The more $ I get, the more I can bring the research skills to #aksen #arsen #lasen #kssen. We aren’t stopping with #mssen.

— Charles C. Johnson (@ChuckCJohnson) July 7, 2014

Grandiosity Wins The Day: Reporter Is 2K Shy Of Funding Goal http://t.co/yEuNOfxQzu via @dailycaller cc; @ChuckCJohnson — John Gort (@JohnGort) July 7, 2014

Don’t worry, corrupt pols in Louisiana, Kansas, and Alaska. I haven’t forgotten about you. You’re next. #mssen

— Charles C. Johnson (@ChuckCJohnson) July 7, 2014

I have many flaws but “boring” isn’t one of them. Get the popcorn, friends. #mssen

— Charles C. Johnson (@ChuckCJohnson) July 7, 2014

And my favorite comment from the site today about the original story:

Oh come on, give it a break. All these people commenting “I was voting for Mead but now will never.. I’m just so appalled” are just wannabe Chuck Johnsons working for Sullivan. I don’t mind the ruthless mudslinging so much, but the false holier than thou approach really gets to me.

The post Controversial blogger has sights set on Alaska Senate race first appeared on Amanda Coyne.

Here’s the response from the Sullivan campaign to the ad:

We’re not surprised Mark Beigch’s special interest allies are running yet another false attack ad funded by Harry Reid and Michael Bloomberg. The ad has no bearing in reality, as the legislation in question had nothing to do with taking away Alaskans’ hunting and fishing rights, and everything to do with cutting red tape and streamlining Alaska’s permitting process. Senator Begich’s special interest allies seem to believe that a lie is true if you tell it enough.

The post Pro-Begich Super-PAC releases third ad attacking Sullivan on HB 77 first appeared on Amanda Coyne.

The debate is scheduled for Thursday night at East High School in Anchorage, and all three major candidates—Joe Miller, Mead Treadwell, and Dan Sullivan—were expected to attend. The organizers were charging $10 at the door.

At issue is who, and how, the debate would be paid for, and how the money collected from the event would be spent. Federal election law dictates that all expenses and revenue for a federal candidates event put on by a political club be handled by a federal account. None of the women’s clubs have a federal account.

Rhonda Boyles, the president of the Alaska Federation of Republican Women, caught the potential mistake and sent a memo out to some of the members of the group on Saturday. To continue the debate as planned could damage the clubs, she said, and more importantly the candidates.

Alaska GOP Vice-chair elect Frank McQueary was able to reach Treadwell and Sullivan’s campaign manager. Both campaigns expressed a willingness to work things out so the debate can go on, McQueary said. He wasn’t able to reach Miller.

On Tuesday, Sullivan’s campaign sent out a release, offering to pay for the debate. “Even though we have agreed to five additional debates before the primary, I think it’s important that we honor this particular pledge to our fellow Republicans,” the release said.

Judy Eledge, the president of the Anchorage Republican Women’s Club, has taken the lead on organizing the event. She’s had help from Bernadette Wilson, who has worked for Mead Treadwell, but  according to Boyles, declined help from her.  When reached on Tuesday morning, Eledge seemed unwilling to allow Sullivan’s campaign to pay for it. Eledge and the party establishment have a rocky history, and there’s been allegations that Eledge has organized the event to Treadwell’s advantage.

“There has been one obstacle after another for this debate not to happen,” Eledge said. “We believe that this will not be an FEC violation and are waiting to hear back from an FEC attorney who has offered potential solutions.”

I’ll have more as I learn it.

Contact Amanda Coyne at amandamcoyne@yahoo.com

The post Alaska GOP Senate debate might violate FEC laws. Will it go on? first appeared on Amanda Coyne.

The Sullivan ad says that as DNR commissioner, Sullivan got results, “1200 jobs worth of results,” Macksey says.

