals federal court ruling that was a step toward new ‘Indian country’ here

• Bellwether trial in Kroger-Albertsons merger begins Monday

• Troopers' union condemns commissioner comments on violent Kenai arrest

Weekend watching

One of my favorite bits of internet pedantry is misused bird calls and animal sounds in movies and television, which makes me all the more grateful for all the loons (and other neat birds) we get to experience.

Have a good weekend, everyone!

In this edition: Alaska’s primary election is tomorrow, which, under the state’s top-four open primary system, will mean just three of the more than four dozen races up this year will see their fields narrowed. Still, it’s a good opportunity to break down how the races are shaping up, especially with regard to how right-wing Republicans are trying to navigate a system that opened a lane for their mortal enemies: moderate Republicans. With right-wingers hoping to claw back the advantage of partisan primaries, we’ve had accusations of “fake Democrats” and half-hearted pledges to consolidate the fields. Also, I’ll run down those three races where at least one candidate will be sent packing and give an update on an interesting takeaway from the latest round of fundraising numbers.

Current mood: 🌻

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Republicans are having a weird time with open primaries and ranked-choice voting

Alaska’s first elections under open primaries and ranked-choice voting in 2022 largely delivered on what its backers had promised: More moderate candidates could run and win in districts that once reliably produced more partisan legislators. And because we’re in a state with more reliably red districts than blue ones, that was mainly seen on the Republican side of the ticket, with voters more often than not opting for the most moderate Republican of the bunch. In the Alaska Legislature, during this last session, we saw that translate to a concerted and bipartisan effort to permanently increase funding for public schools and the most progress we’ve seen on restoring pensions for public employees. Both were ultimately foiled by Republican Gov. Mike Dunleavy and his Republican loyalists, but the progress and the bipartisanship would have been unimaginable just a few years before.

What was particularly interesting is that we had an influx of Republicans who were not only there without party support but were there in spite of it. The semi-closed partisan primaries of the old system no longer played the same gatekeeping role they had, generally producing legislators who seem less fixated on conservative wedge issues and more attentive to actual problems like underfunded schools, understaffed state services and infrastructure. The push for big Permanent Fund dividends, once a central motivating factor for Republicans, seemed to be more blunted by the reality of state budgeting.

But perhaps most critically, the system produced Republican legislators who were less beholden to the party and less likely to fall in line with the governor.

As I wrote before, what’s going to be interesting to see is how those conservative Republicans adapted to the system. Would they look in the mirror and realize that maybe their politics aren’t quite as popular as the partisan primaries made them appear? Or would they blame the system, try to repeal it and launch a bunch of frankly weird efforts to claw back the advantage they once had? If you had guessed the former, I wish I could have been as optimistic as you.

As this election shapes up, we can see now that it’s pretty firmly the latter camp. GOP campaigners have launched an array of efforts to, in the words of one, “circumvent ranked-choice voting” and put partisan Republicans back into office.

On the more out-in-the-open front, we have a handful of pledges for Republicans to consolidate around whatever Conservative Republican gets the most votes in the primary election. The thinking is that a divided field will benefit the Democrats and independents despite that being the whole point of ranked-choice voting. The ranked-choice voting system is there to allow candidates from the same political party to avoid playing spoiler by allowing support to consolidate through the rankings. It’s also not theoretical, as this very thing happened in 2022 when two Republicans made comeback victories thanks to the cross-over support from other candidates.

Republican campaign consultant Trevor Jepsen, who is also the chief of staff for Anchorage Republican Rep. Tom McKay (one of the two Republicans who won thanks to votes consolidating behind him in the ranked-choice voting process), told the Alaska Beacon that the pledges are a way for the GOP to “circumvent ranked choice voting” by essentially treating the primary like a semi-closed partisan primary.

The two legislative races he’s targeting are both in Anchorage, Senate Seat H and House District 9. In Senate H, Jepsen’s boss, Rep. McKay, is running in a three-way race against Democratic Sen. Matt Claman. McKay dropped out of his race for House, which was largely seen as a lost cause after he ran to the right after winning by fewer than ten votes in 2022. Also in the race is Republican former-legislator-turned-perennial-candidate Liz Vazquez. McKay has signed, but Vazquez has not.

In House District 9, which covers Hillside and Girdwood, three Republicans—Lucy Bauer, Brandy Pennington and Lee Ellis—are running against independent Ky Holland. As with Senate H, not everyone has bought into the pledge, and only Bauer and Pennington have signed on. Ellis told the Beacon that he thought it was an “ill-conceived effort” that ignored the fact that most voters in House District 9 seemed to fully understand how ranked-choice voting and open primaries worked.

Republican congressional candidate Nick Begich, who ran against U.S. Rep. Mary Peltola in the 2022 elections, has also signed onto a similar pledge to drop out if he finishes behind Republican Lt. Gov. Nancy Dahlstrom. In a running trend, the Trump-endorsed and party-favored Dahlstrom has not signed on. (I think this race is also particularly interesting because it is a test of the internal struggles of the Alaska Republican Party to unite its disparate factions. Anecdotally, I’ve seen a fair bit of support for Begich, which seems animated by the fact the party does not favor him and might suggest he’s pretty confident he wouldn’t be the one to drop out.)

On the more cloak-and-dagger side, progressives are calling out some Democratic candidates as insincere plants by Republican operatives to muddy the waters and siphon away the Democratic support they believe played into moderates’ 2022 success.

That’d be Lee Hammermeister, who’s running in what is currently a five-way race for Eagle River’s Senate seat, and Tina Wegener, who’s in the four-way race for Kenai’s Senate seat (there’s also perennial fringe candidate Dustin Darden running as a Democrat in Anchorage despite having many positions antithetical to progressives). They’re both in races where moderate labor-friendly Republican incumbents are on the ticket against right-wing Republicans who’ve made things like corporate tax cuts paid for by a sales tax and trans sports bans part of their platform. Flipping the races out of moderate Republicans’ hands (Sen. Kelly Merrick in Eagle River and Sen. Jesse Bjorkman of Nikiski) will be critical if Republicans hope to dismantle the Senate’s bipartisan coalition and replace it with a loyally Republican majority.

Wegener has regularly posted about conservative issues on the Kenai Peninsula, including a post supporting Bjorkman’s 2022 Republican challenger, Tuckerman Babcock. She also posted a picture of her 2022 ballot showing she voted Republican in every race — Dunleavy for governor, Sarah Palin for U.S. House and Kelly Tshibaka for U.S. Senate — even ranking Bjorkman behind an independent candidate.

Hammermeister was listed as a co-host of a fundraiser for extreme-right Republican Rep. Jamie Allard. He’s since told the Beacon that he is a Democrat, supports Harris for president and would join a bipartisan coalition. As for his support of Allard, he claims he didn’t know about her then.

