UPDATED: Below is 2009 email correspondence between then Rep. Nancy Dahlstrom and the wife of retired Lt. Col. Kenneth Blaylock, regarding allegations made by Blaylock of corruption and abuse in the National Guard. Blaylock, the husband, is a 30-year National Guard veteran before he retired in 2012, has recently come forward to multiple media outlets about the Guard scandal, saying that he’s been trying for years to get people’s attention. His wife, whose name is redacted, is also a retired National Guard member.

The allegations that she sent to Dahlstrom involved then Brigadier General Thomas Katkus, and Colonels Catherine Jorgenson and Timothy DeHass. Katkus, promoted to adjutant general in 2009 shortly after Blaylock’s correspondence, was recently fired by Gov. Sean Parnell, followed by Jorgenson. Questions have arisen about DeHass.

After Dahlstrom left the Legislature, she served for a little more than a year as a special assistant for Gov. Sean Parnell for veterans affairs beginning in February 2012. During that year, she received numerous complaints about the National Guard, but handed them all off to either Mike Nizich, and in one case the FBI, she said.  Continue reading →

Dan Fagan and I moderated a gubernatorial forum sponsored by the Mat-Su Business Alliance on Friday at Evangelo’s in Wasilla. Before a crowd of about 250, Gov. Sean Parnell and his running mate Mayor Dan Sullivan, along with their opponents Bill Walker and Byron Mallott, fielded questions, mostly from the audience, for 90 minutes. It was a very engaged crowd and it was anything but boring. Because I was participating in the forum, I couldn’t take notes. However, here’s what I saw and the highlights as I remember them and taken from a recording I made:

• Bill Walker made it clear that if elected, DNR Commissioner Joe Balash would no longer be working as commissioner. It’s too bad. Balash has been a diligent public servant with a trove of knowledge about oil and gas issues. Over the years, he’s been sympathetic to Walker’s pipeline plans, particularly when he worked with Sarah Palin’s administration on AGIA. However, he recently wrote a scathing column about Walker and the Port Authority. Walker’s people fired back, and so it goes.

• Todd Palin sat at the Walker family/staff table. There were lots of Palinistas in the crowd.

• Gov. Parnell admitted that his appointment of the Californian to the State Assessment Review Board was a mistake.

• Walker said that all appointees on state boards and commissions would be state residents in his administration. (Doesn’t the state Aerospace Board have a seat specified for an astronaut?)

• Parnell, Sullivan and Walker are pro-life. Mallott is pro-choice.

Continue reading →

Americans for Tax Reform, a Grover Norquist group that has suddenly taken a keen interest in the governor’s race, sent out a press release today, accusing Independent candidate Bill Walker of calling for a state income tax in a 2004 Anchorage Daily News letter to the editor. The problem? Walker says that he didn’t write it. Walker’s lawyer, Scott Kendall, is demanding a retraction. In a letter (see below), Kendall called the claim “patently false and defamatory.”  As he pointed out, there are at least 20 Bill Walkers listed in the phone book. (Full disclosure: The letter was floated by me a few weeks ago. I asked Walker’s campaign about it then, and Walker’s  spokesperson, Lindsay Hobson, said that neither Bill, nor his wife Donna “recognized it as something he had written.”)

In a press release, Walker said that he has never supported an income tax and never “entertained this thought.” He said it was “another attempt by an Outside group to distract voters from Sean Parnell’s troubling fiscal record.”

Kendall said that he sent the letter after East Coast business hours, and after the decision makers had left for the day, which he called ‘unfortunate.” The press release is being spread around social media.

Here’s Kendall’s letter in full:  Continue reading →

• The final debates for the state were held yesterday and they were full of pent-up anger, frustration, and passion; i.e. fireworks were a plenty. The Dispatch has an article about the  Senate and the Congressional debate. Or, you could simply enjoy the actual footage of the debate with KSKA. Be sure to have popcorn ready, some parts are that good.

• Just in time for Halloween: If you were waiting for the ghost of Ted Stevens to make a presence in the Senate race, wait no more.

• The latest APOC records came in with candidates’ 7 day and 24 hour reports. Money reveals so much about a campaign, even without considering Independent Expenditures.

• Sabato’s Crystal Ball is now changing its stance on the gubernatorial race to “Toss-up” from “Leans Independent. “ To quote them, “an we be brutally frank? The governors’ races are really tough to call this year.” They are not the only ones. The Huffington Post also is predicting a Parnell win on Tuesday.

Continue reading →

I didn’t watch the last Senate debate of the season tonight between Sen. Mark Begich and GOP challenger Dan Sullivan sponsored by Alaska Public Media. But from the post-debate spin, I’d say that both campaigns think their guy won handily, and both of their campaigns thought that the other messed up.

According to the Democrats’ spin, GOP challenger Dan Sullivan avoided answering tough questions about the Patriot Act, tribal rights, the war in the Middle East, and campaign finance reform, to name a few. He did, however, say that banks were over-regulated, which will likely prove to be fodder for attack, particularly given campaign donations that he’s received from the financial industry.

But from what I can see on twitter and in breathless GOP press releases, one of the biggest mistakes of the evening was made by U.S. Sen. Mark Begich when he adamantly denied that he ran attack ads against the late Sen. Ted Stevens who he beat in 2008 after Stevens was convicted of corruption charges, and before those charges were thrown out because of corruption by the prosecutors.

