Decisions, Decisions: Ranked-Choice Voting in the Last Frontier
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fun. Sign up now at ChumbaCasino.com. Sponsored by Chumba Casino. No purchase necessary. VGW Group. Void where prohibited by law. 18 plus. Terms and conditions apply. Welcome back to Beyond the Polls. This week, I explore the politics of our 49th state, Alaska, with political journalist James Brooks, which includes a deep look at the state's controversial ranked choice voting law. Let's dive in.

Well, a few weeks ago, we were talking about depressed Democrats. Boy, were Democrats down because Joe Biden looked like a goner. He looked like a loser. He wasn't. We weren't even sure whether Joe Biden was going to be able to articulate a case for himself. And the.

180 degree sea change that has happened since then is stunning. We've seen Kamala Harris shoot up in the polls. Her favorability ratings have skyrocketed. They're still not great. They're not over 50 percent in most of the polls. But she was down there with Joe in the high 30s and now she's up. And of course, now she's leading in most, not all, but most of the national and the swing state polls.

I think we can say that Kamala mania has set in or as she says, she and Tim Walz are campaigning with joy and for the future. Well, what can we learn about this? You know, is this mean game, set and match? Donald Trump is going to be retired to pasture and Mar-a-Lago is going to get its famous citizen back full time. Well, maybe.

And maybe not. What I want to do is talk to you about the last time a female leader was subbed in at the last minute to create election excitement and what the story from that is. Yes, I want to talk to you about Jacinda mania. Jacinda Ardern, the once

Prime Minister of New Zealand. She stepped down before last year's election, was a late sub in. She was somebody who had been made deputy leader of the New Zealand Labour Party in March of 2017.

But on August 1st, Andrew Little, the leader of the Labor Party, stepped down. Why did he step down? Well, he stepped down because there was an election at the end of September and the Labor Party was polling at 24 percent in the polls. They were over 20 points behind the governing national party. And Little had been utterly unable to reverse that.

the party's dismal fortunes. In fact, they had declined somewhat since the beginning of the year and upstepped the 36-year-old single Jacinda Ardern. I don't think anybody thought that Jacinda Ardern was going to be the next prime minister.

There's no example in New Zealand history where somebody came and took a moribund party in basically seven and a half weeks to bring them to victory. But boy, did that almost happen. By a week of her coming on board, having a young, single, modern, articulate woman cut the national lead in half. By the end of four weeks, Ardern had labor in the lead.

They called it Jacinda mania because people were crazy about her. She was very adept on communication. She was very adept on social media. And remember, this was seven years ago when people were just learning about how to use social media for.

political purposes. One of the things her team did that I was following, she had this cat named Paddles. And Paddles the cat had her own Twitter handle and was tweeting away and doing fun things, which, of course, attracted attention to her. Paddles sadly passed away in an accident, auto accident after the election. So you'll have to find Paddles in the archives now. But she was just talked about. It was Jacinda, Jacinda, Jacinda,

Now, we know she became prime minister, so clearly she won the election.

Well, actually, she didn't. And that's the story that I want to tell is that what happened was, yes, after four weeks, labor was in the lead. Yes, after four weeks, she had gone taking her party from 24 percent in the polls to somewhere in the low 40s. It was a stunning turnaround. But the thing is, people didn't vote in the first week of September. People voted on September, I believe, was 23rd. And in that three weeks, what happened was she made an unforced error and national pounced.

The unforced error was that she said she made what's called a captain's call. Now, in the parlance of parliamentary parties, that means unconsulted with her members in cabinet or the party leaders. But as the leader, she said, we're going to do this. And what she said they were going to do was put in a tax policy committee to study revenue sources.

Didn't commit to anything. Didn't commit to any sort of specific policy. But since labor had gone in to the last few elections saying that they would institute a capital gains tax, New Zealand has no capital gains tax on anything so long as you reinvest the profits in New Zealand.

People thought, well, what this means is she's going to institute the capital gains tax. She's dodging. She's weaving. And, of course, that's what National argued, is that who knows what tax-friendly labor can do with this tax thing, this tax commission. And people who were in the center who might have been attracted to her but had voted to National before began to waver.