(All subterfuge aside, not knowing about Rep. Jamie “3REICH License Plates Are Totally Fine” Allard might be disqualifying on its own.)

Neither candidate has reported raising or spending a single dollar on their election, which is not helping them beat the allegations.

The thinking, in these cases, is that a Democrat in the general election could siphon away support from the moderate Republicans. However, that’s based on the idea that those moderates only won in the first place because of cross-over Democratic support. That’s something that Anchorage Democratic Rep. Zack Fields — who is running unopposed and has been active in calling out GOP campaigns this year — doubts.

“Do they actually think that they’re tricking people?” he told me in an interview. “I live in Anchorage, so I’ve heard from quite a few people in Eagle River who are fully aware that this Hammermeister guy is a far-right Jamie Allard supporter running as a fake Democrat. I think that in these races, it won’t have much of an impact, and people probably won’t repeat this. It’s not beneficial to be disingenuous with voters.”

In Giessel’s 2022 race, for example, about half of the voters who ranked the Democratic candidate first didn’t rank either Republican. In Eagle River, Merrick’s 2022 race was just between her and Republican Rep. Ken McCarty, and she won with a whopping 58% of the vote. Bjorkman also handily beat Babcock. In all three cases, the moderates won the first round with a plurality.

Why it matters

In the big picture, what we’re seeing is tension between the top-down, party-driven politics that benefitted from the partisan primaries and the new system that explicitly removes the party advantage from it. For independents, moderate Republicans and Democrats, that’s been a good thing. It’s meant that the Legislature has been less motivated by elections — we saw several bills authored by House Democrats pass this Legislature, which was also a rare feat just a decade ago — and has seen more nods to bipartisanship.

For conservative party-focused Republicans, it’s not been so great. The 2023 session brought several stinging blows to the governor and his allies, particularly on issues like education funding. The landmark education bill that the governor vetoed—and legislators like Rep. Tom McKay sank their election chances with—only made it to his desk in the first because he lacked firm control over the process. Moderate GOP legislators, like Sen. Bjorkman, voiced deep concerns with the governor’s policy proposals and weren’t shy about hiding it.

They aren’t playing nice, and that’s a problem.

This quote from former Republican Rep. Sharon Jackson, who is among the three Republicans trying to beat moderate Sen. Merrick in Eagle River, sums up the situation very well: “The difference between Kelly Merrick and I is I am loyal to the principles of the party. I am loyal to the people that depend on my conservative votes.”

Fundraising by the numbers

As I noted in a previous edition, the progressive and moderate candidates are generally outpacing their conservative opponents when it comes to fundraising. Sometimes, it’s by unthinkably huge margins, as is the case in the race for East Anchorage’s House District 18, where Democratic Rep. Cliff Groh has raised $116,865.84 to Republican challenger David Nelson’s $565. There are several other races, mostly focused in Anchorage, where the Democratic, independent and moderate Republican candidates are far outpacing their opponents.

What’s interesting about it, however, is the unusual spending by the Americans for Prosperity Alaska—the local wing of the Koch Brothers-backed conservative political network. The group has spent more than all other independent expenditure groups combined, with more than $100,000 reported so far. While that’s not, by itself, particularly notable, the type of spending is interesting. According to the financial reports, a vast amount of that spending has gone to Canvass America, a firm that directly hires people to go door-to-door campaigning on behalf of candidates.

Several politicos I’ve talked with said this is weird and gives the impression that the independent expenditure group is doing the sort of on-the-ground work that a candidate would normally directly undertake with volunteers, letting the candidates essentially sit back with lackluster campaigning. We saw this happen when an independent expenditure campaign did most of the campaign work in Gov. Mike Dunleavy’s first run for governor, letting him sit back and avoid debates.

Also worth considering here is the races they’re getting involved in. To me, it speaks to the races that Republicans see as priorities:

• Jared Goecker, the party-preferred far-right Republican running in Eagle River against Sen. Kelly Merrick – $30,282.38, of which $14,000 is for canvassing

• Stanley Wright, a freshman Republican representative who is in a rematch of his narrow victory over Democrat Ted Eischeid in 2022 – $26,121.96, of which $20,520 is for canvassing

• Mia Costello, a former GOP legislator who stepped into the West Anchorage House race after Rep. Tom McKay dropped out rather than face Democrat Denny Wells in a rematch of his narrow 2022 victory – $20,782.50, of which $18,000 is for canvassing

• Leslie Hajdukovich, who is the Republicans’ latest candidate to go up against 18-year incumbent Fairbanks Democratic Sen. Scott Kawasaki – $18,172.00, of which $14,000 is for canvassing

• David Nelson, a former Republican representative who lost handily to Democratic Rep. Cliff Groh in 2022 – $7,987.06, of which $3,600 is for canvassing

• Jeremy Bynum, the perennial Republican candidate who’s going after the seat held by retiring Ketchikan independent Rep. Dan Ortiz – $500, where none went to canvassing.

While moderates and progressives have outpaced nearly everyone across the board, Republicans have some bright spots in the numbers. Leslie Hajdukovich is the top overall fundraiser in the race against Fairbanks Democratic Sen. Scott Kawasaki, who has fended off loads of well-funded Republicans during his 18 years in office. Jared Goecker is also very slightly ahead of Sen. Kelly Merrick in terms of fundraising, but Merrick has pretty much pulled even in the latest reports. In Ketchikan, Republican Jeremy Bynum has also reported more income than his two independent challengers—Agnes Moran and Grant EchoHawk—combined in the race to replace independent Rep. Dan Ortiz.

I’ve put everything into a chart if you’re interested in the report’s topline numbers. Unfortunately, Substack doesn’t have an easy table feature, so it’s just images. You can find a PDF version here. Dig through the reports on your own here.

Stay tuned.

What’s been going on in Alaska politics: Voting in Alaska’s primary election got underway this week throughout most but not all of Alaska. Blaming issues with mail delivery, the Division of Elections acknowledged this week that early voting had yet to open or had been delayed in more than two dozen rural voting locations. It’s not the product of some grand partisan scheme, but it is the latest in a string of unnecessary and foreseeable challenges to voting in rural Alaska. In the big picture, there’s not much at stake in the Aug. 20 primary, which will be the state’s third open primary under the current voter-adopted system, but let’s break it down anyway.

