Candidates running for Alaska’s state offices — the Alaska Legislature and governor — have spent more than $7.1 million ahead of the state’s primary election, including more than $10,000 alone on candy.
That’s according to the latest fundraising reports filed last week with the Alaska Public Offices Commission, covering each campaign’s income, expenses and debts from the start of the year through July 17. And while the reports give voters their first good look at the money behind the candidates running for state office — letting us figure out frontrunners and who’s funding them — the amount of detail each campaign actually shares about how it’s spending that money varies wildly.
On one end of the spectrum, reports drill down into the minutiae of campaign expenses, like spending on candy ($10,503.12), food ($82,346.07), signs ($318,999.75), wood for signs ($1,236.84) and stickers ($24,485.81). You can see that candidates spent $39 on a nametag from Bovey Trophies in Anchorage, $70.95 on buttons from an online retailer or $3,628.80 for production of an ad that ran during the Super Bowl.
Dig through the reports enough, and you’ll see Alaska’s top spender on candy is moderate, labor-friendly Republican Click Bishop, a former state legislator among the 17 candidates running for governor. He’s spent $3,220.74 on candy purchases for parades, mostly from Costco, according to reports filed with the Alaska Public Offices Commission last week, which is nearly a third of all candy bought for campaign purposes this cycle.
Unfortunately, far more money is spent to influence Alaska’s elections that isn’t captured with that kind of detail.
Instead, several campaigns effectively masked much of their spending by listing their big expenses, especially media buys and campaign management. According to our analysis, campaigns have spent $2.6 million on television, radio and other advertising, a little more than $1 million on consultants and somewhere in the neighborhood of $450,000 on printing and mailing.
Details on each of those vary from campaign to campaign, with many breaking down where ads were actually placed.
Others, however, boiled it down to a few, vague sentences.
That was the case for the single largest expenditure of the campaign cycle, $400,000 that Republican gubernatorial candidate Matt Heilala — a doctor who has largely self-funded his campaign — spent with Alaska-based Brilliant Media for “Media Consulting, Production, and Placement.” It doesn’t include any mention of what kind of media was produced, where it was placed and who, along the way, made a profit from Heilala’s spending.
He’s far from alone on that front.
Several candidates reported their media buys as a single, large lump sum.
Some seem to be placeholders. For example, Jonathan Kreiss-Tomkins, who leads in overall fundraising, has a $239,296.00 expense listed to C+K with the purpose listed as “Media Buy – need details.” And former Alaska Attorney General Treg Taylor — who previously asked to hide details about his rental properties from disclosure — has a $39,907.00 spend at Anchorage-based Blayde Communications listed with a purpose of “TBA.”
Others offer middling detail, like Taylor’s $9,800 he spent with Ohio-based FlexPoint Campaigns for the placement of a TV ad during the World Cup on July 1 and July 3.
And it’s not just this year. In fact, specificity has been a growing issue before Alaska campaign finance regulators, who’ve been fielding more and more complaints that candidates’ reports lack the details needed to keep up with the state’s disclosure laws.
“There has actually been quite a bit of scrutiny over this particular question in response to a host of complaints that were filed over the past two years,” said APOC Executive Director Heather Hebdon via email. “Essentially, there is a heightened disclosure requirement for expenditures related to advertising and consulting.”
A 2025 complaint against Rep. Kevin McCabe stands as one of the first times the APOC commissioners dealt with the issue head-on, dinging the Big Lake Republican for reporting his ad buys without enough detail, landing him with a $3,200 civil penalty for four violations. In that case, it was less than $21,000 spent with descriptions like “graphics, digital advertising,” “digital ad” or “digital ads.”
“‘Digital ad’ or ‘’digital ads,” without more, provides insufficient detail on ‘all services rendered’ by an advertising or consulting agency,” the APOC order explained. “This description does not indicate whether (the vendor) created the ads, directly distributed them, arranged placement on another entity’s website or app, or provided some combination of these services.”
Hebdon said that for most expenditures like printing, signs, staff time and candy, a stated purpose is sufficient detail to meet the disclosure rules, but more details are needed with more complicated and multi-faceted expenditures to advertising agencies and consultants, especially when they may be subcontracting out for significant sums of money.
“Ideally this would give the public an idea of how the expenditure relates to campaign activities. For your general expenditures, the regulations simply require a purpose for the expenditure,” she explained, “But for expenditures to advertising agencies or vendors that provide consulting and management services, the expenditure requires a more comprehensive explanation to detail all services rendered, including media placement and subcontractors.”
For Heilala’s part, he’s filed an amendment to his initial report.
According to that amendment, of his $400,000 media spend: $220,000 was spent with ad-placing company Simplifi Holdings, another $160,000 was spent on digital media between Meta, YouTube and Google, and $20,000 at Facebook. His $100,000 spend at Hackney Communications gives a far better breakdown, with an itemized report of the consulting cost, media production placement on various radio stations, podcasts and advertising on two news blogs at $1,750 apiece.
Heilala’s updated finance reports
Whether that’s sufficient detail will likely depend on whether someone has the time and know-how to file a complaint.
While APOC offers compliance training and has staff to answer questions as they come up, fines and penalties are typically driven by complaints. That’s in large part because the agency has been infamously underfunded, and the lawmakers responsible for overseeing its budget are often on the receiving end of the fines.
But want to know what kind of candy a campaign handed out?
You’ll have to ask a campaign manager.
“We always buy variety packs because you never know what someone’s favorite candy is,” said Bishop campaign manager Shannon Mason in an email accompanied by pictures of mini chocolates in buckets to be handed out at parades. “In a way, that’s a lot like our campaign—we’re focused on bringing people together and working with everyone, no matter their preferences. There’s something for everyone.”
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.
