It was a lousy night for far-right candidates in the Fairbanks North Star Borough’s Tuesday election.
According to nearly complete results, progressive candidates appear to have pulled off a clean sweep of the three Borough Assembly seats, flipped two Borough School Board seats, and protected a third. The results in the Assembly races will mark the end of the conservatives’ 5-4 majority, bringing in a new 7-2 progressive-leaning majority.
There are 1,139 absentee ballots and nearly 600 questioned ballots to be counted, but they’re unlikely to flip any results (they’d need to break 70% or more in favor of conservatives). The closest margin of victory among the six races is Assembly candidate Nick LaJiness, who holds a 610-vote lead, 4.42 points, over far-right Assemblymember Jimi Cash.
Candidate Liz Reeves-Ramos holds an 847-vote lead over conservative Assemblymember and former North Pole Republican state representative Tammie Wilson (52.93% to 46.84%). Candidate Scott Crass beat conservative candidate Aaron Gibson for the third Assembly seat and currently holds an 838-vote vote lead (52.9% to 46.74%). The seat was vacated by term-limited Assembly Chair Aaron Lojewski.
In the race for the Borough Assembly, conservative candidates tried to run more moderate campaigns that reached out to Democrats with mailers that several observers said either rang hollow or were outright misleading. One showed a candidate posing with Fairbanks Democratic Sen. Scott Kawasaki, despite Kawasaki’s support for the progressive candidate.
It was a curious approach given the 5-4 majority has not just been conservative but has frequently edged into anti-government territory. For example, the conservative majority neutered a resolution that would have voiced concern about the safety of a controversial ore haul trucking plan that proposes moving dozens of large haul trucks through the city. At one hearing, according to reporting by the Fairbanks Daily News-Miner, Wilson proclaimed, “It’s none of our business to determine what a private business should or should not do” when discussing a provision urging the company to explore other means of hauling than on busy public roads.
At the hearing, progressive-leaning Assemblymember Kristan Kelly put a fine point on the interests of the conservative majority.
“What I find crazy is that we are bending over backwards for a for-profit corporation at the expense of the public health and safety of our residents,” Kelly said, according to the News-Miner reporting. “When it comes to public safety, that is our job as a government. We are here for the people, not corporations.”
And, it appears, Fairbanks voters agreed.
In an interview with the Fairbanks Daily News-Miner following last night’s results, Assemblymember-elect Scott Crass said he believed the election was “definitely a referendum on the [Kinross ore haul]. I’ve always been an outspoken opponent to that, and I think voters carried that concern to the polls.”
The tone of the Assembly race stood in stark contrast to the race for School Board, where conservatives busted out the national right-wing playbook of transphobia and homophobia under the guise of parental rights. They accused the progressive-leaning candidates of supporting a “radical agenda,” and Right-wing candidate Michael Humphrey created a stir earlier this year with a campaign float that featured a giant, inflatable walrus, an overt nod to right-wing media figure Matt Walsh and his transphobic children’s book “Johnny the Walrus.”
Observers wondered whether the two varying approaches—hollow moderation of the Assembly candidates or outright rage of the School Board candidates—would perform better at the polls. According to the results, the hollow moderation fared a bit better—the conservative School Board candidates all trail by about ten percentage points—but neither was a winning strategy.
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.