And then you had the attacks. Could you trust somebody that young? Could you trust somebody who had never had a significant leadership experience? Again, she had never been on the

the crossbench. She had never been the person who had extensive experience leading shadow government. She had only been leader since August, sometime between August 1st and August 8th. So they were saying, how can she run foreign affairs? How can she run the economy? How can she do this? And what that began to do was puncture the bubble, burst the balloon of Jacinda Mania. She didn't come crashing down.

You know, she was obviously somebody who re-energized the center-left voter who was interested in voting center-left and a number of centrist voters. But what happened was it wasn't that close in the end that National won the election with 44, 45 percent of the vote to Labor's 37 percent of the vote. If this had been America with the first-past-the-post system, Jacinda Ardern would have been a successful leader

who rejuvenated her party, but came in second and formed opposition. The reason she became prime minister is because New Zealand has a proportional representation system and national did not win 50% of the votes. So she was able to put together a coalition with the Greens and with an anti-immigrant populist party called New Zealand First and become prime minister through the back door. So what can we learn from this? First of all, mania's

are short-lived in politics. We should expect Kamala Mania to continue for a little while longer. But once Labor Day kicks in, it starts to get serious. And once Labor Day kicks in, she will have made gains and a lot of them won't be taken back. But there's going to be people who went with the flow who now want to know, is she the person or is she not the person? And that's where a competent Republican slash Trump campaign can step in.

We don't know whether Trump will be competent. Clearly, he has not inspired people in his own party over the last couple of weeks with the way that he has reacted to this. But on the other hand, just as we can expect that homilomania won't continue forever, we should probably expect that Trump's difficulty in coming to grasp with the change in Challenger won't last forever.

And we should begin to see something that approaches a more disciplined campaign series of attacks from him. And gosh knows there's a lot of things that she can be attacked on. You know, you can see a lot of efforts by the Harris campaign to what we call in the business inoculate herself. You know, she's running ads talking about being tough on the border because they know that's a weakness for them. She's talking about bringing inflation down because they know that's a weakness for them.

that a lot of the most, she's running away from a lot of the policies she advocated for when she ran for president in 2019 because she knows that they're too far left for the American center. She's running away from those.

Can Trump make those things stick despite what she's doing to inoculate herself? We don't know. But we also don't know whether she'll be successful. The fact is, what Jacinda Mania tells us is that there's only so much that enthusiasm and personality can bring. At some point, the undecided voter, the voter in the center who actually decides elections, begins to focus a little more centrally. It would be one thing if she were subbed in with two weeks to go, then the

personality bubble can carry you over the line. She was subbed in with three months to go. And what that means is that the Democrats are in a much stronger position than they were before her entry in the race, the Democrats and her look to be in a good position. But we should not assume that

Past performance equals future performance or whatever it is those investment agencies always warn you about. Yes, we got 15 percent a year for the last 30 years, but that doesn't mean we'll get you 15 percent. Things can change in the future. And what we should know is that campaigns matter. The campaign is going to start in earnest after Labor Day. And what the lesson of Jacinda Ardern teaches us is sometimes what goes up quickly also comes down quickly.

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Well, we don't usually think about Alaska and national politics because in the presidential races and the Senate races, it tends to be relatively Republican, but it actually has some of the most fascinating politics in the country. And here to help us understand and unpack what's going on up there right now in the sunny, warm period of the year is James Brooks, state government reporter for the Alaska Beacon, where he is stationed in Juneau. James, welcome to Beyond the Polls. Thanks for having me.

Every Tuesday, a couple of times on third once on Thursday, because that's when Tennessee votes, I live tweet what I call primary night in America where I analyze all the different primaries. And for most of them, it's one of two things. You either have a traditional vote.

party primary where the winner, either in a runoff or in a first-past-the-post situation, goes on to represent their party. Or like California or Washington, you have a top two where top two go on regardless of party. Alaska has something entirely unique. Can you explain what's going to go on next Tuesday in Alaska and why party primaries are conducted the way that they are?

