Bill Hill, a longtime commercial fisherman and former superintendent of the Bristol Bay School District, joined the race to unseat GOP Rep. Nick Begich on Wednesday and landed a big campaign haul.
Hill, an independent, raised more than $200,000 on his first day in the race, his campaign said, doubling the opening fundraising of other candidates and setting a record for non-incumbent candidates’ first-day haul.
“With so many of us feeling the crunch these days, I’m blown away by the number of people who have chipped in,” Hill said in a prepared statement. “I can promise Alaskans this — no one will work harder to win this seat, and no one will work harder to represent you in Congress.”
The field for Alaska’s U.S. House seat includes Democratic candidates Rev. Matt Schultz of Anchorage and Fairbanks history teacher John Williams. While most political observers give the edge to Begich in the race, polling shows that he and Republicans are increasingly unpopular in the age of Trump, and there’s hope that working-class-focused messaging can and will be effective.
“I want people to know I’m an authentic Alaskan who’s concerned about our state and our nation, and I want to stand up and I want to represent everyday Alaskans in Congress,” Hill told the Alaska Beacon. “I think we need to end the idea that having a millionaire in Congress who cozies up to billionaires is right for Alaskans. People like that don’t know what our lives are like, and so we need a real Alaskan in Congress, and I’d love to represent that.”
While Hill has a history of backing progressive candidates, he has turned heads by refusing to commit to caucusing with Democrats or Republicans if elected to office. He told outlets that he plans to leverage his position to the maximum benefit of the state.
“I am somebody who can work with anybody, but my main focus is going to be to find the people who are going to focus on reducing costs to Alaskans, working on corruption, challenging corruption in Washington, D.C., and protecting the Alaska way of life,” he told the ADN.
The filing deadline for this year’s congressional elections is June 1. The race will be conducted using the state’s open primary system, which allows the top four candidates, regardless of party affiliation, to advance to the general election. The general election is then conducted with ranked-choice voting that allows voters to pick several candidates, lowering the chance that politically similar candidates will play spoiler to each other.