• The Fairbanks News Miner and the Juneau Empire have come out with their own Handy Dandy 2014 election guides. This should help if you’re still undecided about who’s getting your vote whether it is local, state, federal.

• The U.S. Senate race is on like Donkey Kong, and it only seems fair that local journalists get to help the nation understand why. Read Alexandra Gutierrez’s spanking piece in The New Yorker about how the alleged war on women is playing in this race.

• Hungry for more Senate news? Get your fill here: The Peninsula Clarion, CapPolitical (with maps!), Politico, the New York Times and the HuffingtonPost all have articles on possible outcomes. Politico explains what a Republican-controlled Senate could mean for defense, while Bloomberg bemoans the possibility of an “all-nighter.” Get your coffee pot ready; Tuesday is going to be a long night for the nation’s future.

• This might be the final poll before tomorrow’s Big Day! Public Policy has released its findings on AK’s gubernatorial and U.S. Senate showdown via the dreaded robo call. The nutshell: Both Dan Sullivan and the Unity Ticket are eking out a lead of 1% over their respective opponents.

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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 →

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.

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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.

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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:

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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

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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.

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