You mentioned those top two primaries that sometimes called jungle primaries and Alaska has a top four primary. We call it the tundra primary and because it's wide open, you get for the top four vote getters, regardless of political party head on from.

the filing period onto the general election in November. And so we're interested means that there's not usually more than four candidates in legislative races, but when it comes to the U S house race, it means it's wide open and you'll have Ford picks in the general. And, uh, 2020, uh, 20, I believe it was, it was a 2020 or 2022 when it was first used. Um,

So it passed in 2020. It was introduced by a ballot measure, passed narrowly by half a percentage point. And then 2022 was the first year that it was used. And actually, Congressman Don Young, the longtime dean of the House, longest serving Republican at the time, died suddenly. And so it was used in a special election that year. It happened even quicker than everybody thought.

They had tons of candidates in that race, including, I believe, somebody was wasn't there somebody named Santa Claus or something like that in the race? Absolutely. Santa Claus is the as you might expect, or maybe not. He's the reliable socialist in the state. Well, yeah, I guess if he's given away presents every Christmas, he's want to tax us the rest of the year to pay for his for his hobby.

But so you mentioned a ballot initiative and I want to get on to what's going to be happening. But Alaska did have the traditional first past the post party primary system until this initiative. Who was behind it and why the change?

So we saw a lot of national centrist groups come into the state and advertise pretty heavily for this. The ballot initiative itself was written by a pair of Alaskan attorneys with long experience in politics. But it got a ton of support from people who like ranked choice voting, people who hope

that it'll drive politics towards the center. And the ballot initiative as it was written had three parts. Number one was this open primary, this top four primary. Number two was ranked choice voting in the general election. So if among those four people, somebody gets over 50% of the vote in the general election, they automatically win.

If no one gets above 50% of the vote, then you have sequential rounds of elimination. The lowest person, the person with the fewest votes gets eliminated. The people who voted for that person as their first choice, well, their votes now go to their second choice. There's a retabulation. We see if anybody's above 50%. And that continues until you're down to two candidates.

And then the third part was a dark money disclosure. Now, I'm sure all your listeners are familiar with Citizens United. This behind this part of the initiative was the idea that, well, contributions can't be limited, but they can be disclosed. There can be a disclosure requirement. So if you're contributing to one of these groups that's involved in politics, it's making third party contributions.

the group that has to disclose the true source of where they're getting their money for that contribution. Right. So if I ran a group that was Alaskans for truth, goodness, and the American way. And puppies too. You might throw that in there. I would have to disclose that my money actually came from the Prince of Darkness address, Hades, the netherworld. Exactly.

So you mentioned ranked choice voting, and that was where I wanted to go next. In the general election, you have...

Not one vote. You kind of have one vote, but in up to four parts that you have the option, as I understand it, not the requirement, but the option of ranking these candidates in the order of your preference, one, two, three and four. How does that look on the ballot and how have people been able to adapt to that rather significant change to the traditional way of voting in the United States?

Yeah, when you open the ballot, what you see is instead of lines signify with little circles saying your vote will go for this candidate, what you have is a grid. So you'll have the listing of the four candidates plus one more line for a write-in and there'll be five ovals to the right of that. And you shade in the one that's farthest left for your first choice, then the second

from the left as your second choice and so on. And you can do up to five of those. Some people do what's called bullet voting. They just pick one candidate and say, that's it. But if that candidate gets eliminated, their vote is what's called exhausted. It's as if they didn't vote for that race at all because their vote's been exhausted. And what we saw was that in

Especially in that first special election, there were a fair number of people that wouldn't use all of their rankings. They either didn't like their subsequent choices or didn't want to use them. And so we saw a fair number of what were called exhausted ballots.

And the 50 percent requirement does not refer to all of the ballots in the first tabulation refers to 50 percent of the final amount. So if you exhaust your ballot, it doesn't even count in the denominator to get to 50 percent. It really is as if you didn't vote at all in determining who wins. Correct.

Now, let's get on to the primary because I want to come back to the effort to repeal ranked choice voting, which is going on at the end of our discussion. But here in Washington, D.C., we're, of course, focused on national races and you've got a humdinger going on for the U.S. House. Tell us a little bit about that.

