Gov. elect Bill Walker and Lt. Gov. elect Byron Mallott released a joint statement, following a touching statement by Gov. Sean Parnell conceding the race. Neither Walker nor Mallott spent any time praising Parnell for his six years in office, but the tone of the response isn’t a divisive one. Other politicos and those working for them should take note: 

“I met with Governor Parnell this morning. The tone of the meeting was very cordial and focused on ensuring that Alaskans’ interests are protected and served first in the weeks and months that lie ahead. We also recognized the dedicated effort of our respective campaigns and expressed tremendous gratitude for our families and volunteers. This evening, Governor Parnell graciously conceded the race in order to facilitate a smooth and efficient transition process.”

Lt. Governor-elect, Byron Mallott added: “I am grateful to Governor Parnell and Mayor Sullivan for allowing the transition process to proceed. Bill and I have a lot of work ahead of us. The graceful gesture of the Parnell Sullivan team signals to all Alaskans that it is time to rise together and work as one toward a vibrant and productive future for our state.”

On Friday night, the AP called the governor’s race for Bill Walker. Sitting Gov. Sean Parnell has yet to concede, though he’s down about 4,600 votes, which he won’t be able to make up with the ballots remaining.

Parnell was the lieutenant governor under Sarah Palin. She left her seat to him when she resigned in 2009, and he immediately brought calm to an office that under Palin, was a mess. He won in his own right in 2010, handily beating both Bill Walker and Ralph Samuels in the primary, and Democrat Ethan Berkowitz in the general.

Those who knew him and worked closely with him knew him to be an honest, ethical governor and a good man. And although he didn’t always find a way to adequately trumpet them, Parnell had some major successes. He was able to pass oil tax reform, which, as the price of oil has continued to fall, looks increasingly wise. Say what you want about the compromises he had to make for it, we’re closer to getting a natural gas pipeline built than we’ve ever been. The North Slope is full of new activity and there’s a natural gas renaissance happening in the Cook Inlet. Fisheries groups seem fairly well satisfied. Things have been relatively quiet on the hunting front, which is a near-miracle. But probably his greatest achievement Continue reading →

The election tally isn’t complete, and already people are speculating on 2016, when Sen. Lisa Murkowski will be up for re-election. The National Journal quoted Jim Lottsfeldt, long-time friend of Mark Begich and the person who headed up the pro-Begich super-PAC, as saying that Begich is already considering running against Murkowski, who will likely see a challenger on her right in the 2016 primary. Here’s Lottsfeldt:

“He is already plotting. I’ve spoken with him and he hasn’t made up his mind, but if he doesn’t prevail he’s certainly considering his options in 2016.” (Begich’s campaign declined to comment on the senator’s future plans.)

Perhaps not coincidentally, Murkowski is making some changes to her staff. Althea St. Martin, from Murkowski’s Fairbanks office, is retiring. Former Murkowski and Ted Stevens staffer Jimmy Parrish will be taking her place. Also, staffer Sonia Henrick is moving from Ketchikan to Anchorage, to “enhance my work in the entire Southcentral region,” Murkowski said in a press release. The release indicates that more changes might be in the works.

Clarification: The piece originally said that according to Lottsfeldt, Begich was plotting against Murkowski. Lottsfeldt said that wasn’t true to what he said, which was that Begich is generally plotting his future in 2016, which could include a run against Murkowski or Rep. Don Young. It might seem a small distinction, but it’s a distinction and an important one.

• Keystone is all the buzz, and President Obama’s actions on the pipeline will set the direction and tone of future Executive/Congressional relationships. If he signs onto the bill at the behest of Sen. Mary Landrieu (D-LA) and other red state Dems, he’ll get flack from his base. If he doesn’t, the 2015 Senate will have enough votes to override a presidential veto, per The Hill. As for Keystone’s meaning to Alaska, Senator-elect Dan Sullivan’s answer on this issue while on the Greta Van Susteren was interesting. Sullivan might want to read this article from the Fiscal Times that also explains how current oil prices could spell death for Keystone.

