Decision 2026: Governor's Edition Why The Race For Governor In Alaska Might Be More Significant Then This Peltola Phone Banker Thought

 

As I've referred to more and more in many of my columns about politics the last few months since June I've been working the phone banks to write and help get Mary Peltola elected to the Senate in Alaska. I've explained my motivations, why I think she's the kind of Senator the country needs going forward and even what the significance is.

However I may have mentioned that the organization I'm working for is Alaska Democrats. And while our main focus has been the Peltola campaign as we enter the homestretch our calls have focused on the two other Alaska Democrats running for statewide office: Bill Hill, who's trying to take back the At Large Seat that Nick Begich took from Peltola in 2024 and the governor's race. It's that race I'd like to focus on for this article.

Now to be very clear I have priorities. As I mentioned in my previous article on the subject it is far more important that we win as many of the governor's races in the Midwest as possible and it would cause a political earthquake if  either David Jolly in Florida or Gina Hinojosa in Texas , both who are incredibly competitive so late in the campaign were to win their governor's races in those states. And I don't pretend its not more important nationally for Peltola or Hill to win seats in Congress then if the Democrats win there.

But that doesn't mean a win in the governor's race wouldn't have a certain amount of importance either. For one thing no Democrats has won a  gubernatorial race in Alaska since 1998 when Tony Knowles won reelection. But beyond the symbolism of being the first Democrat to win this office in the 21^st century there's a good case that it might show a path for Democrats to be able to win in the kinds of small states much of their party has been dismissing for the last twenty years. And if they can take two of three critical offices in the same year, it would be another in a line of showing how much the Democrats are taking their strategy to rebuild serious at a statewide level and moving away from the approached they've tried in the aftermath of 2016.

Throughout this cycle we've seen many states that Democrats have lost for year with attractive candidates running for both Senator and Governor: Josh Turek and Zach Lahn in Iowa, Sherrod Brown and Amy Acton in Ohio, James Talarico and Stephanie Hinjosa in Texas. All of them have two attractive candidates for statewide office which neither  can be easily labeled with the label "radical leftist', each of whom can complement and lift the other up on the campaign trail. (The same can't be said of other combinations such as Angie Nixon and David Jolly in Florida or Abdul El-Sayed and Jocelyn Benson in Michigan where I suspect ballot splitting will take place.) But Alaska offers the most instructive lessons because it involves a state that has been electing Republicans across the board for far longer then most of these states and is much smaller in terms of population. Forget New York: if they can win here Democrats can win everywhere.

So let's have a brief discussion about the Alaska governors in the 21^st century – and to maintain my pledge when phone banking I'll start after Sarah Palin left the governorship.

In case you forgot Palin resigned in 2009 and her lieutenant governor Sean Parnell succeeded her. In 2010 he won election in his own right with 59 percent of the vote against the Democratic opponent. At the time it was a primary that involved the Alaskan Independence Party, the Democratic Party and the libertarian Party of which Ethan Berkowitz won and would receive just 37 percent of the vote. This was the first time in Alaska's history where any party won three consecutive gubernatorial elections.

Four years later Parnell chose to run for reelection. His running mate as Lieutenant Governor was the Mayor of Anchorage Dan Sullivan. The Democrats nominated businessman Bryon Mallott. However Alaska has a fairly strong independent party and the former Republican Mayor of Valdez Bill Walker, ran as an independent.

By this point Parnell's approval ratings were in the toilet and even Sarah Palin was taking issues with the tax cuts he'd paid for the oil and gas industry. So on September 2, Walker and Mallott merged their campaign to run as a single independent ticket, with the Alaska Democratic Party endorsed. It would take nearly a week for the media to officially call the race but on November 15^th Walker was declared the winner by a remarkably close 2 percent. Combined with Mark Begich's defeat in the Senate, it was only the fifth time in the last 50 years when an incumbent governor and Senator from different political parties from the same state were defeated in the same election cycle.

