If you’ve cast a ballot for an Anchorage municipal election in the last decade or attended an Anchorage Assembly meeting, you likely recognize the name Dustin Darden.
Darden is a city maintenance worker and carpenter by trade, but is most known for his outbursts at public meetings, peddling conspiracy theories and his devotion to Alex Jones’ InfoWars. Since 2011, he has run for office a total of 10 times at the local, state and federal level. On average, Darden wins around 6% of the total vote in any given election.
Currently, Darden is running for the West Anchorage Assembly seat against Save Anchorage candidate Brian Flynn — whose wife is the purchasing director for Mayor Bronson — and city planner Anna Brawley. Both Brawley and Flynn have raised around $40,000 while Darden has not reported raising any money.
Darden is what is called a “perennial candidate”: someone who keeps running for office but never comes anywhere close to winning. Perennial candidates tend to be laser-focused on a small set of issues. Although perennial candidates are almost never elected in their lifetime, their candidacies can substantially affect the race they’re in by splitting the vote.
In 2018, Darden ran for State House against former Independent Rep. Jason Grenn as a Democrat. During a town hall meeting, then-Assemblywoman Jamie Allard openly described convincing Darden to run as a Democrat to take votes from Grenn, a moderate. It worked. Darden took 12% of the vote, and Grenn lost to Republican Sara Rasmussen by just 447 votes.
Darden most often runs under the Alaska Independence Party label or as a non-partisan Independent. Darden is motivated by a wide swath of conspiracy theories, ranging from fluoride causing brain damage to weather modification. In candidate surveys, Darden often cites scripture and government corruption as his political motivators. He campaigned for a set of ordinances that, if approved by voters, would have ended the fluoridation of water in Anchorage. In 2022, Darden’s dreams briefly became reality when Mayor Bronson temporarily shut off fluoride in the city’s water system.
Darden claims to be a board member of 1776 Alaska, which is a Facebook page dedicated to conspiracy theories, and is routinely kicked out of Assembly meetings for refusing to end his time testifying or becoming too aggressive.
One could argue his social media and candidate questionnaire responses reveal a more conservative bias: he believes we spend too much on education, is vocally anti-abortion, and holds a variety of libertarian views about government commonly shared by conservatives.
However, most voters who see Darden’s name on the ballot don’t really know any of that. The average voter has simply seen his name on so many ballots that they recognize him over newer candidates. Others use Darden’s name as a protest vote in races without a candidate that excites them.
A combined total of Darden’s non-statewide performances shows he gets an average of 5.5% of the vote in any given election. In municipal elections, he averages 5%; in state-level races, he averages 10.6%.
Below is Darden’s average performance going back to his first run for school board in 2011:
To find meaningful correlations, we’ll compare two relationships: partisanship and turnout.
Partisanship
The first question is: Does Darden take more votes from more liberal or conservative-aligned candidates?
Since Darden runs in more municipal races than any other, and because municipal races are increasingly polarized around presidential partisanship, we’ll use the 2021 Mayoral Runoff as a baseline.
Who Votes for Dustin Darden?
A precinct-by-precinct analysis shows there is no clear correlation between Darden’s level of support to how generally conservative a precinct is.
This bears out when we look race-by-race: There is rarely a clear sign of who Darden is siphoning votes from the most. When Darden is most competitive, it’s in a municipal race, which is non-partisan, or a state-level race where there’s already a frontrunner independent. He does poorly in very crowded races (mayor, U.S. Senate).
One major exception is when Darden ran for State House District 22 in 2016 against Jason Grenn, an independent, and Republican incumbent Liz Vazquez. In this race, he ran as an Alaskan Independent. He took more votes from the Republican and helped split the vote for Grenn to win.
On the same ballot, voters also voted in the Trump v. Clinton presidential race. Let’s look at the results from both in House District 22:
Conservative-aligned candidates received +14% more than Vazquez in HD22. Meanwhile, Green received +4% more than liberal and progressive-aligned candidates. Darden drew support from mostly conservatives in Vazquez’s home base of Sand Lake, leading her to underperform both Trump as well as former Congressman Don Young, who received 57% of the vote in HD22.
Turnout
Darden runs often enough that in some races, he has better name recognition than his challengers. As a result, he could have an edge with newer or low-turnout voters. Let’s look at the relationship between Darden’s level of support and turnout using his municipal average and turnout in the 2019 municipal election:
The areas where Darden has performed best over the years on average are low-turnout precincts. Darden’s top 5 precincts have an average turnout of just 16% — far lower than Anchorage’s five-year average turnout of 28% for municipal races.
Darden also does best in West Anchorage, where he has run most often. This aids the low-information voter turnout theory: Some of his best precincts are near his home in Jewel Lake, and exactly half of his runs for office have been from a Westside seat on the Assembly or State House. Darden’s name has been a staple on the ballot for more than a decade.
Years and years of data indicate that Darden’s success (or lack thereof) isn’t consistently tied to partisanship. An analysis shows it’s not connected to race and ethnicity of the electorate. Rather, turnout stands out as the most reliable indicator of how Darden will do in any given race.
Because Darden doesn’t raise any money and never mounts a real campaign, he has a low ceiling of 12-15% at most. We’ve seen Darden play spoiler before, and in a tight West Anchorage race, he could again. The harder part is figuring out what competitive candidate, Brawley or Flynn, will benefit.
Disclosure: Robert Hockema is working for the Anna Brawley for Anchorage Assembly campaign.