• If the Unity Ticket does prevail in the Alaska gubernatorial race, Sabato’s Crystal Ball reminds everyone that our state will be the only one this election cycle that kicked out both an incumbent governor and senator.

• Taxes got Capone and it looks like Campaign Disclosures is going to get Charlo (F*%k it! I quit) Greene. The Dispatch has the lowdown on what fines APOC has smacked Greene with relating to her fundraising activities for the Alaska Cannabis Club. Here’s a little advice to those that work in the gray area of the law: hire an accountant.

• Mark Begich hasn’t done it himself, nor does it appear that the Alaska Democratic Party will do it, so it appears that others in the Senate will admit that he lost. Here’s Sen. Mary Landrieu conceding on his behalf. It’s certainly not the way Uncle Ted did it. But there is still time left for beautiful speeches before Christmas break.

• It seems that Vice President Joe Biden has once again saved President Obama. This time, from just the idea of impeachment because as Rep. Trey Gowdy (R-S.C.) told The Hill when asked about impeaching the president: “Have you met Joe Biden?”

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Here’s GOP Senator-elect Dan Sullivan on Greta Van Susteren, who asks an interesting question about whether or not Keystone Pipeline will lower the price of oil and cut into Alaska’s coffers:

Either this is a new idea for Sullivan, or he wasn’t prepared for the question. I remember asking Sen. Lisa Murkowski’s spokesperson a while back about how Keystone would affect Alaska, and the answer was along the lines of what’s good for the country is good for Alaska, which is a pretty good answer. But still, it might sting if and when that oil comes down Keystone. Even pre-Keystone, the price of oil is tumbling. On Thursday, crude oil traded for less than $75 a barrel for the first time in more than four years. And it looks like the tumble will continue given that Saudi Arabia, increasingly nervous about the shale oil boom in the U.S, is refusing to cut production. In other words, things aren’t looking good for Alaska.

This is from a comment by Lynn Willis on the subject: Continue reading →

We hear a lot about and learn a lot about candidates during an election cycle. Frankly, it can be argued that we can sometimes know too much, particularly now that partisan trackers are running around with video cameras capturing a candidate’s every move. We hear and know less about the people behind the candidates and the campaigns, the number crunchers, the people who formulate strategy, who communicate with the public, who organize the volunteers, people who are doing the hard work to make a candidate and a campaign work. They tend to want to stay out of the limelight, but sometimes they play a bigger role than the candidate does.

In almost every political campaign there is a campaign manager or coordinator. Additionally, statewide campaigns usually have several political operatives filling a variety of positions such as press secretary, scheduler, volunteer coordinator, field directors and more. While statewide campaigns may have large staffs, most of the smaller races have only one or two campaign staffers who do everything and are often hardly paid or are volunteers.

It’s stressful work, often made more stressful because candidates can be control freaks with big egos. And then there’s the spouses. One of the biggest challenges for campaign staffers is often to get the candidate out of the way.

Here are just a few of the more visible operatives who worked in Alaska this election cycle, who fought to get the candidate out of the way. Continue reading →

• CH2M Hill announced that they would be considering selling their oil, gas and chemicals assets in Alaska. KTVA reports this would impact more than 2,000 of its employees.  CH2M Hill is Alaska’s 6th largest employer.

• The “Worst Ad of the Campaign” award goes to Sen. Mark Begich’s Jerry Active ad, so says the Washington Post’s Chris Cillizza. On the face of it, there were worse ads, but none did as much harm to a candidate as did the Active ad, so says Cillizza, a fact that continues to be repeated and one that I’m not sure I buy.

• Politico has the inside dirt on how Loretta Lynch came to be President Obama’s Attorney General pick (hint: She was far from his first choice).

• Human Rights Campaign issued a report yesterday detailing a marked improvement for LGBTQ equality in Fairbanks from the previous year. Fairbanks Mayor John Eberhart told the Fairbanks News Miner that; “his administration has undertaken several tasks in an attempt to improve the city’s openness to lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender residents.” If that doesn’t deserve two snaps, I don’t know what does.

