Alaska Republicans are attempting to bypass open primaries and regain influence by installing “fake Democrat” candidates while pressuring Republican candidates to sign withdrawal pledges.
The 2022 elections were the first under Alaska’s new, voter-approved system of open primaries and ranked-choice voting, and they opened a new lane for moderate candidates willing to buck the political parties that once played gatekeeper. That’s an outcome that party-line Republicans are hoping to change this year.
Along with a controversy-marked effort to repeal the election reforms via initiative, Republican strategists have launched efforts to, in their words, “circumvent ranked choice voting” by having candidates sign onto pledges to drop out after the primary. And in two races, they’ve drawn accusations of running “fake Democrats” in an effort to undermine support for moderate Republicans.
Supporters of the voting system say the moves miss what works under the new system — quality, likable candidates with broad appeal — and instead play to the most pessimistic and cynical elements of politics.
First, some background.
In 2020, Alaska voters adopted a set of election reforms that ended the semi-closed partisan primaries that empowered primary voters to pick state legislators to represent everyone in the district, particularly in deep red districts where whatever Republican emerged from the primary would handily win in the general election.
While ranked-choice voting has captured most of the attention, the biggest impact of the 2020 election reforms was open primaries. It allowed multiple candidates from the same party to advance past the primary elections and into the general election, where everyone in the district could decide who represented them in Juneau.
It meant moderate Republicans could run and win in districts that once reliably produced conservative, party-line legislators. In Anchorage, for example, it saw the return of moderate, labor-friendly Republican Sen. Cathy Giessel to the Legislature after a party loyalist defeated her in 2020. The story was the same in several legislative districts, with voters typically opting for the most moderate of multiple Republican candidates.
While Republicans nominally held majorities in both chambers, the split between moderate Republicans and right-wing Republicans laid the groundwork for a bipartisan Senate coalition that frequently stymied Gov. Mike Dunleavy’s agenda and that of his allies in the House Majority.
Ending that coalition is a key priority for conservative Republicans this year, and it largely rests on their ability to beat moderate Republicans.
Fake Democrats?
The Senate is currently organized into a 17-member supermajority coalition between nine Democrats and eight Republicans. This coalition is organized around a growing core of moderate Republicans who beat conservative, party-favored Republicans in 2022. Their emergence has led to several bruising losses for Gov. Mike Dunleavy and the broader right-wing agenda while giving new energy to issues like public pensions and education funding.
Two of those Republicans, Eagle River Sen. Kelly Merrick and Nikiski Sen. Jesse Bjorkman face concerted GOP efforts to unseat them this election cycle, a key to dismantling the Senate coalition. Merrick faces a field of three other Republicans — two of which are former legislators — and Bjorkman faces an extreme-right challenger in Kenai Rep. Ben Carpenter.
In both cases, there’s a Democratic challenger who’s drawing raised eyebrows.
Merrick faces a challenge from registered Democrat Lee Hammermeister, and Bjorkman faces a challenge from registered Democrat Tina Wegener. In both cases, the Democrats have only recently changed their affiliation to the Democratic Party, and both have histories that have people questioning their seriousness.
In 2022, Hammermeister was listed as a co-host for a fundraiser for extreme-right Republican Rep. Jamie Allard but now claims that he supports Kamala Harris for president and “would be more than happy to join a coalition” in the Senate.
“We call him the fake Democrat who’s running against Kelly Merrick. People who don’t know … are always going to vote for a D,” Camilla Hussein, a district resident and president of Alaska Women Ascend, told the Alaska Beacon about Hammermeister.
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.
In 2021, she posted that she’s not a “Democrap.”
In both cases, the Alaska Democratic Party is not actively supporting candidates. While it’s stopped short of challenging their credentials, officials say they haven’t shown viability. According to financial reports, neither candidate has been actively fundraising.
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 foul on conservative campaigns this year — doubts.
“Do they actually think that they’re tricking people?” he said. “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 then 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.
He said that the open primaries have largely rewarded candidates who run positive campaigns with broad appeal rather than the negative and divisive approach that has long been a hallmark of right-wing politics.
Pledges
While those tactics seem to be aimed at helping conservative, right-wing Republicans prevail over their moderate counterparts, other tactics appear to be more targeted at ensuring a Republican prevails over Democrats.
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 Carol 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, with similar pledges being made in two legislative races.
Republican campaign consultant Trevor Jepsen, who is also the chief of staff for Anchorage Republican Rep. Tom McKay, 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 of the old system.
The two 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. Also in the race is Republican former Rep. Liz Vazquez. McKay has signed the pledge, but Vazquez has not. In House District 9, which covers Hillside and Girdwood, there are three Republicans — Lucy Bauer, Brandy Pennington and Lee Ellis — running against independent Ky Holland. In that race, only Bauer and Pennington have signed the pledge.
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.
A key backer of the election reforms, Scott Kendall, agreed that the pledge is missing the point.
“We’re a small state, people know each other,” Kendall said. “People know other people’s reputations. So this idea that you can drop out and just sort of give all of your support to another candidate seems very flawed to me.”
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.