Of course no one noticed because of the red wave that had swept the country during the midterms, and if they did it was because of Begich's defeat in the Senate in which Dan Sullivan had won a crowded Republican primary before narrowly beating him.

Walker faced a statewide budget deficit and proposed reinstating a statewide income tax as well as reducing annual payments to qualified state residents from the Alaska Permanent fund. This move was deeply unpopular and doomed his chances of reelection. In 2018 when he was trying to run for reelection he faced a series of controversial problems in the leadup to his election included an unpopular plea bargain involving an FAA air traffic controller accused of kidnapped and sexually assaulting an Alaska native. Finally on October 16 Mallott resigned because of 'inappropriate comments' that neither he nor Walker detailed.

Walker was a facing challenge from the Democratic Party already when Mark Begich had entered the campaign which had led him to withdraw from the Democratic primary and run as a fully independent bid. This split was expected to favor Mike Dunleavy, who ended up being the Republican nominee for governor. However 3 days after Mallott resigned, Walker announced he was suspending his campaign and endorse Begich though Walker's name was still on the ballot.

It didn't make much of a difference as Dunleavy won with 51.44 percent of the vote to Begich's 44.4 percent. All of the polls had favored Dunleavy from the start of the campaign and there were no surprises. In a night that was a disaster for Republicans on a gubernatorial level as much as Congressional (the Democrats won seven states that Republicans had held governorships the previous election) that Dunleavy was the only Republican to flip a governorship counted for less then nothing nationally.

Dunleavy was a good governor when it came to things such as natural disasters like wildfires and the 7.1 earthquake that struck Alaska three days before he took office. But he also used his line-item veto authority to make cuts to the University of Alaska and the budget of the supreme court. As early as July of 2019 there was a recall petition signed. Despite having more than sufficient signatures the state Attorney General (appointed by Dunleavy) issued an opinion against. The recall effort proceeded but it never had sufficient votes in either 2020 or 2021 to get enough signatures to put it on the ballot in November. Still going into his reelection campaign in 2022 he was one of the most popular governors in the United States. As Governor crime had dropped 31 percent with violent crime dropping nearly 16 percent.

By the time Dunleavy ran for reelection in 2022 Alaska had officially adopted ranked choice voting. As I may have explained all candidates would run in a non-partisan blanket top four primary with the top four candidates making it to the general. In the first round Dunleavy received 40 percent of the vote, Democrat Les Gara received 23 percent and Bill Walker received nearly as much running as an independent. Charlie Pierce, another Republican, rounded out the ballot with 6.5 percent.

Because of Dunleavy's immense popularity all polls ranked the race as Likely Republican. While Dunleavy's margin had dropped to just over 50 percent it was more than enough to avoid a runoff and a second round of voting. Dunleavy became the first governor of any party to win reelection since Tony Knowles in 1998. But again if people were paying attention to Alaska it was because of Mary Peltola winning a full term to house and Lisa Murkowski just barely winning reelection over a Republican challenger because of her voting to impeach Trump in 2021.

Like the majority of states Dunleavy was term limited from running for reelection in 2026. The field involved 17 candidates and the combination of non-partisan primary and the ranked choice voting system have been credited with more positive campaigning. As a result candidates have been emphasize areas of agreement.

The Republican field was far more crowded then the Democratic one and the primary led to the two top vote getters being Democratic Jonathan Kreiss-Tomkins, the former state representative from Alaska's 35 district and Tom Begich, the former minority leader of the Alaska Senate and the Uncle of the Republican representative in Congress Nick Begich III. (Like I said holiday dinners in the Begich household must be interesting). After he finished second Begich withdrew from the primary and endorsed Kreiss-Tomkins.

Kreiss-Tomkins is facing three Republican candidates in the general: Bernadette Wilson, a waste management company founder and conservative activist, Dave Bronson, mayor of Anchorage from 2021-2024 and Treg Taylor, Attorney General of Alaska during much of Dunleavy's last four years in office. Taylor faced scrutiny because of financial disclosure that didn't comply with Alaska state law and the Lieutenant governor briefly declined to certify him for the ballot. However four days later she reserved herself.