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• AT 11:01 pm AKSD, Becky Bohrer with the AP tweeted, “Republican Dan Sullivan wins Senate race in Alaska” and media outlets were tripping over themselves to report this information. Here is a list of where you can read about the election call on Alaska’s U.S. Senate race: NBC News, The Wall Street Journal, Bloomberg, CNN,  CBS News, Roll Call, HuffingtonPost, USA Today, BuzzFeed, Fox News. And then there’s my take on the race here.

• The ever-widening gulf between Gov. Sean Parnell and Bill Walker’s vote count has been written up in Governing. This has emboldened the Unity Ticket to not only plan his transition team, but to also announce it at a press announced today. Stay tuned.

• Here are the latest vote counts on the different races from the Alaska Division of Elections. Sullivan is at 48.6%, Begich 45.4%, while Walker is at 47.9% with Parnell at 46.3%.

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With only 15,000 or so ballots left to be counted, and GOP Senate candidate Dan Sullivan maintaining an insurmountable lead over U.S. Sen. Mark Begich, the Associated Press called the race for Sullivan on Tuesday night, a week after Election Day. As of the last count, Sullivan was about 8,000 votes ahead of Begich, giving him a 3.21 percent lead: 48.58 to 45.37 percent. Begich hasn’t yet conceded, but the race is over and Alaska will now be represented by an all Republican delegation.

About $60 million was spent on about 264,000 votes, making it the most expensive race and certainly one of the most hard-fought races in the state’s history. It was a race that pitted a political neophyte against Alaska’s best politician. It was a race that pitted nearly every interest group imaginable against one another. But mostly, it was a race that tested Alaska’s ideological makeup. Begich is a Democrat, but he’s a red state Democrat, and often talked the language of conservatives, particularly on the stump. However, all that talk, all the vigorous campaigning, couldn’t change the fact that this is a conservative state, and the Democratic Party’s platform is simply not a platform that works for many Alaskans,

Most of us knew this, but many of us, particularly in the media, thought that Begich’s and the Democratic Party’s ground game in Alaska might make up the difference. Continue reading →

Update as of 10:22 p.m. Sullivan up 7,911. Walker up 4,004. The Division of Elections has counted a 23,800 absentee ballots since Election Day. There are still 10,300 absentee ballots left to be counted and about 5,800 eligible questioned ballots. The next round of counting will be on Friday.

Updated with new numbers. As of 6 p.m. Dan Sullivan is now up 8,071. Bill Walker is now up 3,839. The Walker-Mallott campaign is announcing its transition team tomorrow. From the campaign:  “Although the outcome of the gubernatorial election is not yet certain, in order to comply with the constitutional timeframe for swearing in the incoming governor, Bill Walker and Byron Mallott have taken the initial steps to prepare for transition to a new administration.”

The first big count of absentee and early voting results, 10,556 in all, have come in from the Alaska Division of Elections. Today, they’ve counted ballots from Nome, Mat Su and Southeast and some of Anchorage and Fairbanks. The count didn’t change the results of the Senate or governor’s race much. Gov. Sean Parnell is now 3019 behind Bill Walker. Sen. Mark Begich is down 8,784 votes. Dan Sullivan gained 635 votes. In state races, Democratic West Anchorage House candidate Matt Claman is beating Anand Dubey by 86 votes. In Ketchikan, Republican House candidate Chere Klein is up 9 against Independent Dan Ortiz. There’s still about 30,000 more votes to be counted. The division will be counting until 9 p.m. tonight.

Here’s a nifty graph of how the Senate vote tally has changed since last week:

.@DanSullivan2014 lead now 8,784 votes / 3.7 pts. How #aksen vote has changed in updates since election night: pic.twitter.com/rYVm79J1X6

— Greg Giroux (@greggiroux) November 12, 2014

While we’re all waiting for the Division of Elections to tally the vote, a reader brought to my attention what appeared to be a very odd vote tally, which we now know is a mistake, from the village of Chefornak. Chefornak, with a population of about 400, is about 100 miles southwest of Bethel and 490 miles southwest of Anchorage. The error-ridden vote count from the village has made at least one election-watcher nervous, and will now likely make many others nervous as well.

