This is a little old, but I think still valuable information: As of Sunday, there were about 45,000 early and absentee votes counted. Partisan breakdown: R-32%. D-18%. Non-Partisan and Undeclared 46%.
Mark Begich is here for lunch at the Lucky Wishbone. #AKsen pic.twitter.com/XUPXwKdeUX — Nat Herz (@Nat_Herz) November 4, 2014
You know who we need to hear more from? Sarah Palin, of course. Here she is, urging us to vote for Walker/Mallott:
Begich was at the Atwood state office building greeting workers as they were coming to work this morning. Smart.
Good morning from Anchorage! Election Day has arrived in the Last Frontier #wpteamamerica #aksen pic.twitter.com/CMqwdP44ry
— Sebastian Payne (@SebastianEPayne) November 4, 2014
Polls opened at 7 a.m. At 8 a.m. Bill Walker and a team of sign wavers were at the corner of Minnesota and Northern Lights in Anchorage. GOP senate candidate Dan Sullivan was spotted waving signs at the corner of Northern Lights and the Seward Highway. Continue reading
The phones are almost done ringing, you won’t need a forklift to carry your mail from the mailbox to your house. Soon the political attack ads on radio and TV will be gone. It’s time to vote.
After months and months, which at times seemed like decades if not centuries, of following the campaigns, here’s my predictions–not what I wish would happen, but what I think will happen– for what they’re worth:
U.S. Senate – Alaska has never seen a race like this, and it’ll likely be a long time, if ever, until we see a repeat. More than $60 million has been spent, not a small amount of which has been paid to try to figure out who is going to win. And, still, nobody can say for sure. But I see the momentum and wind behind Dan Sullivan’s back. Prediction: Dan Sullivan will win.
U.S. House of Representatives – It seems that incumbent Rep. Don Young has tried to do as
much as possible to make this race close. His gaffes, insensitive remarks and behavior would doom any other politician almost anywhere. But there was a bigger mistake made: The Democratic Party and the DCCC didn’t invest in Democratic challenger Forrest Dunbar’s candidacy. Had they done so, this would be a very close race. Prediction: Don Young will win, but he won’t and shouldn’t enjoy the margins of past victories.
Governor – This is the toughest one of the race, so I’m going to hedge. Continue reading
The natural gas pipeline is one of the most important issues facing Alaska. You might not know it, because Gov. Sean Parnell and his people seem to want to keep most things to themselves, but Parnell oversaw a huge advancement in the gas line. Nothing’s for sure, but never before in the history of the state have all interests converged. Independent candidate Bill Walker has made building the line a hallmark of his campaign. Yet what’s happening now and what Walker’s plans are for the line, if he were elected, is one of the most under-reported stories of the campaign. As of now, the state and Trans-Canada have partnered to have a 25 percent interest in the line. Walker says that he wants the state to own at least 51 percent. What that really means is anybody’s guess. How much more will that cost? Where is the money going to come from? The contract that the state is working from now will certainly have to be re-written and re-negotiated, and passed through the Legislature. How long will that take? To what end? Given Parnell’s bungles, does the public even care? I haven’t had the time and the manpower to dig into too much of this since Walker announced, but I gave it a shot in a column on Sunday. And I got lots of responses, most of which I think deserve a wider audience.
Below are excerpts from a few of responses, some lightly edited:
Faithful reader “Jon K” responds to another comment about the $65 billion price-tag being over-inflated and about whether or not the producers are actually serious about building a line: Continue reading
Here’s a snippet from a flyer that’s been hanging on doors in West Anchorage for House candidate Republican Anand Dubey, who’s running against Democrat Matt Claman for the seat being vacated by Rep. Lindsey Holmes. Mia Costello. The flyer is written by Dubey’s wife Shivani. ( Full disclosure, Shivani is a very nice woman and helped me get this website up and running):
The flyer would appear to contradict what Dubey told Alaska Family Action in August: Continue reading
The Virginia-based political prognosticator Larry Sabato completed his final Senate race Crystal Ball predictions on Monday. He has Alaska, Colorado, Iowa and Arkansas moving from Democrat to Republican and Kansas and Georgia leaning Republican. All told, he’s predicting that the makeup of the Senate will include 47 Democrats and 53 Republicans. If that holds true, and particularly if Republicans take purple Iowa and Colorado, Democrats are going to have to do some soul searching about their message. (BTW, Sabato also has the governor’s race leaning toward Walker. And if that holds true, Alaska Republicans here certainly will have their own souls to search.) Here’s Sabato’s Senate map:
So many, including me, are all wondering how to read the current slate of polls. Is Gov. Sean Parnell down by 7 or by 1. Is Sen. Mark Begich down by 1 or by 5? And what the heck is going on with Rep. Don Young? Nothing’s for sure, but do keep in mind that Alaska is a hard place to poll, and that, historically, Alaska polls have shown a Democratic bias. Here’s a chart that Nate Silver from FiveThirtyEight put together a few weeks ago, illustrating that according to his model, the polls have averaged a 7 point Democratic bias in every single race since 2000:
Here’s both Gov. Sean Parnell’s and Bill Walker’s closing TV ads. What do you all think?