Current mood: 🌦️

But first, a programming note: Summertime in Alaska is always a funky time for political newslettering. Between unfortunate bouts with illness, writer’s block and excellent summertime weather, this year has been more challenging than most, honestly, and it’s got in my head more often than not. As with many drafted and discarded newsletters from the past month, I’ve attempted to write this paragraph too many times, so I’ll just point to the introduction from Alaska tech icon Ben Kellie’s latest newsletter that captured the summertime feeling perfectly:

I told myself I wouldn’t, but I ended up taking the summer off again. I said that I’d write a few posts and auto-schedule them to go out, or failing that I’d post book-chapters-in-progress, or failing that I would at least highlight some of my favorite past posts written before I had a real subscriber count.

But then I just went ahead and forgot entirely about that plan. Instead, I enjoyed the hell out of family time for eight glorious weeks.

All to say, thanks! Thanks for sticking around and for making it possible for me to do what I’m doing through all the ups and downs. As always, you can reach me at matt@akmemo.com with any questions, tips or suggestions about what to cover in this newsletter, Alaska politics or just life in general.

Alright, onto the news.

‘Nothing new’

Early voting in Alaska’s primary election kicked off on Monday. However, as of a midweek update, Division of Elections Director Carol Beecher acknowledged more than two dozen early in-person voting locations in rural Alaska communities that hadn’t opened on time or had not yet opened. According to the update, 15 locations had late starts, and another 14 had not opened as of Wednesday. The locations are all for absentee-in-person voting, where voters complete an envelope with their ballot and drop it in the ballot box to be counted at a central location. Beecher said issues with mail delivery caused delays and that the state was compliant with the law.

“Weather and other considerations factor into delivery of the materials,” she said via email. “The USPS works with the division to ensure timely delivery, but for Region IV in particular, getting materials to the AVO locations within a week has proven to be an ongoing challenge, and this year is nothing new.”

She said the state’s monitoring the situation, and people will still be able to vote either on election day or via absentee ballot, which needs to be applied for by Sunday (apply for a by-mail absentee ballot here).

Region IV covers most of western and northern Alaska, where voters are mostly Alaska Native. The affected absentee in-person voting locations that were unopened as of the update include Kokhanok, Nikolski, Akutan, Pedro Bay, Atka, Sand Point, St. George, Stony River, Napaskiak, Deering, Kivalina, Shaktoolik, Koyuk and St. Michael.

It’s a region with a long and frustrating history of voting issues, including a protracted fight over ballot translations, the adequate operation of polling locations and, as I’ve written about previously, a much higher rejection rate of by-mail absentee ballots than the rest of the state.

The closures drew outrage from some, including Robyn Burke, a Democrat from Utqiagvik running to represent House District 40. Burke posted a message on social media about being unable to vote from her hometown, noting that it was just the latest in a long line of challenges to casting a ballot in rural Alaska.

“Voting in rural Alaska already poses many challenges, including lack of staffing, limited access to early voting tablets, the inability to translate official election information into Alaska Native languages, and the failure to receive absentee election materials before the voting window opens,” she said. “Voting is our constitutional right and our opportunity to ensure proper representation at the local, state and national levels. This is why we need legislation to address these unfair barriers that lead to votes being discarded.”

I talked with Michelle Sparck, the director of the Alaska-based Get Out the Native Vote, who has been working on voting issues in rural communities, about what was happening. She also expressed frustration that issues GOTNV flagged after the 2022 elections (during which some votes from rural communities weren’t counted before the election was certified) seemed to have gone unresolved.

“It’s still a systemic barrier, and they still act surprised whenever it happens,” she said, adding, “Where’s the follow-up? Where’s the lessons learned?”

She also noted that after the issues in 2022, Region IV has had a string of leadership changes. When I asked about fixing the situation, Sparck said there’s a lot of room for improvement and opportunities for better collaboration between the Division of Elections, USPS, air carriers and local communities. If they’re having trouble finding election workers, Sparck said, her group can help identify community leaders and volunteers to help. She said the state needs to do more than drop the ballots in the mailbox and call it good.

While there’s no evidence the latest closures were malicious as others have suggested, it’s still part of a long string of issues for rural communities that Sparck said wouldn’t be allowed to happen elsewhere.

“Can you imagine if the Valley or South Anchorage or Kenai was suffering this exact kind of problem? Could you imagine a voter’s response to this delay in accessing our constitutional right?” she said. “Because it’s in remote Alaska and far removed from their eyes and their frustrations, it’s easy to say, ‘Oh well, we checked the boxes off and did our due diligence.’”

During the legislative session, legislators attempted a last-minute effort to push through election reforms. One proposal included removing the requirement for absentee ballots to have witness signatures. While the signatures are ostensibly an anti-fraud measure, the state has previously acknowledged that they have never been used to identify fraud. Instead, it’s been one of the leading causes of ballot rejections, with some districts in Region IV seeing nearly 17% of by-mail absentee ballots rejected during the 2022 special election.

The measure ultimately failed to advance by a single vote in the House, with Burke’s opponent, then-GOP Rep. Thomas Baker, casting one of the deciding votes against it.

What, if anything, is at stake in this primary?

In the big picture, the Aug. 20 primary election has little at stake. With Alaska voters’ adoption of open primaries and ranked-choice voting in 2020, the primaries are no longer the gatekeepers they once were. Rather than having to appeal to a narrower subset of voters in the semi-closed partisan primaries of the past, the top four finishers will move on to the general election regardless of political affiliation. In just one election, we’ve already seen that it has opened new lanes for independents and moderate Republicans to run and win in districts that had once produced reliably right-wing, party-line-toeing Republican legislators.

So, that’s all to say there won’t be many people sent packing on Aug. 3. In fact, there are just three races where any candidates will be eliminated: The race for Alaska’s lone U.S. House seat, state House District 36 (which ranges from Fairbanks through the Interior, out to the Canada border and down the Richardson Highway) and the Eagle River Senate seat.

Alaska’s Democratic U.S. Rep. Mary Peltola has 11 primary challengers, the most prominent of whom are Republican Nick Begich, who ran against Peltola in 2022, and Lt. Gov. Nancy Dahlstrom (who oversees elections but has delegated that authority to Director Beecher). In April, Begich pledged to drop out if he finishes behind Dahlstrom in the primary election. Dahlstrom, who Trump has endorsed, hasn’t made a similar pledge if she finishes behind Begich.

This ploy of pledging to drop out if a fellow Republican finishes ahead of them seems to have become a bit of a trend among some Republicans. Essentially, they’re trying to regain some of the edge they once enjoyed from the semi-closed partisan primaries, where winning a Republican primary was the only real challenge on the way to office. The Alaska Beacon wrote about it in more depth here.  

In Eagle River, moderate labor-friendly Republican Sen. Kelly Merrick faces four challengers: Republicans Sharon Jackson and Ken McCarty (former legislators), Republican Jared Goecker and Democrat Lee Hammermeister. According to recent financial reports, Goecker led the fundraising field. It is one of the few places where party-line Republicans hope to pick up a seat in the Senate, a must if they want to end the moderate, bipartisan coalition.