According to precinct results from the Division of Elections, results which are now reportedly in error said DOE head Gail Fenumiai, the village bucked all the statewide trends and the 199 people who voted in the village on Tuesday voted overwhelmingly for third-party candidates. The village calculated the votes incorrectly, and new totals coming from the DOE tonight will have the correct vote count, Fenumiai said. However, since last Wednesday ,the public, if they were curious enough to look, would have seen that in Chefornak,  Independent Senate candidate Ted Gianoutsosk received 174 votes. Statewide, he only got 1.99 percent of the total vote. Dan Sullivan and Mark Begich combined received only 14 votes in Chefornak. In the governor’s race, the Alaska Constitution Party did pretty well in Chefornak. The Myers/Rensel ticket got 129 votes from Chefornak. Statewide, they received 2.47 percent of the vote tabulated so far. Combined, Parnell and Walker got 32 votes. Here’s a screen grab of the DOE’s results from the village:

• Division of Elections will begin counting its estimated 50K absentee and questioned ballots today. The division expects to get through less than half of the votes. It will update the tallies at the end of the day. As of right now, Dan Sullivan leads Sen. Mark Begich by about 8,100 votes and Bill Walker leads Gov. Sean Parnell by about 3,000 votes. The Fairbanks News Miner has a more detailed breakdown of they types of ballots and the collective assumptions of the ballot results.

• The HuffingtonPost took at look at Latino voters and Nov. 4 election. Immigration was the main issue on their minds as they headed to the polls and while Democrats won the majority of those ballots being cast, President Obama’s empty immigration talk meant Republicans picked up a sizeable chunk because it is now abundantly clear this voting block is no longer happy with overtures-results are required for voter loyalty.

• The Alaska Journal of Commerce announced that the BOEM has updated the Chukchi lease sale, though regulations still need to be met before drilling can occur making exploration in 2015 unlikely. That might have something to do with six environmental groups filing a lawsuit with the U.S. District Court in Washington, D.C. to protect walruses from oil drilling off Alaska’s coast.

• Red-state Democrats are finding themselves in a new position of power heading into 2015 as bipartisan leaders for Sen. Mitch McConnell or Sen. Harry Reid according to Politico.

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Although Gov. Sean Parnell is down 3,000 votes, it’s possible, but unlikely that the 41,000 or so votes left to be counted will swing any other than they did on election night. We’ll know soon enough, but Republican turned Independent Bill Walker is likely to be the state’s next governor and his running mate, Democrat Byron Mallott is likely to be the lieutenant governor.

It’s an odd pairing, only made possible because of the National Guard scandal and the fact that Gov. Sean Parnell seemed to be caught flat-footed after the so-called “Unity Ticket” was announced on Labor Day. Prior, Parnell only had a shell of a campaign structure, which seemed to turn into a real organization only about two weeks before the election. By that time, most of the air-time was already bought and the National Guard issue dominated the media’s attention.

What wasn’t focused on much was the hallmark of Bill Walker’s candidacy: the fate of both of the natural gas pipelines, the smaller ‘bullet line” and the large diameter pipeline. Continue reading →

No matter who wins the upcoming Senate race in Alaska, the Republicans will be in majority, and this session, they’ll likely begin to dismantle some of the more easily dismantlable parts of ObamaCare.

One of the first to go will likely be repealing the medical device tax that was passed to help pay for the Affordable Care Act. The 2.3 percent sales tax on medical devices– surgical gloves, x-ray machines, defibrillators, even bandages– expected to bring in $30 billion dollars over the next ten years. The tax is low-hanging fruit. Some Democrats have been trying to get rid of it, mostly because of the large concentration of medical device companies in Massachusetts, New York and California, and because of the army of lobbyists the industry has hired. Continue reading →