Here’s the exchange between Sullivan and Begich on the ads:

Here’s a 2008 Begich ad that every Republican in the world is sending out:

Continue reading →

Here are the most recent fundraising numbers from state House and Senate races that I’ve been keeping an eye on. (Some, I’ll admit, a closer eye than others.) They include the mandatory 7 day reports (due seven days before the election) and daily reports thereon out until Election Day. It’s important to note that these numbers don’t include the hundreds of thousands of dollars that are being spent by Independent Expenditure groups on both sides.

Anchorage House District 15

• Democratic challenger Laurie Hummel: $103,596
• Republican Rep. Gabrielle LeDoux: $147,743

This one is going to be close, and is getting nasty. Hummel has characterized the National Guard scandal as partly the fault of LeDoux, who sat on the Military and Veterans Affairs Committee, which is totally unfair. In fact, it’s so unfair that it might warrant a response, considering that Hummel’s husband, Chad Parker, is a colonel in the National Guard, and as such, might have had some knowledge of the issues himself, which he seems to have kept to himself.

Anchorage House District 21

• Republican candidate Anand Dubey: $39,614
• Democratic candidate Matt Claman: $109,670

Continue reading →

Here’s the latest really good radio ad from Planned Parenthood Votes, which supports Sen. Mark Begich and continues to have a huge presence in Senate race. It’s organizing the largest get out the vote effort that PP Votes has ever done in Alaska. According to the group’s spokesperson, volunteers have already knocked on over 41,000 nearly 35,000 doors as of Thursday morning and made over 16,000 phone calls. About 50 PP supporters showed up to rally in front of last night’s KTUU Senate debate, where not a single women’s health care question was asked.

• Last night’s U.S. Senate debate was electric. It started out as inspiration to one of the most beautiful pictures of the night, but quickly fell into a winner-takes-all style verbal brawl. KTUU has the entire debate up on their website incase you missed it and are feeling left out of the water cooler banter, but the Free Beacon has a snippet of one of the most passionate parts of the evening. Too dramatic for your blood? The Brookings Institute has the key issues itemized in easy to follow bullet points.

• The Sullivan campaigned had Moore Information out of Portland (Not to be confused with Ivan Moore) conduct a poll and the results show him with a 4 point lead over Sen. Mark Begich with a 4% margin of error. The Hill points to early voting breakdown as one of the reasons for Sullivan’s surge. 35% Republicans, 19% Democrats and 44% Undeclared/Nonpartisan. What those numbers mean is anybody’s guess, but Moore Information is interpreting it as the extensive ground game by the Democratic Party not coming to fruition.

• My last midterm election piece for Politico before November 4 is up and ready for your digestion/dissection. Outsiders may think they know Alaska, but they don’t. We are unique, right down to the way we use Crisco.

• Steve Kornacki with Real Clear Politics explains what a win for U.S. Senator Mark Begich will mean for the future of the Senate. Both Begich and Sullivan could use this to bolster their case for support.

Continue reading →

Below is a summary from local pollster Ivan Moore’s most recent survey question–paid for by gubernatorial candidate Bill Walker– which shows Walker-Mallott up against Parnell-Sullivan by more than 9 percentage points, or by a whopping 13 percentage points, depending on what sample is used. Only about 5 percent are undecided. Others polls have the race much closer, and the undecided voters much greater. Moore has also been outspoken supportive of the formation of the ticket and has held a fundraiser at his house for Walker-Mallott.  Continue reading →

Contrary to other polls that have been recently released (see here, here, and here), an internal poll conducted by Moore Information, a Portland-based firm that’s polling for GOP Senate candidate Dan Sullivan’s campaign, has Sullivan holding a 4 percentage point lead over Sen. Mark Begich, 42 to 38 percent, while 12 percent are still undecided. Third-party candidates Mark Fish and Ted Gianoutsos each are getting 4 percent of the vote.

The poll surveyed 500 voters October 26-28, via cell phone and land line. The margin of error is plus or minus 4 percent.

The pollster for Moore, Hans Kaiser, has a long history of polling for Alaska Republicans, including for Sen. Lisa Murkowski and former Sen. Ted Stevens.

The crosstabs weren’t available, but Kaiser’s memo accompanying the poll said that Sullivan is leading among men 16 points and is trailing by 7 points with women. Kaiser also said that Sullivan has a significant advantage among those most interested in the race. According to Kaiser, the intensity is squaring with the partisan makeup of early voter turnout. Here’s the numbers he’s crunched from Alaska Division of Elections, as of 10.27:

• 35% GOP
• 18.5% Democrat
• 20.2% Non-Partisan
• 23.7% Undeclared
• 2.5% Other

It’s nice to be a woman right now. Every time we turn on the television or open up the computer, someone’s telling us how important we are to the political process, and how we must take charge of our own destiny and vote for the man who will best listen to us, not distort what we say, and look out for our interests. It’s great to be in such a position of power. It might, in fact, make some of us feel as important as, say, Sen. Lisa Murkowski, the most powerful female politician in the state. I mean, what she does and what she says matters, right?

Except, apparently, when it doesn’t, and except when a certain man decides that it doesn’t. I’m talking about Sen. Mark Begich’s staunch refusal to discontinue using a picture of him and Murkowski for campaign purposes. Murkowski’s office even sent a legal order and he still refused. When GOP challenger Dan Sullivan asked about it at a forum, Begich said that Murkowski “shouldn’t be ashamed” that the two of them work so well together and besides that, the only reason she wanted it taken down is because “she didn’t like the photo.” Continue reading →