This is an interesting race because many people in Democratic circles are calling out Hammermeister as a “fake Democrat,” noting that he has only recently changed his affiliation and once co-hosted a fundraiser for extreme-right Eagle River Rep. Jamie Allard. The thinking is that his candidacy would somehow draw away from the moderate Sen. Merrick, but there’s a lot of skepticism around that (as well as the whole drop-out pledge mentioned above). Also, Hammermeister hasn’t reported raising a dollar and isn’t winning many endorsements.

Tok Republican Rep. Mike Cronk’s decision to seek an open state Senate seat (held by Sen. Click Bishop, who has hinted at running for governor in 2026) has attracted a crowded field for the massive House District 36. That race has drawn four Republicans — Pamela Goode, Dana Mock, Rebecca Schwanke and Cole Snodgrass — along with Democrat Brandon Putuuqti Kowalski and Libertarian James Fields. Two candidates will be eliminated in that race.

Aside from narrowing the field in those three races, the primary election is a benchmark on where races stand with two and a half months to the general election. It also gives us our first good look at the campaigns’ fundraising activity through the disclosure reports due 30 and 7 days before the election, which is always great fun for nerds like me.

I broke down the numbers from the 30-day reports in some detail here for The Alaska Current. The topline takeaway is that Democrats and Democrat-aligned independents are outpacing their opponents by sizable to gigantic margins in most key races. At the extreme end of things, we’re talking about an order of magnitude more fundraising, such as Anchorage Democrat Denny Wells, who has raised $137,816.77 to Republican opponent Mia Costello’s $10,075.00.

With extremely close outcomes in the 2022 elections (Wells came within ten votes of Republican Rep. Tom McKay, who has since bowed out of the race to take on what is likely a lost battle against Sen. Matt Claman) and the $174 million anchor of Gov. Mike Dunleavy’s education bill veto, there’s a lot of optimism that one or more House seats could be flipped from Republican control.

Republicans, however, have some bright spots in the reports.

The top overall fundraiser is Fairbanks Republican candidate Leslie Hajdukovich, who has raised $162,661.06. Like many Republicans before Hajdukovich, she’s seen as the party’s best chance so far at unseating longtime Democratic legislator Sen. Scott Kawasaki. Kawasaki is usually a middling fundraiser who makes up for it with strong constituent services and has, so far, fended off every Republican’s best chance at unseating him. He has raised $68,787.62.

In the open race for the seat held by the retiring independent Ketchikan Rep. Dan Ortiz, Republican candidate Jeremy Bynum has raised $55,512.60. His challengers, independents Agnes Moran and Grant EchoHawk, have raised $16,017.77 and $8,960.00, respectively.

I’ll plan on doing an updated breakdown in this newsletter once the reports are ready next week. Well, unless we get some sunshine.

Stay tuned and enjoy this summer!

In this edition: The trial challenging the initiative to repeal Alaska’s open primaries and ranked-choice voting system has been underway for the last week and a half. It has outlined a lot of suspicious but not blatantly illegal activity on behalf of the initiative campaign. We’ve heard a lot about unattended booklets, signature gatherers carrying an unusually high number of booklets, suspicious handwriting comparisons and a petition gatherer who worked at superhuman speeds. Still, given the Alaska Supreme Court’s tendency to side with voter intent, it’s looking like a long shot. Also, an update on Anchorage’s HOME initiative, which looks like it’s dodged a veto.

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580 signatures

Alaskans for Honest Elections, the right-wing group pushing an initiative to repeal Alaska’s open primaries and ranked-choice voting system, has faced more than its fair share of allegations of unethical and suspicious behavior. The group has been peppered with campaign complaints over inaccurate and incomplete financial disclosures, campaign materials that lacked paid-for-by disclosures and a “church” that was set up seemingly to mask the true source of big-ticket contributions. Now, the group faces a new round of accusations focused on its signature-gathering efforts.

The testimony over the last week-and-a-half in Anchorage Superior Court Judge Christina Rankin’s courtroom has painted a picture of unattended signature booklets, haphazard booklet management and questionable differences in handwriting and timestamps that the challengers say should disqualify enough booklets that it should disqualify the initiative from the 2024 ballot. However, one of the big pieces missing from the testimony is evidence that any booklets were signed while unattended.

That will likely make that line of attack on the initiative a long shot.

The Alaska Supreme Court has traditionally afforded citizen initiatives with a wide latitude to reach the ballot, erring on voter intent (which is a good thing). Much of what has been presented to the court has been suspicious, but not much of it has come across as blatantly illegal. It is a point disgraced former Attorney General Kevin Clarkson has routinely seized upon in his cross-examination of witnesses. Shady, he said, but not technically illegal (which, I suppose, is something he has some personal experience with).

Still, one case in particular is about as shady as it can get. That’d be Philip Izon, one of the campaign’s leads, who collected a whopping 580 signatures in a single day from multiple house districts. For comparison, an expert brought in by Alaskans for Better Elections, the pro-open primaries group challenging the initiative, said a good day of signature collection is about 40-50 signatures per person, estimating it takes about two to three minutes to collect a signature. Izon, if his collection efforts are to be believed, was collecting a signature a minute for about ten hours straight.

“It stretches the limits of credulity,” the expert said. “There’s just a real limit to the number of signatures one person can collect if they are, in fact, directly involved in the collection of them.”

He said if it were up to him, he would have flagged the collection as suspicious, rejected the signatures and halted Izon’s signature-gathering efforts altogether. He said it was particularly problematic because Izon was responsible for instructing the signature gatherers, arguing that it could have trickled out to a series of problems in the rest of the signature gathering.

Still, in the big picture, it’ll be difficult to prove there’s fire beneath all this smoke, but there sure is a lot of smoke.

Testimony continues today.

Stay tuned.

HOME Initiative dodges veto

The Anchorage Assembly narrowly approved the HOME Initiative last week, a measure that effectively eliminates single-family zoning throughout much of the Anchorage Bowl. The hard-fought change is part of a larger effort to increase the availability and affordability of housing in Alaska’s largest city, which lagged greatly behind its neighbors in new home construction as prices continue to climb. Backers argue that allowing homeowners to build duplexes, mother-in-law apartments, tiny homes and other denser housing will bring housing prices down in the long run.

However, before we could see whether any of that would pass, the measure had to dodge the potential vetoes of two very different mayors. Its 7-5 vote was a vote short of the margin needed to ensure an override, but backers can now rest easy.

