New Year, New Platform and a New Session of Hope

It's Monday, Alaska! The legislative session starts Tuesday!

Programming note: Ahead of the 2025 legislative session, I'm moving my publishing of The Alaska Memo from Substack to independent platform Ghost. It has some neat features and is also a bit more friendly in terms of the rates it charges, meaning more of your support will end up with me and won't go to underwriting whatever writer Substack is promoting. You shouldn't notice any interruption from your end, and subscription information should carry over without you having to do anything. But if you hit any snags or have any questions, please contact me at matt@akmemo.com.

In this edition: This is the same—albeit more edited—version of Friday's newsletter, which may not have gone out to everyone in the transition. If you've read that, you're all caught up with me. In it, we talk about the dynamics of this weird political moment we're in and how the Alaska Legislature's incoming multipartisan coalitions have a real opportunity to do some good this year. Have a nice remaining few hours of the interim!

Current mood: 🥳

A New Session of Hope

This is an updated version of the Jan. 17 newsletter.

Over the past month, I’ve written stories that explore how Alaska’s multipartisan coalitions in both chambers of the state legislature might mesh with Donald Trump’s simultaneous return to the White House, focusing on women’s reproductive rights, labor issues, impacts on education, and other matters of public policy here in the 49^th State. 

On the Trump front, we’re seeing lots of world-weary shrugs and comments: “Here we go again.” “Who knows what will happen?” “The best we can hope for is the incompetence will outpace the cruelty.” And perhaps the most cynical yet understandable: “I guess this is what America voted for.” 

There has been much navel-gazing and finger-pointing about this unthinkable yet unsurprising Democratic loss to Trump and the MAGA movement in 2024.

Some pundits wonder whether Democrats should actually move further right, despite broad evidence that progressive issues, including raising the minimum wage, are so popular they pass on ballot initiatives by wide margins.

For example, Alaskans voted strongly in November 2024 for a ballot initiative that not only increased the minimum wage and tied it to inflation but also expanded paid leave requirements. In addition, the new law prohibits employer-mandated “captive audience” meetings, "the primary purpose of which is to communicate the employer's opinion about religious matters or political matters."

In Alaska, the state Supreme Court has ruled repeatedly to protect women’s reproductive health, primarily because of Alaska’s state constitution’s explicitly stated protection of privacy rights. In 2022, voters soundly rejected the right-wing effort to open the state’s constitution through a decennial convention vote–backed by Gov. Mike Dunleavy, making him the first-ever sitting governor to push for amending the state constitution in such a manner–to attack those rights. 

One of the most interesting perspectives on the current US political climate after the 2024 election that I’ve seen comes from Michael Podhorzer, a former political director for the AFL-CIO.

“The results are best understood as a vote of no confidence in Democrats, not an embrace of Trump or MAGA,” Podhorzer writes. “America didn’t swing rightward, but couchward.”

Podhorzer notes that much of the recent “red shift” across the nation resulted more from voters staying home than any discernable spike in MAGA support. In his take, Podhorzer partially blames Democrats’ gestures toward a milquetoast corporate centrism that swayed few votes while alienating many working-class voters.

He asserts that any traditional political assessment of right versus left constitutes an overly simplistic view of current national politics. We should also consider, according to Podhorzer, a third axis of politics: Eligible voters who choose neither party. 

“When we use the wrong tools, we might not just fail to diagnose an illness – we might misdiagnose it, and prescribe a treatment that is actively harmful to the patient. When Flatland analysts argue that America “moved right,” the prescription tends to be that Democrats should also move right, or at least play nice with Trump to avoid alienating the Americans who supposedly granted him a decisive mandate. The same prescription will be dispensed to civil society and the media. … But that diagnosis completely misses the life-threatening illness America is really struggling with: a billionaire-captured system that doesn’t work for most people, and justifiable disaffection and anger at this system. Americans are fed up, and people are perpetually in the mood to throw the bums out, whoever the bums in charge are.” 

While the information-delivery system in the US has become increasingly toxic as part of what Podhorzer calls a self-serving “billionaire-captured system,” other parts of the system could afford fundamental change as well. Alaska is on the forefront of a positive political trend.

Fortunately, Alaska’s fledgling voting system, narrowly approved by voters and first implemented in the 2022 state elections, mandates open primaries and then ranked-choice voting in general elections. Alaska voters narrowly defeated a ballot initiative in November 2024 that continues to protect open primaries and rank-choice voting.

