Progressive-leaning incumbents on the Anchorage Assembly and School Board handily defeated far-right challengers in Tuesday’s election, maintaining majorities on both bodies.
The preliminary election results show incumbent School Board members Kelly Lessens and Margo Bellamy outpacing their challengers, including extreme-right candidate Alexander Rosales, each by about 15 percentage points. Incumbent Assemblymembers Daniel Volland and Kameron Perez-Verdia outpaced their opponents by 30 points or more.
According to the results, Lessens secured another term with 54% of the vote over Mark Anthony Cox, who received just 38% of the vote (the remaining percentage is due to write-ins or people skipping over the race altogether when filling out their ballot). Bellamy received 53.3% of the vote to Rosales’ 38.7%.
Volland, who faced an unusual coalition supporting his conservative challenger Daniel George, won with 56% of the vote to George’s 29.43%. While George has many Republican connections, he also drew support from centrist Anchorage politicians who had been dissatisfied with Volland’s work in easing restrictions on homebuilding.
Perez-Verdia cleaned up with 60.5% of the vote in a three-way race.
Rejecting the extreme-right
Heading into election day, progressive activists raised alarm bells over some of the conservative candidates’ conduct and dubious connections. Rosales was the heart of the outrage after a slew of bigoted, racist, and transphobic posts he made on his X account, Tears of Valhalla, came to light. Rosales tried to downplay the rhetoric, including posts that called for the castration of parents of trans kids and praise for Hitler’s economy, but it proved to be toxic.
Cox, a conservative who has run unsuccessfully three times, tried to distance himself from Rosales in the final stretch of his campaign against Lessens, even going as far as endorsing Bellamy over Rosales. However, conservative media frequently paired them together as Good Conservatives who would battle “woke” ideologies in schools.
According to the preliminary results, Cox received fewer votes than Rosales.
One candidate with ties to Rosales did win in the conservative Eagle River Assembly district. Jared Goecker, who made his debut into politics by losing to moderate labor-friendly Republican Sen. Kelly Merrick last year, is on track to win a seat on the Assembly with 49.92% of the vote in a three-way race for the seat. Rosales had helped with Goecker’s Senate campaign, but Goecker also eventually distanced himself from Rosales.
Of the three other Assembly seats on Tuesday’s ballot, progressives held onto the two seats they held going into the election. Yarrow Silvers leads in the race for East Anchorage’s seat with about 48% of the vote in a three-way race, and Erin Baldwin Day is on track to win the Midtown seat with nearly 60% of the vote.
In South Anchorage, center-right candidate Keith McCormick won his seat with more than 80% of the vote against far-right, fringe candidate Darin Colbry.
The outlook
While the election results will keep progressive-leaning coalitions in the majorities on both the Anchorage Assembly and Anchorage School Board, those coalitions have been far from lock-step on several issues.
Former far-right Mayor Dave Bronson had largely unified the Assembly’s moderates and progressives on a variety of topics, but since the election of moderate Mayor Suzanne LaFrance, the Assembly has been more prone to vote in ways that are more nuanced than the traditional left versus right dynamic. That’s especially true for issues like public safety, homelessness and housing.
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 Bluesky.