Now-former Mayor Dave Bronson left office without issuing one last veto of the Anchorage Assembly, and newly minted Anchorage Mayor Suzanne LaFrance said she supports the measure. LaFrance made the comments to reporters following her inauguration event in downtown Anchorage on Monday.

“At the end of the day, I feel like it was a good compromise, and it’s time to move forward,” she said, referencing a change that put an extra step for approval on more remote lots at higher risk of fire danger. “There’s a lot of other work that needs to be done around housing; definitely streamlining our code is important. There are a lot of actions we can take to make it easier to build here and ensure we have adequate and affordable housing stock.”

For more on LaFrance’s inauguration, check out my coverage here.

In this edition: The Alaska Supreme Court reversed the big-ticket Superior Court ruling that struck down much of the state’s homeschool laws. But is it the major victory for the public subsidization of private and religious schools that Gov. Mike Dunleavy and his allies claim it is? Not at all. Let’s break down the technicalities that decided the case and why there’s still likely an expiration date on Alaska’s de facto private school voucher program.

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Homeschool ruling reversed by technicality

If you saw the response of Alaska Republican Gov. Mike Dunleavy and his allies to the Alaska Supreme Court’s Friday ruling that reversed a lower court’s ruling striking down broad swaths of the state’s homeschool laws, you’d think they had won a major coup in the battle over where public education dollars flow.

“This is a huge win for public education and a huge win for families,” he wrote. “The Court got it right on this one. We were confident that the statutes were always constitutional. We thank the Alaska Supreme Court for their prompt decision in favor of the state. Correspondence programs/homeschool programs can continue in their entirety. This gives certainty to thousands of parents, nearly 23,000 students, and thousands of vendors for 29 school districts who help support education.”

At the heart of the case is a 2014 law authored by then-Sen. Dunleavy that lifted nearly all state oversight of publicly funded homeschool programs, which some have turned into a de facto voucher program to subsidize tuition at private and religious schools in defiance of the Alaska Constitution’s prohibition of public spending on private and religious education institutions. Since the practice has come to light through this lawsuit, Dunleavy has made clear that kind of spending was the intention all along. A Superior Court judge found the practice so constitutionally flawed that it merited striking down much of Alaska’s homeschool laws.

The Alaska Supreme Court disagreed.

However, the Alaska Supreme Court’s ruling doesn’t endorse the practice—far from it. Instead, it found that the Superior Court judge used a sledgehammer when a scalpel was more appropriate. Let’s break it down.

THE GOODS: The Alaska Supreme Court’s order in the homeschool lawsuit

The state’s appeal to the Alaska Supreme Court appears to be one of the more clever legal approaches out of the Dunleavy administration (finally, one of his contracts with an Outside legal firm is paying off). It focused on technicalities in the Superior Court’s ruling, first, that the statute permits many undisputed, legal uses of the state’s homeschool allotments—therefore, the statute should not have been declared facially unconstitutional, meaning struck down in its entirety.

Another technicality in the case centers around the fact that local school districts, not the state, are the ones administering homeschool programs.

“School districts are independent actors, and then you look at the statute, and they are the ones that make the ultimate decision about the funding,” Elbert Lin, a West Virginia lawyer that the state hired to take on the case, told the Alaska Supreme Court during oral arguments last week. “The state can’t be held liable for violating the Constitution because they’re not the ones undertaking that action.”

And, frankly, he’s got a point.

Because of the state’s hands-off-by-design approach to homeschool programs, we have next to no idea about how allotments are being used. The arguments at the Superior Court suggested that the practice of subsidizing private and religious school tuition with allotments has become widespread in recent years when Dunleavy administration allies—such as Jodi Taylor, wife of Attorney General Treg Taylor, and former Board of Education member Bob Griffin—put out instructions on how to take advantage of the program. But because the state has taken a completely hands-off approach to homeschooling, they’re not collecting spending data or conducting any meaningful oversight, so we don’t have much insight beyond a family that intervened in the case to defend their usage of the allotments as private school subsidies.

A particularly interesting question that has gone unanswered through much of this debate is just how many “homeschool students” are really private and religious school students whose families are taking advantage of the homeschool program’s light oversight to subsidize the tuition they would already paying for. That certainly seems to be the case in other states, where similarly lax public school spending laws are now being reined in.

Interestingly, despite Dunleavy’s statements that this is all by design, the state conceded that tuition subsidies are not allowed under the statute, pointing to regulations that limit spending to no more than three hours of weekly face-to-face instruction at a private or religious school.

The court’s ruling cited the state’s admission as part of its reasoning for not ruling on that constitutional question:

If the statute does not permit allotment funds to pay for full-time enrollment in private school, that would make it unnecessary to decide whether this use is unconstitutional. Moreover, we must interpret the statute before we can decide whether it is constitutional as applied to a given set of facts. But the statutory interpretation question has not been presented for our decision.

In other words, because the state’s appeal didn’t focus on the constitutionality of the de facto voucher program, the Alaska Supreme Court couldn’t weigh in (despite what you may see out of the U.S. Supreme Court, this is how courts are supposed to work).

So, what happens now is that the case is returned to the Superior Court for the scalpel approach. If the plaintiffs in the case want to see it to its conclusion, they’ll need to also rope in a school district—the Denali Borough School District may be a good target because it has been the go-to homeschool subsidy for Anchorage’s most prominent private religious school, Mountain City Christian Academy—and ask the courts to determine whether the statutes allow tuition subsidies in the first place.

If we’re looking for any guidance on where the Alaska Supreme Court may be leaning on the underlying question of subsidizing private and religious school tuition with public education dollars, I think it’s helpful to look at an exchange from the oral arguments before the court.

Institute for Justice attorney Kirby West Thomas argued on behalf of families using the allotments to subsidize private school tuition that it was their right to do so. She called the right to attend private schools with state funding a “fundamental right” and pointed to recent caselaw that allowed public spending at religious schools.

However, as Justice Dario Borghesan pointed out, that case was about Maine’s voucher program being allowed at private, non-sectarian schools but not religious private schools.

“This case is factually different,” he explained, laying out a legal standard for determining what kind of limitations on public benefits are constitutional. He noted that placing limits on how money can be spent is permissible as long as it’s not being used as a cudgel to discourage other activities.

In the case of Maine, the state was attempting to promote private schools while effectively discouraging religious school attendance. In this case, he noted the Alaska Constitution bars spending on both private and religious schools.

In the big picture, the ruling allows things to continue on the status quo—which, sure, is a win for Dunleavy—but the whole case has dragged out into the daylight an activity that sure seems like a flagrant effort to flout the Alaska Constitution, and there’s likely an expiration date in the next year for the practice.

It’ll be interesting to see what school districts do in the meantime.