Right. Even though Alaska is a Republican state, it's currently represented by a Democrat, Mary Peltola, the first Alaska native elected to Congress, first from Alaska as well. And by Alaska native, you don't mean somebody who was born and raised there. You mean something else. Correct. The indigenous population of the state. Right.

And she was elected during that special election to replace Don Young. She was one of originally 48 candidates, and she was not initially thought of as the frontrunner. But she came out of that first top four primary as one of the leaders. And what was really interesting was

A Republican, a lot of your listeners might know, Sarah Palin was one of the finalists as well, as was Nick Bigich, another Republican. But what happened was there were a lot of Republicans who were very passionate about Sarah Palin and only Sarah Palin. And there were a lot of Republicans who absolutely detested Sarah Palin and would not vote for her no matter what.

And so that effectively broke the ranked choice system. You might think that Republicans would rank another Republican as second. And we saw some of that, but it wasn't enough to overcome Peltola's lead. We saw because Begich finished third in those rankings, his voters

A lot of them did rank Sarah Palin next, but a significant number, a decisive number, chose either not to rank anybody or chose Peltola instead of Sarah Palin. And in both the special election and the regular election in November, that was decisive. And so Peltola is now one of just a handful of Democrats in representing districts that also voted for Donald Trump in 2020-21.

Now, earlier this year, I highlighted one of her ads in my ad of the week segment. It was one, I think, where she was talking about fisheries. And she just had a series of really interesting television ads that highlight her cross or attempt to highlight a cross-partisan appeal, focusing on local issues rather than national issues. And most people seem to think

that she has, if not a lock, certainly an edge, which one wouldn't expect in a Republican state like this. What explains her appeal? You can say she got elected because she was the not Sarah Palin candidate, but she seems to have a positive appeal now. Is that right? And if so, what is behind it?

So I think there's a variety of factors. During the election two years ago, both elections, she ran a positive campaign. She did not engage in negative campaigning. The two Republicans did attack each other fairly strongly. Sarah Palin was cordial to her. Nick Bagich was cordial to her. And so you didn't see a lot of hard punching in the campaigns. And I haven't seen that again this time around.

She is a Democrat, but she's closer to a blue dog Democrat. She is very pro oil drilling, pro guns, anti-gun control. And she's tended to focus on issues that have a lot of cross partisan appeal here in the state. But you pointed out the fisheries issue. That's something that has a lot of importance to Republicans, Democrats alike, a lot of concerns about that.

She's also focused on cost of living issues, the pending merger between Albertsons and Safeway, for example, that a lot of consumers in Alaska are concerned about how that will drive up grocery prices in the state. So she's been spending a lot of time on that. And since you're so far north, you've got high prices because most of your stuff is pretty imported over pretty large distances to begin with.

Right. Only 2% of the produce, the food consumed in the state actually comes from the state.

Although I have to say, when I visited there 2020 doing research into the young races, as well as the recall of Governor Dunleavy, I walked into one person's house for dinner one night and one of the people in the household was busy skinning a moose that he had just shot. So I know that that household was consuming some local produce and

You know, one of the things that's interesting because this is this way is that you've got this two strong Republicans going at it. And there's not necessarily going to be a resolution to this in the primary. Who are the Republicans and how are they profiling vis-a-vis one another?

Yeah, this time around, we've got Nick Bagich coming back again for 2024. He had run in 2022 unsuccessfully. We also have the state's lieutenant governor, Nancy Dahlstrom, running. And then there's a whole constellation of other people vying for that fourth spot. We presume that Peltola is going to be in the top four as well.

But Begich has been more towards the Freedom Caucus. He's got a lot of local support from local Republicans. Dahlstrom has the support of the governor as well as Donald Trump's endorsement. And she has a lot of backing from, I don't know how, if you would call it the mainstream, the leadership of the Republican caucus in the House. But she has their endorsement and support as well.

Now, is she using the Trump endorsement in television ads or is she does she have enough money to go up on television? Television is pretty cheap here in the state. But at this point, she has been using the Trump endorsement. I have seen it out there.