http://youtu.be/71FVl4donhQ 
Confession: I usually hate going to political fundraisers. I normally feel out of place, and it can feel really uncomfortable sitting in a corner, squinting at nametags, scratching on my notebook. But I always felt at home at Walker-Mallott fundraisers, and now that they’re over, I’ll miss them. For one, the food’s usually good, and though I never eat anything at these things, I like to be around good food. And good people, who talk about interesting things. At Walker fundraisers, I’ve talked existentialism and German literature with Bruce Botelho, constitutional law with Charlie Cole, and the state of the media with Hal Gazaway. I’ve talked about the good old Valdez days with former Lt. Gov. Stephen McApline, who I always call Steve. I’ve talked about Wally Hickel’s vision for Alaska with Malcom and Cindy Roberts. I’ve talked about subsistence issues with Craig Fleener, and fashion with Donna Walker. I’ve talked about the Catholic church with Cal Williams and about fisheries with Clem Tillion. I’ve talked women’s rights with Rep. Harriet Drummond and the human condition with her husband Elstun Lauesen. If I do something horrible in my life, and my punishment is that I have to spend the rest of eternity at a political fundraiser, I would hope that She will have mercy enough to put me at a Walker/Mallott fundraiser. The last one I went to was last Monday, and the campaign outdid themselves. All the usual suspects were there—plus Jerry Ward, for whom I will always have a fondness after he saved me from the wrath of a group of media hating Tea Partiers in 2012. But this time, there were more. Hundreds, of people of color, ethnicities, and sizes and political leanings were crammed upstairs at Gallos Mexican Restaurant in Anchorage. It was hot crowded and interesting.
With the election less than a week away, I’m told that people are tired of fundraisers. Continue reading
Below is a summary of the most recent PPP polls, which shows GOP Senate candidate Dan Sullivan up 1 percent, gubernatorial candidate Bill Walker up by 1, Rep. Don Young by 6. Also a recent Rasmussen Reports poll has Walker up by 7 and Sullivan up by 5. Caution: both PPP and Rasmussen use robo-calls to conduct their surveys. That’s not to say that robo-polling is always bad, it’s just at this stage of the season, when Alaska is so over-polled, I can’t imagine that machines are getting good samples.
Here’s PPP’s summary:
The Alaska Senate race is even tighter than the one in Colorado, with Dan Sullivan leading Mark Begich just 46/45 with the full field and 47/46 in a head to head contest. Begich leads 50/36 with independents and has 91% of the Democratic vote behind him to just 81% of Republicans who are for Sullivan. The picture in this race is pretty steady- Sullivan led by 2 points on our last poll in September. Begich has a very strong ground game and it could be enough to put him over the top.
The Alaska Governor’s race is similarly tight with independent Bill Walker holding a 1 Continue reading
On Friday, Americans for Tax Reform sent out a release, claiming that gubernatorial candidate Bill Walker wrote a letter to the editor in 2004 calling for a statewide income tax. Shortly after the release, Bill Walker’s lawyers sent a cease and desist letter to ATR, claiming that Walker did not write the letter and that there were at least 20 Bill Walker’s in the state that could have done so.
Now it appears that Bill Walker who wrote the letter has stepped forward. This Bill Walker has a blog and builds boats and wants some credit for his letter, which was supposed to be a satire, but satire in newspaper land is hard pull off:
Here’s what the real writer of the letter wrote on his blog:
I found the idea of both permanent fund dividends and a state income tax to be such an absurd idea that I wrote a satire proposing it. Mine was originally titled “A Modest Proposal” after Jonathan Swift’s 1729 satire where Swift proposes the absurd idea of the impoverished Irish selling their babies as food for the rich. Unfortunately, ADN replaced my title with their own. However, ADN did leave my reference to “A Modest Proposal” in the text.
No response yet from ATR.
Here’s a memory: It’s 2007, and I’m at the Loussac Library’s Wilda Marston Theater, with about 200 other Alaskans, listening to members of Gov. Sarah Palin’s administration explain a new plan that they promised would finally, after more than 30 years of trying, get a natural gas pipeline built. It was called the Alaska Gasline Inducement Act, or AGIA, for short. And it’s was a different plan than any other plan that had been floated in the 30 years that plans had been floated.
The difference: Historically, the energy companies that hold the lease rights to the gas had been the ones that were going to make the decision about when and how to build the line. They were, in effect, in the driver’s seat. This plan, however, would separate the line from the producers. AGIA was structured in such a way as to allow—in fact to favor—a third party to come into the state and build the line. The assumption was that if the pipeline was built, then the producers would make the smart and prudent business decision and sell the gas to buyers. They would have to. Their shareholders would demand it.
It was a radical rethinking of the project. The producers—among the biggest private energy companies in the world—would be put in a corner. We were, at long last, going to outsmart them. Continue reading