Macksey is referring to the North Slope’s Point Thomson, an oil and gas field about 60 miles east of Prudhoe Bay. The field was originally discovered in 1977 and has been the subject of decades of legal challenges between the state and ExxonMobil, which holds the lease rights. Sullivan negotiated terms as DNR commissioner. Some of those terms have been criticized, but to date, ExxonMobil has spent about $2 billion of the budgeted $4 billion that it plans to spend for full production. At its peak this winter, about 1,200 people were working on the project. Hence the ad’s job claim.

Faulkner said that business has increased “drastically” recently. He credits oil tax reform and the Point Thomson settlement. He was doing some work for Shell when it was preparing to drill in the Arctic, but after a series of blunders, the Obama administration shut Shell’s Arctic program down pending an overhaul of Shell’s plans.

Contact Amanda Coyne at amandamcoyne@yahoo.com

The post New ad features Sullivan as job creator, Begich as job killer first appeared on Amanda Coyne.

In any case, a poll is just a slice of what people are feeling at a particular point and time, and right now the electorate is still largely undecided, as one would expect.

According to the Daily Caller/Vox Populi poll conducted June 5-9, a whopping 31 percent of the Alaskan electorate either didn’t know which candidate they would vote for in the Republican Senate primary, or were going to vote for someone other than Joe Miller, Mead Treadwell, or former DNR Commissioner Dan Sullivan.

I don’t have the poll itself, so I don’t know what the makeup of it was. But the story accompanying it said that out of 619 surveyed, 32 percent said that if the election were held today, they’d vote for Sullivan. In this poll at least, he’s beating Treadwell by 9 points and Miller by 17 points.

The numbers to pay close attention to: Among voters who consider themselves “very conservative,” 41 percent support Sullivan, 25 percent support Miller, and 21 percent support Treadwell. These are the voters most likely to actually vote.

According to the poll, Sullivan has a lower favorability rating than does Treadwell. Forty-one percent of Alaska Republicans rated Sullivan favorably while 28 percent had an unfavorable view of him. Forty four percent of those polled had a favorable view of Treadwell while only 16 percent viewed him unfavorably. Likely some of this has to do with the negative ads Begich and his super-PAC have released about Sullivan. They’ve largely left Treadwell alone.

The poll showed that GOP voters have a generally negative view of Miller. Twenty-four percent held a favorable opinion of him while 52 percent had a negative view of him.

A recent poll by Anchorage-based Dittman Research surveyed 500 likely GOP primary voters May 27 – 29. It showed Mead Treadwell with 35 percent of the vote, Dan Sullivan with 37 percent, and Joe Miller with 12 percent. The margin of error was 4.4 percent.

Contact Amanda Coyne at amandamcoyne@yahoo.com

The post National poll has Senate candidate Sullivan up in GOP primary first appeared on Amanda Coyne.

Political ads are ubiquitous here already. They have run on Alaska airwaves nearly 20,000 times since early last year, according to Kantar Media, a monitoring and research firm. That is more than in North Carolina (18,000), Arkansas (13,000) and Louisiana (12,000), all of which are conservative states where Republicans believe they can pick off Democratic incumbents.

And as if on cue, here’s another ad. This one’s from GOP Senate candidate Dan Sullivan, who, after months of silence, appears to be on a roll.

This ad is supposed to be a counter to a recent one by Put Alaska First, a pro-Begich super-PAC, which attacks Sullivan HB 77, one of the most controversial bills introduced in the state Legislature recently. The rap on it is that it proposed to give unprecedented powers to the DNR commissioner to issue permits. At the time of its drafting, Dan Sullivan was the DNR commissioner.

The ad, however, pivots away from HB 77, and instead focuses on federal gun control laws.

Smart, maybe.

Contact Amanda Coyne at amandamcoyne@yahoo.com 

The post Another day, another Senate ad first appeared on Amanda Coyne.

Some background: Sullivan recently released an ad where he stands atop the Dena’ina Civic and Convention Center and says that Alaska needs “real results, not just talk.” The issue: the convention center was built while Begich was Anchorage mayor, and Begich touts it as one of his biggest achievements. Hence the ad. Ouch.