Stay tuned.

In this edition: The Anchorage Assembly is set to take up an ordinance aimed at increasing housing density in the land-limited Anchorage Bowl. With an ongoing housing shortage and escalating prices, backers say that allowing duplexes, mother-in-law apartments and tiny homes would go a long way to increasing the availability and affordability of housing in a city that has faced outmigration. The opposition, which seems to dwell on anxiety about the parts of town where poor people live, has argued that it would undermine the city’s quality of life. Let’s break that down in this edition.

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‘We have a housing crisis, so what?’

If you’re expecting Anchorage to be a left-wing paradise/nightmare once Mayor-elect Suzanne LaFrance takes office, may I suggest looking into the ongoing battle over the city’s zoning laws?

LaFrance is set to take office next Monday, but the city’s moderate and progressive wings are already brawling over attempts to address its housing shortage by updating its obstructive-by-design zoning laws. The well-meaning efforts to update the city’s planning laws have run into a lot of not-so-ambiguously coded language about maintaining “neighborhood character,” illustrating a divide in not just what the city should look like but whose interests it should cater to.

“We have a housing shortage, so what?”

That was the lasting line from status quo supporters, who testified against an ordinance earlier this month that would have streamlined and clarified how we update the city’s zoning laws. In reality, the ordinance was an attempt to fix a complicated process that empowers entrenched nimbyism. It failed on a 6-6 vote.

Now, Anchorage Assemblymembers Meg Zalatel, Anna Brawley and Daniel Volland are proposing the HOME Initiative—a simplified version of what was a more significant effort to update the city’s zoning laws. The measure, which will be in front of the Anchorage Assembly tonight, would allow duplexes and other multi-unit forms of housing on nearly every residential lot in the Bowl (Eagle River and Girdwood excluded). Some building constraints would still apply — Anchorage’s building laws also place higher standards on duplexes than single-family housing — and homeowners associations could prevent such development in some areas.

As Assemblymember Brawley discussed with me for a story I did with The Alaska Current, the idea is that the changes could not only make more housing units available — driving down prices and making it more affordable for people to buy homes — but that they can also better meet the city’s evolving needs. She argued that the city’s housing policies idealize single-family housing as the best use of Anchorage’s land. In contrast, today’s Anchorage could use more multi-generational, multi-family housing as well as smaller housing options.

Unsurprisingly, much of the pushback has centered around wealthy Anchorage residents’ anxieties about the poor parts of town. Columnist and former Anchorage resident Charles Wohlforth took aim at Mountain View in a column warning against changing the city’s zoning laws.

“Mountain View had been a proud little working-class neighborhood of cottages on small lots. It became the city’s roughest, most transient area with apartment buildings on those tiny parcels, without room for kids to play or space to park cars,” he wrote, noting that progressives of the past worked on ideas to “how to slow growth and limit the population of the city to preserve its quality of life.”

The question, to me, is what does preserving the city’s quality of life even mean?

It’s impossible to overlook the fact that much of what opponents point to as lousy development are simply parts of town where poor people live. Parts of town that, I’d guess, are occupied mainly by people who don’t own the property and, because of escalating housing prices, likely won’t anytime soon. This anxiety over anything that isn’t single-family housing overlooks that people are stuck renting homes in a market increasingly squeezing them for all they’re worth. You don’t have to look far to find stories of rent that has increased by as much as 100% overnight, with little justification.

The thing is, too, a lot has changed since the zoning laws were last rewritten. Unlike the oil boom days, when land was still widely available, it does not look like there are many get-rich-quick schemes in the Anchorage housing market. We’re at a point where if we want to make significant strides in housing availability, we have to look at increasing housing density.

Homeownership ought to be an attainable goal — it’s one of the easiest ways for families to build generational wealth and equity for their futures. One of the ways to get there is to build more housing — which in the land-constrained Anchorage Bowl means requires increasing density or erasing the city’s greenspace gems. This worked in Austin, Texas, where recent headlines of collapsing home prices were a bit alarmist before you remember that regular people being able to afford a home is a good thing.

Because, at the end of the day, that’s what it’s all about. As someone who’s lived in Alaska for about 15 years now, I’ve watched too many intelligent, dedicated and passionate people leave the state for greener pastures. Indeed, more housing wouldn’t have kept all those people here, but it would have kept many of them. Even now, I have friends looking at this city’s housing market and not seeing a future.

If I have to weigh this not-so-ambiguously coded value of maintaining status quo “neighborhood character” against the much more tangible reality of attracting and retaining talented younger people by allowing them to invest, build and grow, then the decision should be easy.

I want a city filled with people who have a stake in their homes and a reason to care and be invested.

There are many barriers to that right now, and housing availability is one of them.

In this edition: The filing deadline for this year’s legislative races closed on Saturday, drawing more than 100 candidates for the 50 seats on this year’s ballot. In this edition, let’s look at some of the broad trends in the filings, some of the key races and the ongoing impact of open primaries and ranked-choice voting on Alaska’s elections. Also, the reading list.

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The road to November

The lead-up to this year’s legislative candidate filing deadline brought a handful of surprises, with seven incumbent legislators bowing out of their seats, a last-minute switch-up and several rematches of close 2022 contests that all have the potential to change the course of politics in the state capitol, particularly on closely decided issues like school funding, the return of public pensions and election reforms. Of the 50 races on this year’s ballot, all but eight will be contested, and about a third of the contested races will effectively be intraparty contests.

While there’s plenty of prognosticating to be done on the traditional head-to-head matchups between Republicans and Democrats, those account for fewer than half the seats on this year’s ballot. Only 18 of the 42 contested seats have both a Democrat and a Republican in the race, and fewer will actually be competitive. What’s particularly interesting to me are the races that are or will essentially be intraparty matchups between a field of Republicans or a field of Democrats. By my count, about 13 will come down to a choice between candidates from the same party.

Under reforms approved by voters in 2020, Alaska has abandoned the traditional semi-closed partisan primaries in favor of open primaries that send the top four finishers to the general election regardless of political affiliation. To avoid spoilers, the general election is conducted with ranked-choice voting, where voters rank candidates in the event that no candidate crosses the 50% mark of the vote. When that happens, votes are re-tabulated in what is essentially an instant run-off, with the worst-performing candidates eliminated and the votes divvied up according to voter preference.

In the 2022 cycle, when the latest redistricting cycle opened up many seats, several seats attracted multiple serious candidates from the same party who advanced to the general election. In most of those cases, voters opted for the more moderate of the candidates. In races with multiple candidates from the same party and competitive candidates from the opposing party, we also saw votes largely unite behind a leading candidate through ranked-choice voting, with several Republicans and Democrats who won thanks to the re-tabulation process.