Her main problem has been that a lot of the local while the state state party hasn't made an official endorsement. A lot of the district parties, the city groups, the women's groups have been, but they've been endorsing baggage. And so she's been out there and campaigning pretty hard. But both of the Republicans are trailing by fairly large margins in terms of fundraising against Peltola.

And I'd expect to see that difference start to show up in the general election. Now, Begich has said that he will drop out if he finishes third. At least that's what's been reported back here. Is he still saying that? And do you think he'll actually follow through if he does?

And that's something we can talk about with regard to the top four primary, because there's plenty of Republicans who don't like the idea of ranked choice voting. The top four primary, they think, hey, we should the party should be allowed to pick one candidate. That candidate should be the only Republican in the race. And anything else is splitting the votes, splitting the party. Their worry is about a repeat of 2022. The feeling is that

the current system split Republican votes and allowed Peltola to get elected. And, and,

I have some disagreements with that. There's some truth to that, some not. But the idea is that if and it's not just in the U.S. House race. We've seen these pledges in legislative races as well. The idea that if a Republican finishes third, they pledge to withdraw and throw their support behind the Republican who finished first or second in the primary.

The question is, will that work? Because in the U.S. House race, you have 12 candidates. If somebody withdraws based on a new Alaska Supreme Court decision that came out after the 2022 race, the division of elections has to fill that spot with the person who finished fifth or below.

Yeah, because somebody finished fourth in the 2022 race and then dropped out. I think it was Al Gross who was thought to be the favorite on the non-Republican side going into the race. And nobody filled it. So there were only three people who were going in.

Correct. And the Alaska Supreme Court subsequently ruled that that was a mistake. The division of elections should have filled that. And that would have resulted in a completely different race because the number five finisher was a Republican who had wide cross party appeal, but not as much with with the party itself. Now, Dahlstrom has not pledged to drop out if she finishes third.

Correct. Correct. And I asked her about it just the other week, and she said she has no plans that this is the system that's in place right now. This is what the law is. So one of the things that we've been hearing about is that because of this system, there are progressive groups that are advertising trying to get.

A third Republican to finish for that. They're basically saying Republicans should support baggage or baggage and Dahlstrom and somebody else. I forget the person's name. Why would you want as a progressive to have three Democrats, Republicans and Mary Peltola as your final four?

It's because what we talked about earlier with exhausted ballots, the idea is that if you have multiple Republicans in the race, you can still get split the ticket effectively, even with ranked choice voting, because Republicans are more likely to bully vote, to pick just one candidate. And the Republican they seem to be trying to get into fourth place, Jerry Hikas, is a

extremely conservative religious person, born again Christian. I had a great conversation with him about his conversion experience coming during the Trans-Alaska Pipeline boom. He was a lounge singer who went to a baptism. Remarkable story, but I'll leave it at that. But extremely against abortion, has the type of evangelical beliefs that you might expect from a conservative Christian.

And so getting him in would be putting in a candidate to the right of both Begich and Dahlstrom might attract votes, might attract people who would bullet vote. And so if they vote for him and no one else, he gets dropped out in the first round of ranked choice tabulation. That's fewer Republican votes in the system, increases the chances that Mary Peltola wins in the end.

This sort of games playing probably merely exacerbates conservatives' distaste, anger, fury, or however you have it about this ranked choice voting system.

How do you there is an initiative that's going to be on the ballot that will try to repeal this? How does that look? What would it do specifically? Would it repeal all three of these things that the initial initiative put in? And does it look like it might pass?

So right now it's been approved. It has the signatures it needed. It's been upheld by a lower court. The Alaska Supreme Court still has to rule on it. But at this point, it looks as though they're going to rule in favor of it being on the ballot in November. We haven't seen the campaigns on this kick into high gear yet. The pro-repeal campaign,

had some stumbles, some unforced errors early on. But they have a lot of enthusiasm from conservatives, particularly religious conservatives who feel disadvantaged, disenfranchised by ranked choice voting for the reasons that you mentioned earlier. And so the people against the

repeal who want to keep the system have been testing out some ads here in the early going, working on their polling to hone their campaign. And they've got quite a bit of money to spend on this. And I expect to see a lot of ads promoting the open primaries aspect of the system in the coming months.

