The spring Anchorage municipal races are still five long months away. Heck, the major candidates in South Anchorage won’t even officially kick-off their campaigns until next week. That isn’t stopping one group from getting involved now.
The grassroots conservative group Americans for Prosperity-Alaska (AFP) sent out an online call for volunteers to make phone calls this afternoon that said:
While the message explicitly says these phone banks are about the spring assembly elections, that’s not necessarily so according to AFP State Director Jeremy Price. He said in an interview AFP does phone banking year round and the calls today “Won’t target any race or election specifically.”
While he didn’t want to go too much into detail about what the callers would be telling people, he did say they are intended to be two way conversations. He said AFP wants to share their vision of economic freedom, but just as much they see the calls as an important tool to hear what voters think of actions being taken by the Mayor and assembly members.
In reality, these types of calls this far before an election are unlikely to sway, inform, or motivate anyone. More likely, they are an exercise for AFP to train staff how to organize and target such operations and to recruit and teach volunteer callers.
Locally, AFP made some waves this year by getting involved in the Anchorage and Fairbanks mayoral races. Those efforts ended with the candidates AFP supported being defeated and lead to AFP’s effectiveness being questioned.
Regardless of how those races turned out, it looks like AFP will be a player in Anchorage this spring.
Matt Acuña Buxton is a long-time political reporter who has written for the Fairbanks Daily News-Miner and The Midnight Sun political blog. He also authors the daily politics newsletter, The Alaska Memo, and can frequently be found live-tweeting public meetings on Twitter.