In a way, that’s the true goal of Alaska’s election reforms. This combination of open primaries and ranked-choice voting means that the broader electorate will get a say on their representation rather than how it worked in the past, where races in highly partisan districts were decided in the primary by a smaller subset of the electorate. In the past, that meant more partisan candidates typically prevailed, while the new system has, in broad terms, seen more moderate candidates prevail.

On that front, here are some of the most notable intraparty races on this year’s ballot:

• Nikiski Republican Sen. Jesse Bjorkman, a pro-school moderate who prevailed over Dunleavy ally Tuckerman Babcock in 2022 by about seven points, is now facing a challenge from extreme-right Republican Rep. Ben Carpenter (along with Democrat Tina Wagner and Alaska Independence candidate Andy Cizek). Carpenter, whose main legislative proposal was a corporate income tax cut that would be paid for by a sales tax, spent much of this session angling for this race against Bjorkman, outlining several issues that would endear him with a far-right base of the partisan primaries of the past but don’t exactly have the kind of broad appeal needed to win under the new system.

• In West Anchorage, conservative Republican Rep. Craig Johnson, who voted to uphold the governor’s veto of the education bill and played a crucial role in blocking a pension bill from advancing, will face former Republican Rep. Chuck Kopp, a relative moderate who has spent much of his time out of office advocating for a change in the pension system, as well as independent Greg Magee. While this isn’t a traditional Republican versus Democrat race, a Kopp win would change the balance on critical issues like pensions and school funding.

• Rep. David Eastman, the extreme-right Wasilla Republican who doesn’t play well with others, faces what’s likely his most formidable challenge yet in Mat-Su School Board president Jubilee Underwood. This isn’t exactly a race that will greatly tip the ideological bend of the seat, given that the Mat-Su School Board has been a hotbed of the right-wing culture wars. Still, Underwood would at least likely get along better with Republicans and help shore up an unreliable seat.

• Eagle River Republican Sen. Kelly Merrick, a pro-labor moderate, faces three Republican challengers—former Rep. Ken McCarty (whom she beat by nearly 20 points in 2022), former Rep. Sharon Jackson and Jared Goecker—as well as Democrat Lee Hammermeister. Given her trouncing of McCarty in 2022, it’s unlikely that Merrick is in any real trouble. That, however, would likely change under a return to the semi-closed partisan primaries.

• Wasilla Republican Rep. Jesse Sumner, a moderate-by-comparison member of the House Majority, faces three Republicans: Steve Menard, Elexie Moore and Jessica Wright. Sumner’s 2022 race was a good example of how the new election system works. He finished second in the primaries to Menard, but when the general election rolled around, he did a strong job consolidating the vote around him. He not only finished first in the general election’s initial round but won a majority of votes from the third- and fourth-place fishers.

• Republicans don’t have a complete monopoly on intraparty contests. Bethel Democratic Rep. CJ McCormick faces two Democratic challengers, Victoria Sosa and Nellie “Unangiq” Jimmie, and Veteran’s Party candidate Willy Keppel. That marks just one of two races with multiple serious Democratic candidates.

• Republican-turned-independent Rep. Thomas Baker’s time in the Legislature is likely coming to a quick end after a session spent bucking his community’s interests in favor of Gov. Mike Dunleavy, with notable votes such as upholding the governor’s education bill veto and against election reforms. While he’s still in the race, most see it as a contest between Democrats Robyn “Niayuq” Burke and Saima “Ikrik” Chase.

Other intraparty contests include: GOP Rep. Justin Ruffridge in a rematch against former Rep. Ron Gillham for Soldotna; Republicans Bill Elam and John Hillyer competing to replace Rep. Ben Carpenter in Nikiski; Republicans Lee Ellis, Lucy Bauder and Brandy Pennington and independent Ky Holland to replace Rep. Laddie Shaw in South Anchorage; Rep. Kevin McCabe in a rematch against Doyle Holmes in Big Lake; Republican Rep. Mike Prax and Michael Welch in North Pole; Republican Rep. Frank Tomaszewski against Joy Beth Cottle in Fairbanks; and Republican Sen. David Wilson against Stephen Wright and Robert Yundt in Wasilla.

The surprises

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In this edition: With the filing deadline just a few days away, we’re already looking at an election cycle that will reshape the Alaska Legislature with plenty of rematches of close races and several narrow votes in the Legislature that will be the centerpiece of campaigns. In this edition, let’s break down how some of those headliner races are shaping up and what it could mean for big-ticket issues. But first, let’s look at one of the big surprises of the election season and what it means for 2026.

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‘A bigger role’

Perhaps the biggest surprise of the election season so far is the announcement from pro-labor Sen. Click Bishop that he won’t be running for reelection. The moderate Fairbanks Republican was first elected in 2012 and has been an easy-to-like legislator, combining a bit of folksy charm with a consistently pro-worker mindset. His departure opens the door to the unknown, leaving a district that spans from the quite progressive west Fairbanks district represented by Democratic Rep. Ashley Carrick to the more conservative Interior district represented by Republican Rep. Mike Cronk that horseshoes around the Fairbanks North Star Borough, spanning from rural Interior villages to the Canada border.

But that’s not really what people are talking about.

While other departures are due to legislators stepping away from politics altogether, Bishop’s announcement wasn’t exactly subtle about his future plans.

“The time is right for me to prioritize and focus on family matters over the next two years. My parents recently passed on, and there are some gold mining opportunities I need to pursue. It’s also time for me to learn a few things from my grandkids as we prepare for the next chapter,” he said. “My family and I are not done with public service. There is still a determination inside me to fix our current path of rising energy costs and the loss of our working-age population. It is clear that addressing those issues requires taking on a bigger role than serving in the Legislature.”

Of course, two years would neatly align with an open shot at the governor’s office, a position that Bishop has long been rumored to be considering. If that’s the case, he will occupy the kind of moderate, centrist lane that, at least on paper, is well-suited to the world of open primaries and ranked-choice voting (which could be repealed in this year’s election, though there’s a lawsuit challenging it for technical reasons).

Just who he picks as a running mate will go a long way to shaping his path to office. A conservative running mate may be appealing to shore up the right but would likely undermine much of his moderate appeal and could be a fruitless endeavor anyway because there’s likely to be a more conservative Dunleavy-aligned ticket that would be difficult to peel off voters from. Instead, I’d expect him to look toward the kind of coalition building that has helped U.S. Sen. Lisa Murkowski and U.S. Rep. Mary Peltola into office that tapped into support from labor and Alaska Native groups.

