Alaska’s 2026 regular legislative session came to a largely smooth ending last week, with lawmakers wrapping up the final day of passing bills with plenty of time to spare.
Much of that is because high oil prices buoyed the state’s budget — usually one of the largest points of friction in the final days of the session — with extra money for education, school maintenance, child care and healthcare, all while running a slight surplus and paying out a $1,200 PFD. And that’s based on the spring revenue forecast, which was put together in the nascent days of Trump’s Iran war, meaning the surplus could very well be massive by this time next year.
Legislators ultimately resisted the urge to spend based on those assumptions, leaving what could be hundreds of millions in additional oil tax revenue for next year’s Legislature to decide.
And even if oil prices fall back to earth and the time of tight budgeting returns, lawmakers will still have plenty to look forward to.
That’s because this is the final year of far-right Alaska Republican Gov. Mike Dunleavy’s time in office.
His schoolyard-bully approach to legislating never won over lawmakers, who spent much of the last eight years working to curb his worst impulses while struggling for incremental progress — last year’s massive fight over education funding boiled down to a $20 increase in per-student funding over the prior year. When Dunleavy doesn’t get his way, he’s taken to giving performatively angry news conferences that often get combative with reporters, disappearing from Juneau for long stretches of the session and, of course, vetoing the heck out of lawmakers’ bills.
Thanks to Alaska’s strongest-in-the-nation veto power — requiring a ⅔ vote to override non-spending vetoes and a ¾ vote to override spending vetoes – Dunleavy has often resorted to legislating by veto in his second term.
He issued 12 non-budget vetoes during the 2023-2024 legislative session and has already issued another 12 during this one, including his twelfth non-budget veto on the final day of the session: Anchorage Rep. Genevieve Mina’s bill to include the input of local communities and tribes in the formulation of the state’s transit plan. That followed his veto of the pension bill after lawmakers failed to sign off on his AKLNG pipeline subsidy — a move he allegedly made in front of one of the bill’s key sponsors, as if to rub their face in it.
Other vetoes have appeared petty, seemingly targeting legislators who have been critical of him, such as his 2023 veto of Fairbanks Rep. Ashley Carrick’s legislation to update state law on e-bikes. Other lawmakers suggested it was payback for her criticizing his latest K12 funding veto.
“I can say there’s been chatter about the governor being hard on particular legislators,” Fairbanks Democratic Sen. Scott Kawasaki told the Alaska Beacon at the time. “I just think the governor’s been a little petty with some of the obvious politics around good bills.”
Combined with the three non-budget vetoes he issued in his first term, Dunleavy has issued 26 over his two terms in office. That’s more than Govs. Bill Walker, Sean Parnell, Sarah Palin and Frank Murkowski had combined.
Dunleavy still has plenty of opportunity to run up the score this year. There are still dozens more bills that the Legislature has yet to send over to the governor for consideration — including prime targets like campaign contribution limits, a bill honoring the late Vic Fischer (a legendary statesman who spent his final years trying to recall Dunleavy), and a ban on single-use Styrofoam food containers.
That said, he’s not likely to catch up with the last veto-happy governor. That’d be Democratic Gov. Tony Knowles, whose fraught relationship with legislative Republicans led to nearly 70 vetoes over his two terms in office. Legislators ultimately mustered overrides for 20 of them.
In the big picture, Dunleavy’s legislate-by-veto approach means that, in addition to stopping the damage he’s done from the governor’s mansion, lawmakers have faced eight years of roadblocks on everything from school funding and contraceptive care to public pensions and the most modest election reforms.
His veto of the election bill — a measure designed to be inoffensive across the political spectrum — stands out in particular because so many of its policies are ones he had once championed.
That included voter roll maintenance measures that would have made it far easier and faster to deactivate voters suspected of being ineligible to vote, a measure long sought by conservatives. On the flip side, it would have implemented ballot-fixing and ballot-curing, but also aimed to make around-the-edges changes to many of the well-known, long-standing structural barriers to voting in rural communities.
Other issues, like campaign finance limits, struggled to get traction with lawmakers because the governor’s veto seemed like a foregone conclusion. (Interestingly, lawmakers revived the campaign finance in the final hours of the legislative session, setting it up to be his 13th veto.)
For many, it feels like the state’s stuck in neutral.
While his veto message on the election tried to hide behind concerns about implementing the changes in time, the underlying message was that election reforms — like so many things — will simply have to wait for a new governor.
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.