If it survives a few more election cycles, Alaskans might come to appreciate open primaries and rank-choice voting for the way it is moderating politics in Alaska. The system undoubtedly provides that much-needed dimension to the ballot. Alaska voters are not as bound by the top-down politics of a national two-party system, along with all the corporate and other baggage that comes with it. Alaska voters can express their views with nuance instead of the certainty of little real choice at the ballot box. 

With fringe candidates no longer grabbing state legislative seats in closed-party primaries, we saw political moderation blossom in several races over the past two regular election cycles. Voters in reliably Republican districts, for example, including in Eagle River, Kenai, and South Anchorage are still, by and large, electing Republicans, as they should be in red legislative districts.

But here’s the difference: Instead of extremists, voters are electing moderate Republicans who better represent voters and whose policy positions broke from their right-wing party bosses to support, say increased public education funding and public pensions in an effort to slow the state’s revolving door of workers.

For example, Sen. Cathy Giessel, a moderate Republican who, after working across the aisle in Juneau for years and rose to Senate Majority Leader, was nevertheless primaried by a far-right extremist in 2020. Giessel did not disappear from elective office, however, and regained her seat after rank-choice voting was implemented in 2022. Here is her story. 

Victories by Giessel and other moderate Republicans and Independents were critical to organizing the coalitions in both chambers of the state legislature. Alaska’s pro-active, moderating politics likely is the biggest reason far-right legislators remain ever-focused on their divisive and destructive culture wars, as they pledge to take another shot at repealing open primaries and rank-choice voting with another ballot initiative planned for the 2026 election cycle.

Alaska’s Impending 2025 Legislative Session 

After Democrats, independents and moderate Republicans forged governing coalitions that will control both legislative chambers (albeit quite narrowly) in 2025, a buzzy optimism prevails in Juneau that Alaska may well see significant progress in solving pernicious and seemingly intransigent problems that have dogged the state for years. That would include Alaska’s continuing population outmigration and dire teacher shortages, particularly in rural Alaska. Ballooning student-teacher ratios. An ever-rising cost of living. Energy instability, particularly with looming natural gas shortages in Southcenteral Alaska.

All these challenges have festered as Alaska struggles to get its fiscal house in order.

But that resistance to get the house in order–largely driven by politicians like Dunleavy who refuse to budge on the dividend but also refuse to come up with a plan to pay for it and can’t be pressed to come up with cuts–has been a distraction while schools shutter, potholes grow, and workers flee the state for better opportunities Outside. 

Gov. Mike Dunleavy’s veto pen, as always, looms large over the entire legislative process. 

For example, Dunleavy’s years-long, unnecessary vetoes of public K-12 education have closed schools across Alaska. His policies create disincentives for attracting young families to move to magnificent Alaska. In addition, the governor’s gratuitous, seemingly vengeful vetoes of the University of Alaska budget have done little to keep Alaska’s sons and daughters in-state for post-secondary education.

Without the votes to override Dunleavy on bills and budget vetoes, the restoration of defined-benefit pensions for public employees or a permanent boost to education are likely still at least two years away (although sooner if a job for Dunleavy in Trump’s historically high-turnover cabinet opens up). Dunleavy is also suppressing a salary report that legislators funded to help guide work this session, according to longtime Fairbanks journalist Dermot Cole.

Instead of funding, say, public education and much-needed infrastructure maintenance (such as vetoing snowplowing on state roads), the governor keeps trying to act like “a champion of the people” by irresponsibly pitching a fiscal fantasy that the state can balance its budget without making tough choices. 

But judging by the several pre-filed pension bills, a bill to increase the per-student funding formula, along with Fairbanks Rep. Maxine Dibert’s universal free meals bill (which I write about here), legislators are not going to let the process be hung up on whataboutism or hypotheticals. 

Alaska’s election system may have opened the door for more moderate, results-focused candidates to run and win elected office in Alaska, but it’ll now be up to them to show it was worthwhile. 

Stay tuned. 

Reading list

Mat-Su Sentinel: School board to consider Mat-Su Central shake-up as district faces $22 million funding shortfall

ADN: Hard work and hope: Ukrainians in Alaska ponder an uncertain future

Alaska Public: Biden's Interior Department, as a last act, proposes subsistence protection in NPR-A

Alaska Beacon: Alaska governor, ally of Trump, will keep flags at full-staff for Inauguration Day

Weekend watching

In a world of pie-in-the-sky Alaska inventions, the Alaska Freight Lines’ experimental Sno Freighter really stands out. Check out this cool video talking about the history of the machine as well as a tour of where it rests off the Steese Highway.

Have a nice weekend, y’all.