Local elections see shift in tactics after last year's far-right flop/Notes from the federal candidate forum

The conservatives up in Fairbanks appear to be getting the message that being completely and overtly unlikable whackos isn’t a winning strategy when there’s a center nervous about the status quo.

Happy Indigenous Peoples’ Day, Alaska.

In this edition: We’re a month out from this year’s elections but let’s take a look at what happened with last week’s local elections, particularly the curious case of Fairbanks where the results swung back to the right after a strong progressive victory last year and one perspective on why that might be. Also, notes from today’s federal candidate forum.

Next time: Today’s the deadline for campaign finance reports. Let’s get lost in them.

Current mood: ☃️

A look at the local elections

Photo by Zetong Li on Unsplash

With a month to go until the fall statewide elections, a bunch of local governments had their night this week with local elections going on in pretty much every corner of the state. In Ketchikan, voters look to be rejecting an initiative that would cancel borough funding for the Ketchikan Public Library. Juneau voted to repeal a 2020 law that requires the disclosure of real estate sales prices to the city’s assessor’s office. On the Kenai Peninsula, Borough Assembly assemblyman Jessie Bjorkman (who’s also running against GOP organizer Tuckerman Babcock for the state Senate seat) won his race with a big margin. On a 22-vote margin, Bethel voted to amend the city code and ban any future mask mandates. In the Mat-Su, Mat-Su things are happening with the more notable election news being the Mat-Su Borough Assembly voting to require a hand count for its upcoming Nov. 8 local election.

And in Fairbanks (where I spent much of my Alaska career reporting on local elections, so forgive the soft spot), local politics saw its latest pendulum swing to the right. Conservative candidates took all but two of the seats that were up for grabs between the Fairbanks North Star Borough Assembly, Fairbanks City Council and the Fairbanks North Star Borough School Board (though some of the races are close enough that the yet-to-be-counted ballots could sway things).

It’s an interesting turn for the Golden Heart City, coming just a year after progressives saw broad success across the slate of races, which was the first big blue wave the city had seen after several years of conservative success, which itself came after a long period of progressive domination at the borough level.

Talking with some people who were involved in the races, there’s a couple different factors at play here that I think are worth unpacking.

First and foremost, Anchorage’s far-right scene isn’t currently in full-on rampage mode for this election. Last year’s fall local elections took place during the worst of the ugly anti-masking protests at the Anchorage Assembly, where the worst of the extreme right was on display, proudly wearing Stars of David, packing the occasional firearm and producing nightly head-turning moments that put a lot of centrists on red alert. It certainly didn’t help that Fairbanks’ slate of conservative candidates last year—which included folks like Lance “My Magazine Tantrum Inadvertently Brought Gloria Steinem to Fairbanks” Roberts and Patricia Silva—seemed even more conservative and unhinged than Anchorage Assemblymember Jamie Allard.

Centrists looked at the whole thing and thought better of it while progressives were galvanized into a groundswell of support.

A year later, though, and the general feeling seems to be that unlike our esteemed Republican candidates for the U.S. House, the conservatives up in Fairbanks appear to be getting the message that being completely and overtly unlikable whackos isn’t exactly winning strategy when there’s a center nervous about the status of the status quo. The candidate forums were described as oddly—perhaps even a little unnervingly—congenial and the campaigns generally stayed positive.

At least among the folks I talked with, there’s some extremely cautious optimism the shift toward decency on the campaign trail might just translate into some decency in office or, at the very least, some hope the conservatives won’t find themselves beholden to whoever’s screaming the loudest this week. Whether any of that pans out to be true, though, will only be seen in the coming months.

And, at the very least, it was a bunch of close elections and there’s always next year for things to swing back.

‘Not one to beat up on the federal government’

All candidates for Alaska’s U.S. Senate and U.S. House seats save for Republica Sarah Palin participated in the Anchorage Chamber of Commerce candidate forum today. It was a pretty by-the-books sort of forum with questions about the Port of Alaska (everyone’s a fan) and rolling back regulations to unleash the economy, etc. Here’s a couple of the more noteworthy quotes:

U.S. Rep. Mary Peltola on the need to have properly funded federal permitting offices, after her opponents railed against federal permitting’s existence as the key problem holding back Alaska’s economy rather than understaffed agencies: “I’m not one to beat up on the federal government. It seems like Alaska’s favorite sport, and I'm not sure why people run for a federal seat if they just want to make it sound like the federal government is out to get us. The federal government provides a third of Alaska’s budget. The federal government is a huge cornerstone of the Alaska economy, so I hate to rail against the federal government on every answer.”

U.S. Sen. Lisa Murkowski on Roe v. Wade, after opponent Kelly Tshibaka said that she doesn’t actually support banning all contraceptives but claimed that Murkowski supports “abortions for when the baby’s coming out the birth canal”: “We can’t take women’s rights, whether it relates to abortion or reproductive health care more largely. We can’t take them back 50 years. We can’t threaten a woman with the prospect that contraception … is now on the table as Kelly has now indicated in her own words in video that’s on the website out there that she would support doing. I support a woman’s right to choose, but I recognize that it is not without limitation. I’ve voted against partial-birth abortions and have voted against federal funding.”

Republican candidate Kelly Tshibaka abortion: “I would absolutely sign Lindsay Graham’s bill for a limit nationwide somewhere in the second trimester (it’s 15 weeks). That still allows for a choice for someone to decide before that. I also support women's access to birth control for women to have birth control without a prescription. ... My position on birth control is that we should have more access.”

Democratic U.S. Senate candidate Pat Chesbro on abortion: “A person’s reproductive choices belong to that person. They don’t belong to someone sitting somewhere else deciding for them.”

Tshibaka on why she supports the Alaska Constitutional Convention, the sole candidate at the forum to support the constitutional convention (U.S. House candidates were not asked): “I’m not at all afraid of Alaskans taking the opportunity to examine the constitution and then put proposals for the people. ... I am very afraid of the Legislature at the federal or the local level, just unilaterally amending the constitution through legislative action.”

Mary Peltola on Biden’s pardons of minor marijuana possessions: “Taking a page out of Congressman Young’s book, he was part of the Cannabis Caucus and part of a move to decriminalize marijuana and remove it from this schedule I drug categorization and I, too, would be very supportive of that. If you look at the growth of businesses in Alaska, one of the biggest growth sectors is marijuana. ... We should be shifting our attention away from criminalizing marijuana and more to the negative effects of fentanyl.”

Libertarian U.S. House candidate Chris Bye on an elected official’s role: “We’re just representatives we’re not decisionmakers.”

Peltola on the teacher shortage: “Not having a good retirement system makes it very unattractive to be in these fields.”

Republican Nick Begich on the teacher shortage: “We have to look seriously at the role the federal government has had in creating this environment where we’ve encouraged people not to work.”