If nothing changes and the polling is correct, the Democrat candidate will win the Alaska governor’s race. It could lead to disaster. With a Democrat governor, our State Legislature will pass every loony left-wing bill they can think up, and Jonathan Kreiss-Tomkins (JKT) will rubber-stamp every one of them. The next four years will go badly for citizens of this state, but the unanswered question is who will get the blame.
If this election ends with Alaska having a Democrat governor, it would be easy to blame Ranked Choice Voting. Ironically, we could have another unfair RCV election result in the same election where RCV is repealed. Now that would be hard to take.
The Republicans will try to avoid accountability and by citing RCV as the culprit, but some of the candidates in this year’s election will also deserve some of the blame.
One person who won’t be blamed is Bernadette Wilson. Wilson played by the rules. She won the primary and should be the lone Republican running in the general election. To Wilson’s credit, she did say before the election that she would drop out if she weren’t the Republican vote leader, and since winning has tried to hold candidates Dave Bronson and Treg Taylor to that same standard – asking them to drop out. If JKT wins, Wilson will merit the least amount of criticism. If she loses, you could see Wilson on a statewide election ballot at some point in the future.
Not so with Dave Bronson and Treg Taylor. They are in the process of destroying their political careers. They are both experienced politicians who should have known from Mary Peltola’s 2022 election victory that by remaining in the race, they were sabotaging Wilson. Instead of acting statesmanlike, they selfishly remained in the race hoping for a miracle. While some sort of October surprise might yet catapult one of them to victory, the truth is that no poll has ever shown either of them with any chance of winning. All they can do at this point is guarantee a Democrat victory in November. Jonathan Kreiss-Tomkins is probably giddy that Bronson and Taylor are still running.
Another group that will deserve its portion of the blame is the Alaska Republican Party. They have done nothing to police their members. If JKT wins, yes, RCV enabled it, but the AKGOP has done nothing to prevent it from happening. A strong political party would have encouraged two of the candidates to drop out of the governor’s race and endorsed the GOP candidate who earned the most votes in the primary election.
There is a lesson in this about how voters view the AKGOP. Alaska has a conservative population, but there are more registered nonpartisan voters than Republicans. The voters know the AKGOP is an unreliable partner in delivering conservative governance. Why should they support a party that consistently gives us weak RINO candidates like Lisa Murkowski, Louise Stutes, and Gary Stevens?
The AKGOP deserves some of the blame for the imminent train wreck ahead of us and might want to look at what is happening to a weak conservative party in Great Britain. The British Conservative Party is the oldest political party in the world, but is now largely irrelevant, replaced by Nigel Farage’s Reform UK. The Tory party failed the voters, and they looked for other alternatives to represent them. The Alaska GOP could experience the same fate.
If you believe the polls, a Democrat will win the governor’s race, meaning the train wreck that will follow is inevitable. The ones that will receive most of the blame have the most to lose. I am specifically referring to the candidates Bronson and Taylor, along with the AKGOP. If they do nothing and JKT is elected, the voters will blame them. However, it isn’t too late to act. Bronson and Taylor could become the October surprise. As suggested in a previous post, they should both drop out to support Bernadette Wilson. The AKGOP leadership should work to make that happen. Either they demonstrate leadership now, or they will be held accountable.
The views expressed here are those of Greg Sarber. Read more Sarber posts at his Seward’s Folly substack.