A large part of the reason the race is favored to go to Kreiss-Tomkins (or JKT as he's referred to in Alaska) is because he has been leaning towards bipartisanship and making it clear that politicians of all alignments are welcome in his cabinet. By contrast Wilson, who is the leading candidate among Republicans has been criticizing bipartisanship and has been calling both Taylor and Bronson to drop out and urging her supporters not to rank other candidates.

While all three Republicans generally agree on most issues there are key difference on two critical points. Wilson is the only candidate advocating for a return to paying out full Permanent Fund dividends, something that Dunleavy campaigned on but was unable to implement as governor. The Republicans also differ on the issue of data centers. Bronson and Taylor are generally supportive of the issue, portraying them as an economic opportunity for the state, provided they generated their own electricity and didn't drive up energy costs. Wilson is opposed to data centers, highlighting their environmental impact – a huge deal in Alaska. Kreiss-Tomkins had advocated for a moratorium on the issue until a regulatory framework can be developed. (It has to be said that he has received large donations from the AI industry which may give credence to Wilson's allegation about his trustworthiness on the issue.)

Because of the divided Republican field JKT has been building a lead in the polls ever since the primary. In polls in the first round JKT he polls with 48.8 percent of the vote, nearly twice as much as his nearest opponent Wilson. In a potential second round he maintains that lead with Taylor's votes likely going to Bronson. Most polls indicate in a head to head challenge he would easily beat Wilson, with the weighted average currently showing him ahead by nearly six points.

JKT does have virtues. For one he'd be only 37 if elected which would make him a fairly young man to become governor. He was elected to represent the 34^th district for the first time when he was 23, dropping out of Yale in order to run. His first race was so close that it took a month to call, winning by just 32 votes. In his freshman term he introduced House Bill 216, which made 20 Alaska Native languages state languages which was signed into law in April of 2014. He's also done a lot of good work for Alaska helping found Outer Coast College in Sitka. A college that is built on ''academics, labor and self-government." It's curriculum emphasizes bridging Western and indigenous ways of knowing. He was also vital in forming Alaska's Covid-19 simulation program Covid Act Now. In both cases these programs were helped with Republican governors.

No one will confuse JKT with Mamdani but I'm inclined to look more favorably on his accomplishments before running for Governor than my current Mayor. He's only three years older than Mamdani but has far more qualifications to be governor then Mamdani had when he ran for Mayor and he's done more for his state in a decade in public service then Mamdani has accomplished in his career. He certainly has a far harder row to become Governor than Mamdani ever did running for Mayor in New York.

I don't pretend that  if JKT wins it will matter to anyone outside of Alaska the way that Peltola's victory in the Senate will or Bill Hill winning in Congress. But as of today JKT has the best chance of winning in almost every political survey of the three major candidates running in this cycle. His gubernatorial run is currently ranked Lean Democrat in most polls where as Peltola is still considered mostly in Toss-Up to Tilt Democrat and it looks increasingly probable that Begich will win reelection.

And the fact America – not just the Democrats – need more competent elected officials in every major political office. Having endured a decade of  bigoted near-fascism from the major force in Republican politics and an increasing lean towards left-leaning populism from the bigger forces in Democratic politics, the country at large is exhausted by both. The country at large is exhausted by demagogues and showboats and by and large wants to go back to an era where its elected officials is quiet, competent professionals who do their jobs without making everything about appealing to the loud rage of one side or the other. I personally would welcome a return to an era where elected officials both ran for office and did their jobs with no drama and publicity.

To that end I have no problem doing my part to see that JKT becomes governor much as I am helping Mary Peltola become Senator.  Voting for quiet competence may not be as public as some candidates but that's the point. I think America wants its elected officials to be good at their jobs, work across the aisle and get things done with as little fanfare as possible. That's as true in the least populated states as the most populated ones and I hope we can get that.