Alaska’s former Attorney General Treg Taylor officially joined the race for governor last week, launching his campaign off a six-plus-month runway filled with profile-raising, state-paid appearances and years of signing onto virtue-signalling lawsuits against Biden.
Leaving behind a legacy of finding the perfect legal contortion to back up whatever legally dubious piece of Dunleavy’s agenda was in question, he spent his final day as Attorney General as the guest of honor at a $100,000-per-ticket fundraiser for groups that he may or may not have some sort of connection with, according to ADN coverage, and he declined to answer questions. What we do know is that Advancing Alaska Action produced a bunch of professional B-roll of Taylor and his family and posted it to YouTube three weeks ago. That footage, which is the standard fare of posing with his family, fixing salmon and driving around a side-by-side, was used in his official launch video this week.
Legally questionable, ethically dubious.
Anyway, that kind of money might give him the edge but the impact of deep-pocketed backers has its limits in a world without campaign finance limits — there are only so many ad slots to buy and so many road signs to print — and Taylor has a lot of work to do if he aims to unite a Republican party that’s currently fielding 10 candidates for governor. Not only does the field have just about every flavor of right-wing conservative you could expect — with more, like former Anchorage Mayor Dave Bronson, in the wings — but several are also more personable with longer track records in Alaska.
Skim the usual spots, and you’ll see a lot of surprisingly varied conservative vitriol aimed in Taylor’s direction.
“No,” “Nope,” “No,” “No,” “He was not a strong AG. How in the world could he be a strong governor? No trust,” “Another corrupt politician,” “Woe to Alaska if you vote for him … Was not doing the job he’s paid well to do” and “Hard pass” were some of the comments on posts announcing his candidacy.
I think a lot of that’s to do with the fact that the guy is not just wealthy but so-wealthy-that-I-should-not-be-held-to-the-same-rules-as-everyone-else wealthy. It was an apparently sore spot that conservative writer Suzanne Downing hit one too many times with her story reporting how he was asking for special treatment from campaign finance regulators because it’s just too darn hard to upload the legally required financial disclosures for the more than 200 people who pay him rent at the multi-million-dollar apartment tower he owns with his wife.
More: Downing’s exit from Must Read Alaska was almost noble
Pressure from ownership, upset with the treatment of Taylor in that story, ultimately led to Downing’s exit from the outlet she created. She said they ordered her to take the story down. They claimed to be combating the “political favoritism” creeping into the outlet’s coverage, which is to say expect nicer coverage of Taylor ahead.
Downing’s coverage of Taylor was one of the more straightforward things she’s written and her most pointed note was simply stating the obvious takeaway from the whole hulabaloo: That it wasn’t a good look for a former Attorney General, a guy who just penned an op-ed claiming “The rule of law doesn’t work unless it applies to all of us,” to be asking for special treatment with an exemption from the law.
She wrote that his actions “may draw scrutiny as he positions himself for a run for governor. Personal financial disclosures have discouraged many business people from running for office, and so some may ask why Taylor, as the attorney general, should get an exemption from his public official financial disclosure.”
Apparently, that kind of scathing “political favoritism” gets you the boot.
Still, staff at the Alaska Public Offices Commission agreed, writing in their recommendation that allowing him to skip any part of the disclosure defeated the purpose of the state’s transparency laws.
“The purposes of public official financial disclosures in part are to assure that public officials and their official acts are free from the influence of undisclosued business interests and to allow the public to have access to the information necessary to judge the public officials’ credentials or performance in office,” said APOC Executive Director Heather Hebdon during the hearing, later adding, “This is what the statute tells you that needs to be disclosed. It’s not for APOC’s information; it’s for the public information.”
Ultimately, commissioners punted on the issue of confidentiality.
More: Treg Taylor still has to disclose his business connections, campaign regulators find
They agreed that the state’s filing system could be on the arcane side of things, allowing Taylor to file in a format befitting someone with 200+ renters (I believe that list, when it’s uploaded, which it isn’t, will be one of those forms you have to directly request). They found that since Taylor had never officially asked in writing for the renters’ names to be kept secret, it wouldn’t rule on that. That means, at least for now, regulators expect him to file the complete list of renters as part of his financial disclosure (which he has yet to file).
“Although there was some discussion at the September 10, 2025, hearing whether Attorney General Taylor is required to produce the full names of all tenants, the Commission does not believe that such a request has been sufficiently raised by either the Attorney General or APOC Staff pursuant to (regulations). In the event Attorney General Taylor seeks to withhold tenant information from public disclosure, he shall formulate his position in writing for Commission review.”
You can find APOC’s order on the case here.
It’s also worth noting that the folks at APOC saw just how problematic Taylor’s request was from the get-go, hiring outside counsel rather than relying on the Department of Law that Taylor has helped shape into a dependable justifier of the Dunleavy administration’s legally dubious actions.
What’s next for Taylor’s entrance into the race isn’t clear. The field has yet to really gel, and the Democrats are largely still waiting to see if U.S. Rep. Mary Peltola enters the race. Notably, Taylor has yet to file his financial disclosures with the state.
As several Republican campaigns in recent years have shown, some candidates have approached the state’s disclosure laws with stonewalling and interminable legal challenges. While some issues may eventually incur massive fines, it seems that candidates have merely seen that as a cost of doing business in the state, with the penalties and legally questionable campaign activities not being revealed until well after the votes are counted.
A few other things about Treggarick
- Treg (real name Treggarick) and his wife, Jodi, are also key figures in the push for pseudo-privatization of Alaska’s public education system that I’ve written about at length, advocating for near-nonexistent oversight of the state’s homeschool and charter programs to redirect public education funding to private and religious schools. Jodi Taylor penned a notorious op-ed laying out the specific steps to game the system — they took advantage of the lax rules by using homeschool funding to send their kids to a private religious school — which has fueled a lawsuit challenging the practice.
- Treg Taylor has rarely found a right-wing culture-war issue that he hasn’t wanted to sign onto. That’s included joining other GOP Attorneys General that would force states to release abortion records to other states. He also scared pharmacies in Alaska away from carrying mifepristone, despite it being legal here. And don’t get him started about anti-trans issues.
- One of his final acts in office was to sign off on a letter justifying the appointment of Attorney John W. Wood to the non-attorney spot on the judge-selecting Alaska Judicial Council (a part of a larger effort to override the non-partisan, merit-based system currently in place).
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.