The post Begich mocks GOP candidate Sullivan in new ad first appeared on Amanda Coyne.

Here’s the YouTube ad that went out with the announcement of the group’s formation:

According to a memo leaked to Politico, the Koch brothers funded political arm, Americans for Prosperity, intends to spend $125 million on the upcoming midterm elections. Americans for Prosperity has already spent $2.5 million attacking U.S. Sen. Mark Begich. It gets confusing, however, because Begich himself is the only Senate candidate, including among the three Republican challengers, to whom the Koch brothers have donated. In 2010, they gave his leadership PAC $5,000.

David Brock, the founder of American Bridge, called the group’s new effort a “research-and-communications, first-of-its-kind war room that’s targeting the Koch brothers and also the GOP candidates who are benefiting from their … spending.”

In related Koch brothers news, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid on Thursday called for amending the U.S. Constitution to bar big money donors, like the Koch brothers, from unlimited donations to super-PACs.

Contact Amanda Coyne at amandamcoyne@yahoo.com

The post New group forms to counter Koch brothers first appeared on Amanda Coyne.

Intorcio is no novice. He’s worked for Republican congressmen, was an Iowa field rep for Rick Santorum’s presidential campaign, and a field coordinator for President Bush’s 2004 campaign. He’s also been affiliated with a Patriot Voices, a grassroots group devoted to “liberty.” Watch him here talking about the group. Word is that the hire has been in the works for awhile.

According to two recent polls, Treadwell’s numbers have been falling while Dan Sullivan’s have been rising. A PPP poll released on Tuesday shows that among 313 Republican primary voters surveyed, Sullivan has a 14 point lead over Treadwell: 40 percent for Sullivan and 26 percent for Treadwell. Joe Miller, the other challenger, is falling in the polls with only 14 percent of GOP primary voters saying that they’d vote for him in August.

All of them lose to Sen. Mark Begich in the general, however. The poll, which surveyed 582 general election voters, has Sullivan losing by 5 points, Treadwell losing by 8 and Miller by 16 percentage points.

PPP is a Democratic leaning firm, and uses robo-calls to conduct its polls and has been suspect in the past. However, the numbers are fairly consistent with a poll paid for by Sullivan released in early May that used live interviewers.

Contact Amanda Coyne at amandamcoyne@yahoo.com

The post U.S. Senate candidate Mead Treadwell hires communications director first appeared on Amanda Coyne.

The poll was conducted by Portland-based Moore Information, and was paid for by Sullivan.  It was conducted April 27-28, in 500 live interviews on both landline and cell phone. The margin of error is plus or minus 4 percent. Moore is associated with Republicans and has a long history for polling for Sen. Lisa Murkowski and Rep. Don Young. The firm also polled for the late Sen. Ted Stevens.

The last time the firm polled early this year, Sullivan polled two percentage points behind Treadwell and ten points ahead of Joe Miller. By the end of April, however, 38 percent of primary voters were going to vote for Sullivan, while Treadwell would get 22 percent and Miller 12 percent. However, 29 percent of primary voters are still undecided, leaving lots of room for Treadwell and Miller to pick up support.

According to the poll, Begich’s positive image went from a net +17 positive to a net +5 today. “The more voters learn about Mark Begich and his ties to the Obama agenda, the less likely they are to hold a favorable impression of him and, conversely, the more likely to hold a negative opinion of him,” Moore’s Senior Vice President Hans Kaiser wrote in a narrative accompanying the poll.

Kaiser wrote that Begich’s vote on ObamaCare appears to be his most serious liability. Among undecided voters, 56 percent are less likely to vote for a candidate who supported Obamacare. More bad news for Begich: only 24 percent had a positive view of Obama while 63 percent had a negative view.

However, it’s impossible to say what those numbers really mean as the chart accompanying the poll didn’t show the total percentage points of undecided voters in the general election.

Contact Amanda Coyne at amandamcoyne@yahoo.com

The post Senate poll: GOP candidate Sullivan ahead of primary pack, even with Begich first appeared on Amanda Coyne.