Bipartisan-minded legislators are on track to hold onto their majority in the Senate and take control of the House, according to early election results from Tuesday’s voting.
The coalition of Democrats, independents and moderate Republicans performed well throughout the state, and if current results hold, the alliance is slated to expand its presence in the House, picking up three seats in Anchorage and one on the North Slope.
In Anchorage, three conservative party loyalist Republicans will be replaced by more moderate legislators.
In East Anchorage, GOP Rep. Stanley Wright trails Democratic challenger Ted Eisched by about three percentage points (48.5-51.3). In South Anchorage, an open seat will flip from Republican hands to independent Ky Holland, who has a roughly six-point lead over Republican Lucy Bauer (53-46.6). In West Anchorage, moderate Republican Chuck Kopp repeated his primary election trouncing of Republican Rep. Craig Johnson, beating the powerful House Majority Rules Chair by more than 20 points (61-38).
On the North Slope, Democratic candidate Robyn Burke holds a commanding lead in a three-way race that includes Republican-turned-independent Rep. Thomas Baker. Republican Gov. Mike Dunleavy appointed Baker, and he frequently broke with his fellow rural legislators on critical issues such as education funding and voting rights reform. With 14 of 20 precincts counted in House District 40, Burke has 58% of the vote to Baker’s 21%.
Republicans can count on one flip in their favor in the House.
That’d be in Southeast Alaska’s House District 1, where Ketchikan independent Rep. Dan Ortiz declined to run for re-election, leaving an open seat that Republican Jeremy Bynum is poised to win. Bynum has about 51.5% of the vote, while independent candidates Grant Echohawk and Agnes Moran split the remaining vote nearly evenly.
Republicans also appear to have ousted long-time thorn-in-their-side Republican Rep. David Eastman. Eastman is one of the Legislature’s most conservative members and has been a lightning rod for controversies, which caused other Republicans to shun him over repeated racist and inflammatory comments. He is currently trailing conservative Republican candidate Jubilee Underwood by about three points (51-48).
If the results stand, it would cut the total number of Republicans in the House to 20.
With Kopp and Kodiak Republican Rep. Louise Stutes open to joining a bipartisan coalition, that would put a coalition majority of at least 22 with five independents, two Republicans and 15 Democrats.
The one area closest to the edge of flipping with the yet-to-be-counted absentee ballots is East Anchorage’s House District 18, where incumbent Democratic Rep. Cliff Groh holds a 28-vote lead over Republican David Nelson. Those votes are set to be counted next week.
Meanwhile, Republican efforts to weaken the existing bipartisan coalition in the Senate appear to have failed.
The three key targets of loyalist Republicans were Fairbanks Democratic Sen. Scott Kawasaki, Eagle River Republican Sen. Kelly Merrick and Nikiski Republican Sen. Jesse Bjorkman. They all hold leads in their races.
Kawasaki holds a roughly one-point lead (50.3-49.5) over Republican Leslie Hajdukovich in a race that attracted significant spending on both sides of the ticket. Merrick and Bjorkman, labor-friendly moderates central to the Senate’s bipartisan coalition, hold comfortable leads in their respective three-way races that pitted them against far-right Republicans and Democratic candidates accused of being bogus plants by far-right Republicans.
Neither took an outright lead, which means the races will likely come down to ranked-choice voting. In Eagle River, Merrick has 46.5% of the vote to Republican Jared Goecker’s 40.4% and Democrat Lee Hammermeister’s 12.8%. In Kenai, Bjorkman received 47.8% of the vote to extreme-right Republican Rep. Ben Carpenter’s 41.1% and Democrat Tina Wegener’s 10.8%.
While the Democrats in the races have suspicious ties to Republicans, voters who ranked the Democrats first would have to break almost entirely for the right-wing candidates on their second choice. As Alaska’s last election showed, that’s unlikely.
The one semi-flip for Republicans in the Senate comes in the ranging Senate District R, an open seat vacated by moderate Republican Sen. Click Bishop. Currently, conservative Tok Republican Rep. Mike Cronk has a 52.7% share of the vote in the district that spans from Fairbanks to the Canada border. Independent candidate Savannah Fletcher has about 41% of the vote, and Alaska Independence Party candidate Bert Williams has about 6.2%.
If the state Senate results hold, the Senate would consist of nine Democrats and 11 Republicans. Of those 11 Republicans, five — Sens. Merrick, Bjorkman and Sens. Gary Stevens, Cathy Giessel and Bert Stedman — have been reliable members of the bipartisan coalition.
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 Twitter.