The fight for the return to a public pension system could also play a significant factor in this race. The issue made strides this session with the passage of Senate Bill 88 out of the Senate, and a few flipped seats in the House could mean the same in future years. However, the reality is that the measure will likely be dead as long as Republican Gov. Mike “Abundant evidence of anti-union animus” Dunleavy is in office. Getting to a pension-friendly majority in both chambers is possible with a few flipped seats, but getting to a veto-proof majority of 40 across the Legislature isn’t likely to happen anytime soon. A Gov. Click Bishop would change that calculus.

But that’s about 2026.

Let’s talk 2024.

Of rematches and narrow majorities

In 2022, Alaska saw several close legislative races decided by margins as narrow as seven votes. The results paved the way for Republicans to take a slim majority in the House and a moderate bipartisan supermajority to run the Senate, which went a long way to dictating what the Alaska Legislature could and couldn’t accomplish this last session. This year, more than a handful of votes were decided by a single vote, including the Legislature’s failure to override Republican Gov. Mike Dunleavy’s veto of a widely popular public school funding bill. Others—such as election reform, public pensions, abortion access or trans youth in sports—were stopped by who was in control of the chamber.

As the filing deadline approaches this Saturday, the Alaska Legislature could be on the cusp of significant changes. These shifts could either pave the way for more progress on issues like school funding, public pensions, election reform and the state’s financial situation or open the door to the right-wing culture wars that have been simmering in the most conservative corners of the Alaska Legislature.

Following the 2020 round of redistricting, Alaska elected one of the largest classes of first-time legislators in recent memory. Twenty of the state’s 60 legislators were new faces, thanks in large part to a large number of open seats. That won’t be the case this time, with many legislators expected to seek reelection and, as of writing, only four legislators have announced plans not to run for their seats—Anchorage Reps. Jennie Armstrong (D) and Laddie Shaw (R), Ketchikan independent Rep. Dan Ortiz and Nikiski Republican Rep. Ben Carpenter, who is running for Senate, and Sen. Click Bishop, as was discussed above.

About a third of the 50 seats on this year’s ballot are currently uncontested.

If we’re looking for seats with a high potential to be flipped, Anchorage has a bevy of races that are shaping up to be rematches of close 2022 contests, with some of those very close votes mentioned above looming large.

In South Anchorage, Republican Rep. Tom McKay is set to face Democrat Denny Wells. After completing the ranked-choice tabulation and recount, Wells came within seven votes of beating McKay in 2022. Republican Rep. Julie Coulombe is also facing a rematch of her narrow 2022 victory over non-partisan candidate Walter Featherly, whom she defeated by 112 votes.  

Both Coulombe and McKay voted against overriding the governor’s veto.

East Anchorage also had close races set to be repeated this year. Republican Rep. Stanley Wright, who did vote for the override, beat Democrat Ted Eischeid by 72 votes and will face a rematch this year. Democratic Rep. Cliff Groh faces a rematch with Republican David Nelson, who fell 77 votes short of Groh in 2022.

Anchorage doesn’t have a total monopoly on rematches, though, with Nome Democratic Rep. Neal Foster set to rematch with Republican Tyler Ivanoff, whom he beat by 92 votes in 2022. The electoral slate includes several other rematches, but most were decided in 2022 by several hundred votes or more.

Find a complete list of candidate filings here.

A single vote can be the difference

Some big-ticket issues that were narrowly decided this year include the Leigslature’s failure to override the governor’s veto of a hard-fought compromise on an education funding bill. The measure would have made a $174 million increase in public school funding permanent, but the governor vetoed it because it didn’t include a controversial set of changes for public charter schools.

The Alaska Legislature ultimately approved the funding as one-time money through the budget, which the governor has indicated that he won’t zero out through a veto. Still, it’s left considerable uncertainty swirling around the future of public school funding in Alaska. Some of the legislators responsible for upholding the veto—such as Anchorage Republican Reps. McKay and Coulombe—had narrowly won their elections in 2022 and insisted a make-up bill was achievable after blowing up the bill.

As the chair of the House Resources Committee, Rep. McKay even introduced the House Republicans’ replacement education funding bill in an apparent nod to the political pressure he’s facing. His much-softened rhetoric on school funding, going from questioning any increases to professing his support, didn’t translate into any material success. Instead, the bill floundered in the final weeks of the legislative session and never even made it to a vote in the House, let alone in the Senate.

The education bill’s veto will likely affect several legislative races this year and was cited as a motivating factor in many of the rematches and new challengers.

In Homer, extreme-right Republican Rep. Sarah Vance—who has been a lightning rod for culture war issues and voted to uphold the education bill veto—will face several challengers this year, including Kenai Peninsula Borough Assembly President Brent Johnson. He told the Anchorage Daily News that he had first considered running for the Legislature more than a decade ago but was happy to stay in his community and work locally until he saw the impact of the education bill veto. 

“I didn’t want to change any of that. And I held that position consistent, even though people asked me to run several times, until the failure to override the governor’s veto of education funding,” Johnson told the paper.

Other legislative outcomes were not quite as stark as falling a single vote short of a veto override, such as the House’s refusal to take up the public pension bill or an election reform measure on the final day of the session. That was more a product of conservative Republicans holding key positions in the House thanks to their hold on the speakership. That allowed them to sock away legislation restoring a pension for public employees—a frequently cited issue with the state’s recruitment and retention woes—in a special committee without ever taking it up in a meaningful way.

The same goes for a House election bill altered in the Senate to include changes intended to lower the high rates of ballot rejections in rural Alaska. Rural Alaska voters have long seen their by-mail absentee ballots rejected at a higher rate than most urban districts, a problem that has been partially attributed to the state’s requirement for a witness signature on ballots. There’s no process in place for those witness signatures to actually be verified—meaning they have never been used to identify fraud—and the state has no ballot-curing procedures. Both would have changed under changes advanced by the Senate, but House Republican leadership ultimately blocked the bill from getting a vote in the final days of the session.

While those issues could change with a Democrat-led or bipartisan-led House, things could shift dramatically to the right if the Senate’s 17-member bipartisan majority were to give way to conservative Republicans. The bipartisan majority eschewed divisive culture war issues this session, making it clear that they were not interested in taking up abortion restrictions or the House’s trans sports ban bill that consumed more than a day of the House’s time in the final days of the legislative session.

That would quickly change if conservative Republicans took both chambers.

That’s unlikely but not impossible, especially after Sen. Bishop’s announcement. Under Alaska’s election rules, only half of the Senate is up in a regular year. Seven members of the Senate Majority will not be on the ballot along with the chamber’s three ultra-conservative Republicans. It would take many flipped seats, including in some very blue districts, for it to flip.

The filing deadline is 5 p.m. on Saturday, June 1. The general election is on Nov. 5.

Stay tuned!