And I think it'll be another close race in 2020. Installing it was done by half a percentage point. I think right now where I'm seeing it, it's going to be another close race. Is there any public polling that either has come out either with respect to a hypothetical vote on this initiative or on the House race?

No, unfortunately not. There's extremely limited public polling in Alaska, even on a good day. And it tends to be extremely varied. And I...

I don't put a lot of stock in it, unfortunately, especially because response rates have really plummeted just as they have across the country. And you've got such a difficult state to poll, too. You know, you've got 10 to 15 percent of your population effectively living, if not off the grid, close to off the grid in all of these rural communities, particularly the native communities. You have a transient population as well. You know, people who can vote, but people who may not be there all year.

Who is the one pollster? Is there a pollster native to Alaska who you think might be more accurate than others? Or should we take all Alaska polls this cycle with a grain of salt? I tend to take all of them with a grain of salt. I...

do like rasmussen but um but i i mean it's it's been really hit or miss until you get to within a month or so of the elect of the general election and especially within a few weeks

Now, Alaska has extensive mail voting. So two things about both primary night and general election night. My understanding is you'll have a lot of votes released early. Your polls will close at midnight Eastern time because they're the early votes. But then you have like a 10 or a 12 day period when votes can be coming in, probably because of this people, you know, who knows how long mail is going to take from the native community off on some

barren peninsula on the Bering Strait. So when do we think we'll know something that is meaningful, either in the primary coming up or in the general election?

So the timeline is for the primary, 10 days after election day is your final unofficial tally, and then you'll get the certification after that. You have 10 days for all those mail ballots to come in after election day, as long as they were postmarked on or before election day. And then for the general, it's 15 days. Now, the turnout, the number of ballots coming in really drops off.

after about 10 days. So there's not as many ballots. But the key thing here, and this is something that Alaska does that no other, as far as I can tell, ranked choice voting system, municipal or state, anywhere in the country does, is that they wait until every ballot is in to do the ranked choice tabulation. So we'll have election day and then 15, but that'll only give us first choice votes.

And then 15 days later, we'll have tabulation day where we'll find out who's actually won in cases where nobody has 50 percent of the vote. Yeah. And for those of us who are uber nerds like I was two years ago, I actually tuned into the live simulcast on the Internet of tabulation day when I forget whether it's the head of the divisions of election. Just let's push the button. Exactly. Live for everybody. Yeah.

Yeah, and behind that camera, like they had a camera pointed at the screen and pointed at the Division of Elections director. And then behind that camera was where all of us reporters standing at the windows looking into that room, like watching the same thing, watching them film it. So it was quite a moment.

And what they did, it said it was kind of like hermetically sealed from non-election officials when the calculation was being done. Well, in the office, they they put it in the review room. So where where all the ballots are reviewed. So we couldn't go in there. But but, yeah, we were behind a pane of glass.

Now, I usually don't talk about state legislative races on this show, but Alaska remains one of the most interesting states across the board, in part because it's a red state at one level. But you have had cross-partisan coalitions governing one or the other of the two state houses for the last few years.

which has stymied the attempts of conservatives to do more budget cutting, which is something that they've wanted to do. Where does this cross-partisan alliance stand right now? And is there a chance that you might actually have full Republican control of both chambers and by full Republican control, I mean,

Without an independent or Democrat either joining with a dissident group of Republicans or vice versa, dissident Republicans joining with the Democrats and the independents in the caucus. Yeah. For folks who aren't familiar right now, there's a conservative Republican governor and the state Senate is a coalition of Democrats.

Democrats and Republicans in a super majority. There's only three Republicans who are not members of that. Of the 20 members of the Senate, 17 are in this super majority. And it's pretty well balanced. They said, we're not going to do any controversial issues. So no transgender stuff or abortion issues or anything along those lines. Also, no taxes. And then in the House...

