Alaska’s primary election is on pace to have one of the lowest turnouts in state history — which isn’t all that surprising given that it had next to no stakes under the state’s open primary system — but it still has reshaped November’s general election.
Since polls closed last week, a slew of conservative Republican candidates has dropped out after disappointing performances to coalesce support behind a single conservative candidate in what are expected to be competitive races against Democrats, independents and moderate Republicans.
“This is a prudent, calculated strategy; the best path forward is to consolidate behind a single conservative,” said Eagle River Republican Jared Goecker in a news release announcing that former Republican Rep. Ken McCarty had dropped out of the race and endorsed him. He was the second former Republican legislator to do so, following former Rep. Sharon Jackson’s announcement last week.
Goecker is one of several conservative, party-backed candidates critical to the Alaska Republican Party’s mission of dismantling the bipartisan supermajority in the Senate.
McCarty’s exit leaves Goecker as the last right-wing Republican against Republican Sen. Kelly Merrick, who, as a pro-labor moderate, has been a core member of the Senate’s bipartisan majority. The majority is comprised of nine Democrats and eight Republicans and has served as a backstop against some of the most right-wing policies put forward by Gov. Mike Dunleavy and House Republicans, such as a “Don’t Say Gay”-style bill, anti-abortion measures and a ban on how trans girls are allowed to play sports at all levels.
Goecker made his support of the trans sports ban one of his central campaign promises.
According to the latest results, Merrick holds a plurality with about 34% of the vote. Goecker received about 33.75% of the vote, McCarty got 11.4%, and Jackson got 7.5%. Democrat Lee Hammermeister — who has drawn accusations of being a “fake Democrat” for previously supporting extreme-right Republican Rep. Jamie Allard — received about 15% of the vote.
While ranked-choice voting allows voters to support several candidates, it doesn’t always mean that votes will neatly align by the candidate with the next-closest politics. But the results suggest that the race could be very close come November and will likely rely in part on how voters who supported Hammermeister — who has not dropped out of the race — will rank the rest of their ballot.
Other shakeups are less about intra-party brawling and, instead, are focused on clearing a head-to-head race that conservative Republicans believe will help them in races against Democrats and independents.
That includes Republican Rep. Tom McKay, who sank his political chances by legislating to the far right after narrowly winning his 2022 election (thanks to ranked-choice voting) and opted for a face-saving run for West Anchorage’s state Senate seat.
He dropped out on Friday after finishing in 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.
“I don’t necessarily agree that you can go out and convince Alaska voters to do the ranking,” he said.
Which 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.
And then, of course, there’s the race for Alaska’s lone U.S. House seat.
Republicans are smarting after the 2022 special and regular elections, arguing that the ranked-choice voting system cost them the seat. Republican former Gov. Sarah Palin and Nick Begich spent most of their campaign attacking each other, while Democrat Mary Peltola rode a positive, centrist line to victory. Republicans were keen on not repeating that infighting and mounted an intense pressure campaign on Lt. Gov. Nancy Dahlstrom to drop out of the race following her disappointing third-place finish.
She bowed out on Friday, leaving Begich with a clear shot in his third contest against Peltola.
But even if Dahlstrom’s support neatly coalesces behind Begich, the Republicans will face an uphill battle as Peltola won an outright majority of the primary election votes. With late-arriving ballots, Peltola has increased her vote share to nearly 51%.
Begich and Dahlstrom combined claimed just 47% of the vote.
Progressives keep their powder dry
While most of the strategic dropouts have been on the Republican side of the ticket, there’s one on the progressive side, too.
The open West Anchorage House seat race, currently held by Democratic Rep. Jennie Armstrong, attracted a heated primary fight between two progressives: Democrat Carolyn Hall and independent Nick Moe. Moe went into the primary election with the backing of many party Democrats but finished more than 20 percentage points behind Hall.
This week, he announced he was bowing out of the race, leaving Hall as the lone candidate in the race in order to keep time and resources focused on other competitive races.
“There’s a path to winning, but it’s narrow,” he told the Alaska Beacon. “I mean, we’re gonna probably raise another 70 grand in this race fighting against each other. So I think trying to use those resources and energy and time to elect other good people is a smart decision.”
And Moe has good reason to see that. While it came with all the caveats of a low-turnout election, the primary showed a lot of promise for Democrats, independents and moderate Republicans throughout Anchorage. By and large, incumbents belonging to those groups had strong performances, and several challenging conservative Republican incumbents turned in particularly strong performances.
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.
