Progressive and moderate candidates held advantages in early results from Anchorage’s Tuesday election.
With six Assembly seats and two School Board seats on Tuesday’s ballot, progressives held leads in all but two of the races. As of Tuesday night, 42,0494 votes had been counted, representing a turnout of 17.9%. Thousands more ballots are yet to be counted and more are expected to arrive by mail over the next two weeks.
In several races, progressives accused their conservative challengers of stooping to shady campaign tactics to confuse or deceive voters.
Incumbent Assemblymembers Zac Johnson, George Martinez and Anna Brawley hold commanding leads over their right-wing challengers, largely mirroring their initial victories in 2023.
Johnson, who was the target of a Republican-linked group that tried to paint him as both too liberal and too conservative, appears to be fending off challenges from Bruce Vergason and Janelle Sharp. According to Johnson had 47% of the vote to Vergason’s 39% and Sharp’s 11%.
Brawley maintained a wide lead over conservative Brian Flynn by 12 points, 54-42, a repeat of her 2023 victory over Flynn.
Martinez, who accused his conservative challenger of, at the very least, being bad at maintaining his residency tax exemption forms, was beating Cody Anderson by about 15 points, 55-40.
In the Assembly’s three other open races, progressives and conservatives are each set to maintain control of one seat while the third is too close to call.
In the sprawling North Anchorage district spanning from downtown into East Anchorage, progressive candidate Sydney Scout held a commanding advantage in the four-way race to replace the term-limited Assemblymember Christopher Constant. She has 54% of the vote while her leading conservative challenger, Justin Milette, got just 32%.
In the Midtown Anchorage seat vacated by the term-limited Anchorage Assemblymember Felix Rivera, progressive Janice Park narrowly trailed conservative Dave Donely. Donely is the long-time token right-winger on the Anchorage School Board, where he had reached his term limit. There, fewer than 100 votes separate the two candidates — Donley has 3,196 votes to Park’s 3,107 — well within the margin of yet-to-be-counted ballots.
The lone place for success for conservatives was in the conservative stronghold of Eagle River, but progressives made some inroads since 2023. There, conservative Donald Handeland is beating labor-friendly Kyle Walker by 10 points, 53-43, but that’s a smaller margin than Eagle River Assemblymember Scott Myers won by 18 points in 2026. Myers was eligible to run for a second term, but bowed out.
Voters also soundly rejected bids from far-right conservatives for the school board, sending a group of right-wingers, headlined by extreme-right bigot Alexander Rosales, packing.
Progressive candidates Rachel Blakeslee and Dave McDonough have big leads of 17 points and 16 points, respectively.
Rosales, whose inflammatory anti-LGBTQ and anti-school district posts were featured in his opponents’ political mailers, has been a headache for Anchorage conservatives, who’ve been wary about welcoming him into the fold. Several conservative groups took the unusual step this year of not endorsing any school board candidates, in large part to avoid having to take any firm position on Rosales or not.
Some, like former U.S. Senate candidate Kelly Tshibaka — whose husband, Niki Tshibaka, played a central role in former conservative Mayor Dave Bronson’s disastrous single term as the city’s top executive — have even gone as far as disavowing their support for Rosales heading into the race.
Rosales currently has 37.75% of the vote to Blakeslee’s 54.4%.
On the proposition front, voters are currently approving every capital improvement bond except for a pair of propositions that aimed to raise funding for the Anchorage School District, which is facing budget shortfalls like just about every other district in the state.
Both Proposition 1, which is for school maintenance and construction, and Proposition 9, which would help cover the district’s operating costs, arec both failing by fewer than 400 votes out of more than 41,000 countd.
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.