It's a predominantly Republican coalition with the balance held by four rural Democrats who joined or I should say Democrats and independents who joined that Republican group. Now, a couple of them represented native communities, if I remember. Yeah, it's what's called the Bush caucus.

And it's rural, independents, Democrats. And this year was one Republican, I should say, instead of four Democrats and independents. So it was three in one. But that Bush caucus typically holds the balance or it can when there's no super majority in play. And so it was a predominantly Republican majority, but it was still a coalition government in the House.

Does it look likely to continue? I mean, if you have a Republican majority, but three of them can't get along with the others, and hence why you have this super majority in the Senate, is there a chance that you might actually get Republicans all on the same page? Or does it look like we're going to continue in one or the other house with this cross-partisan coalition?

In the Senate, I think it would be a stretch to get to a purely Republican majority or one that is more conservative. I think the odds of that are much lower than they are in the House. In the House, though, there's been candidates changing parties. There's been candidates dropping out. Lots of switches, but it seems...

Like the most likely scenario is a hold serve effectively where the balance doesn't change significantly or at all. The problem is that it's so the divisor is so close that even one or two seats flipping unexpectedly would result in a situation where you have a handful of moderate Republicans joining the

Democrats and independents to have a majority coalition over there. And that had been the case until this most recent legislature. Well, for a state that's so far away, you have politics that I wish was a lot closer because people would

learn a lot about how parties can fight and also get along if they understood the Alaska way, for lack of a better phrase. Not that it particularly delights hard partisans of either side, but there's a lot, presumably fewer of those on the Democratic side than there are on the Republican side. That's often what we hear here is all the conservatives in Alaska upset that they don't actually run a conservative state.

Well, and it's interesting because I think outside Alaska, you hear the phrase that Democrats argue, Republicans get in line. But here in Alaska, the Republicans are saying, well, the Democrats get in line, but we all argue among ourselves. So you effectively have Republicans

to Republican parties. You have the business first Republicans who will who are like, please leave social issues alone, keep funding as it is. We'll just cut the dividend to balance the budget. And you have social conservative Republicans who are saying lots of money for the permanent fund dividend, cut services and yes to social issues. And they don't get along.

For non-Alaskans, the permanent fund dividend is the check that each Alaskan gets each year from the oil money. It's the only place where not only do you not pay income or state sales taxes, but you get a check every year. But that's been getting cut with the low oil production. Well, it's actually investment returns now anymore. Investment returns are what drives everything. Now, Alaska is not so much an oil state anymore as it is an investment state. I mean...

The investments from the $80 billion trust fund, the proceeds from that pay for two-thirds of the state's general purpose revenue every year and most of the permanent fund dividend. So it's interesting. I guess Alaskans must be hoping they went big in NVIDIA and the Great Seven and got some money from the tech runoff.

Yeah, or if you keep shopping at your Washington, D.C. malls, quite a few of them are owned by the Alaska Permanent Fund. So keep shopping at those malls. Wow, I'll have to look into it. I've got some friends who are Alaskans out here, and I'll say, hey, we've got to support all of our friends out in the Mat-Su Valley and the Kenai Peninsula. James and Juno need something to be able to afford when those grocery prices at the Safeway Albertsons go through the roof.

Well, thank you very much for an enlightening discussion of what's going on up there and what's at stake. Where can my listeners follow your work? So you can find me at alaskabeacon.com, and my work is also published on the Anchorage Daily News and all the other newspapers here in the state. So if you're a subscriber to the Chilkat Valley News in Haines, you can find me there, or the Wrangell Sentinel in Wrangell, you can find me there as well.

Well, I think my listeners are known for some of their nerdy and deep in the weeds interests. But if any of you are actually subscribers to the Chilcot or the Wrangle Paper, shoot me a line. But it's wonderful to have you on. Do you have an ex or social media presence?

I don't use Twitter or X anymore. You can find me on Blue Sky at Alaska, appropriately enough, and on Mastodon as well as AK underscore OK.

because Alaska is okay. There we go. Well, on that note, thank you for telling all of us that Alaska is okay, even with rank choice voting. And I look forward to having you back on Beyond the Polls. Thank you.

