Republican gubernatorial candidates Dave Bronson and Treg Taylor have come together for a new video urging conservative voters to rank all three Alaska GOP candidates on the November ballot.
The video, which was paid for by the Bronson campaign, comes just a week after GOP frontrunner Bernadette Wilson called on Bronson and Taylor to suspend their campaigns and rally around her as the conservative choice for governor.
In the August jungle primary, Wilson was the top GOP vote-getter with 10% of the vote. She finished in third place behind left-wing Democrats Jonathan Kreiss-Tomkins (22.5%) and Tom Begich (20.8%). Bronson finished fourth with 8.1% and Taylor finished in fifth at 7.2%. Since Begich agreed to drop out, that moved Taylor into the final-four grouping, which will appear on the Nov. 4 ballot.
Wilson has insisted that the best chance for a Republican to win the gubernatorial race is for Bronson and Taylor to exit and consolidate their followers behind her.
Taylor ends by claiming that if Republican voters rank all three GOP candidates, “we will have a Republican governor.”
While Bronson and Taylor don’t won’t be quitting, they do want to unite the GOP base as much as possible. The new video does not mention Wilson by name, but it does encourage voters to rank all three Republicans on the ballot.
The video begins by stating that both Bronson and Taylor oppose the ranked-choice voting system, while noting that Alaskans are stuck with it, for now. If Ballot Measure 2 passes, however, Alaska will ditch ranked-choice and return to its long-standing, traditional election system going forward.
“The November election is ranked-choice,” Bronson observes. “If you only vote one Republican, your vote can be exhausted – thrown away entirely.”
That would happen if a voter only chooses one candidate and fails to rank any others. If no candidate wins more than 50% of the vote in the first round, the candidate with the fewest first-place votes gets eliminated and all his second-choice votes are awarded to the remaining candidates. If a voter declines to rank any other candidates, then their ballot would be tossed in round 2.
“That’s how JKT wins and Republican votes die,” Taylor notes in the video.
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Bronson then urges voters to make sure their ballot doesn’t “die early” by just voting for one GOP candidate.
“Fill out every Republican line,” he implores.
In a playful moment, the video shows both Taylor and Bronson urging voters to choose them as their “number one” choice.
The 49-second clip ends by stating that “ranking all three does not help JKT.”
Rather, “It keeps conservative votes in the count until the final round,” Bronson concludes.
Taylor ends by claiming that if Republican voters rank all three GOP candidates, “we will have a Republican governor.”
The slogan for the video is, “Rank 1,2,3 – just not JKT”