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Your chance to redeem real prizes is just a spin away. Care to join me? Sponsored by Chumba Casino. No purchase necessary. VGW Group. Void where prohibited by law. 18 plus. Terms and conditions apply. In most of the targeted Senate races, the Democratic incumbent has the name ID advantage. That is to say they've been in office for a while. More people who are voting know who they are.

and they tend to look on them moderately favorably, the Republican is the candidate who is shooting uphill, trying to define themselves. And that's one reason why Democrats tend to lead in most of these races. Arizona is the one targeted Senate race where that's not the case. Republican Kari Lake is

Gained notoriety as a failed close loser, but still a failed candidate for governor last time. And as a notable fan of Donald Trump and as a notable election denier, not just somebody who said that Trump's election had been stolen, but somebody who had said and continues to say that her election had been stolen. That means that she goes into the race not only with a high degree of voter name ID, higher than her Democratic appointees,

Representative Ruben Gallego, but a high negative name ID. People who know her don't always like her because of what she's done in the past. That's what this ad is focusing on. And I want you to hear what the Democratic Senatorial Committee is telling Arizonans about Carrie Lake. Let's listen. Carrie Lake's plan to get elected is to divide Arizona.

She's pushing divisive policies, too, like banning abortion, even in cases of rape and incest, and putting cameras in schools to police what's being taught. She's even endorsed by white supremacists and Holocaust deniers. Carrie Lake.

Well, I think you can immediately see what they're trying to do here. They're trying to reinforce the sense among the key voters in this election, the moderate Republicans who voted for people like Representative Dave Schweikert and Representative Juan Siskamani or State Treasurer Kimberly Yee, people who voted for John McCain, people who voted for Governor Doug

Doug Ducey, but voted for Democrats at the presidential and the senatorial and the gubernatorial level because they felt that the Republican nominees in 2016, in 2018, 2020 and 2022 were too negative, too extreme, not the sort of Republicans they like. You hear it right at the

The attack. This is Carrie Lake herself that she in her last rally at the gubernatorial campaign said what you heard on the ad. She said that McCain supporters should get the hell out.

And this is said to be one of the reasons why she lost is that people who were McCain Republicans decided if you don't want me, I don't want you. So they start the ad with a picture of her saying that and her own voice, again, reinforced with words on the screen that say Carrie Lake's tells McCain supporters get the hell out. But then they focus on.

The issues. It's not just that she's telling the key voters in the election that she doesn't want them. They give these voters current reasons to continue to dislike her. And they don't talk about election tonight. They talk about abortion. That's an issue that unites the 25 to 33 percent of Republicans who are pro-choice.

many of whom are those moderate McCain Republicans who've been crossing over, that Carrie Lake disagrees with them. In fact, while she has run away from past views, she has in the past said exactly what Republicans or what Democrats say she says there about no exceptions for rape and incest.

But then you get to the interesting thing, which is the last attack where they talked about even been endorsed by white supremacists and Holocaust deniers. In the background, she had a rally this year where in the background is the Confederate flag. And so what you have is pictures of Carrie Lake at that rally with the Confederate flag in the background.

And the Holocaust deniers is not just meant to appeal to the moderate Republican or the person who thinks that associating with these people is completely beyond the pale. The Jewish vote is not inconsiderable, which is say it is roughly in the national average in Arizona, two to four percent. If you can get Jewish Republicans angry as well or Jewish independents angry,

This is a very close election, a very close state. You can add to the sort of person who might say this is beyond the pale, even if they're not a McCain Republican. This is an effective negative ad that targets the key demographics, uses her own words, using

pictures of her own actions that focuses on key issues and key statements that these voters will find distasteful. That increases the chance that they might vote for Trump at the top of the ticket. They might vote for a Republican for Congress, but it increases the chance that they won't vote for Carrie Lake. And that's why it's this week's Out of the Week.

Join me next week as I'll be speaking with Jeff Rowe, one of our most prominent political consultants today, about how modern campaigns are run and how they've changed over the last decade or two. Until then, let's reach for the stars together as we journey beyond the pole. With Lucky Land Slots, you can get lucky just about anywhere.

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