In response to Ivan Moore’s poll showing that the ballot measure to legalize pot was up by an eye-popping 18 percentage points, Dittman Research, whose firm has historically been accurate in its polling, released its own poll that showed that the measure was losing by 10 percentage points, 43 percent to 53 percent. Moore’s question was paid for by the group that is working to legalize pot in Alaska. Dittman is working for the group fighting against legalization.

Dittman’s poll was conducted Sept. 30 through October 3. Six hundred likely registered voters were surveyed. The margin of error is plus or minus 4 percent. Dittman’s sample, as was Moore’s, was representative of the general election voter population in Alaska in age and party affiliation. Thirty one percent of Dittman’s sample were contacted via cell phones.

Moore’s poll was touted by the pro-legalization group as the only public poll released so far that reflects the language that is going to be on the ballot, and the only poll that had a true representative sample of “cell phones only” users, which Moore said is “highly significant.”

However, in his poll, Moore’s question includes the phrase “constitutional protections,” which isn’t in the ballot initiative language. (See the exact initiative text below.) Moore’s poll also asks if they “favor” or “oppose” the initiative, as opposed to whether or not they planned to vote “yes” or “no.”

Here’s the Dittman poll question, Continue reading →

David Holthouse, editor of the Anchorage Press, broke yet another highly damning story about the Alaska National Guard. Holthouse somehow got a hold of a confidential military report that focused on Lt. Col. Joseph R. Lawendowski, who is the guard’s Deputy Chief of Staff for Operations and Training. The March 3 report says that he was recommended for “other than honorable” discharge, for, among other things, allowing “recruiters to sexually assault and harass female soldiers, recruits and civilians,” while he was commander of the Alaska Army National Guard Recruiting and Retention Battalion (RRB).

And there’s more, including the fact that Lawendowski was the owner of a pornography company and co-founder of an “’end times’ fundamentalist group. Read the must-read here.

According to a question on a poll conducted by local pollster Ivan Moore, Ballot Measure 2, which would tax and regulate marijuana like alcohol, is winning in the state by about 18 percentage points, 57.2 percent to 38.7 percent The question about the measure was paid for by the group working to legalize pot in Alaska, and was asked as part of a larger poll that Moore was conducting. The sample size was 568 likely voters, and was conducted Sept. 26-30. The margin of error is 4.1 percent. (I’m waiting for the complete demographics.)

Taylor Bickford, who’s running the legalization campaign, said that the numbers seem a little optimistic to him. Older internal polls showed the campaign winning, but by a slimmer margin, he said. However, the poll is significant in that it’s the first public poll that asks the question exactly as it will appear on the ballot. A highly touted August PPP poll which showed the measure losing messed up the wording in the question. Further, the PPP poll didn’t call cell phones, which are a key demographic in this race.

Here was how the question was phrased:

There is an initiative on the General election ballot that would tax and regulate the production, sale, and use of marijuana in Alaska. Criminal penalties would be removed for adults over the age of 21 who possess up to an ounce of marijuana, and constitutional protections allowing home cultivation would be preserved.

Here’s the results:

• Favor: 57.2%
• Oppose: 38.7%
• Neutral/Undecided: 4.2%

• Katie John’s son, Fred John Jr., has a moving compass piece in the Dispatch about his mother’s legacy to preserve Alaskan Native rights and the role Dan Sullivan played by suing her and taking the state’s case to the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals.

• Scott Kawasaki and David Guttenberg were the two Interior legislators that said at the Greater Fairbanks Chamber of Commerce that they were backing Ballot Measure 2, the initiative to legalize recreational use of marijuana. The Fairbanks News Miner has the lowdown on where the other Fairbanks area candidates stand on 2, and on the other ballot measures.

• LA Times columnist Doyle McManus calls Mark Begich’s Jerry Active ad “the worst Democratic attack ad of the Senate race.” And TIME calls it one of the five most dishonest political ads of the year.

Continue reading →

Senate District C’s delegation is likely to return to Juneau with at least one, if not two new faces representing the district. The district combines parts of Fairbanks with rural Interior Alaska. It’s a cold and unruly place, with an incredibly involved and unpredictable populace. Talk to them one minute and you think you’re among ruby-red Republicans. Another and you’d swear that everyone’s a Karl Marx disciple. And let’s not forget the villages, which offer their own unique flavor of politics. It’s my idea of heaven, for one day anyway, in July, armed with bug dope.

Here’s an overview of the Senate race and the two House seats in the district, and my take on the state of the races, for what it’s worth: Continue reading →

Here’s the results from the three mayoral races–the Kenai Borough, the City of Wasilla, and the North Slope Borough–that I profiled earlier: 

From the Peninsula Clarion:

With 26 of 29 precincts reporting, unofficial election results show Mike Navarre retaining his seat as Kenai Peninsula Borough mayor in Tuesday’s municipal election. Navarre has 53.42 percent of the vote. Challenger Tom Bearup collected 36.62 percent of the vote, while Carrol Martin has 9.43 percent.

From the Mat-Su Valley Frontiersman:

The contested mayor’s race went to Deputy City Administrator Bert Cottle who pulled in nearly 75 percent of the vote, raking in 566 votes to city planning commissioner Loren Means’ 188. This will be the second time Cottle has been mayor of a city; he previously served as mayor of Valdez.

From the North Slope Borough:

Incumbent Mayor Charlotte Brower wins against former NSB Mayor George Ahmaogak. Here’s the unofficial total, with all villages counted but without 67 absentees that still need to be counted:

• Brower: 935
• Ahmaogak: 816

Here’s Brower’s statement on her win: Continue reading →

For all intents and purposes, the constitutional ban on gay marriage in Alaska and other Western states was struck down on Tuesday by the U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals.

The court overturned bans in Nevada and Idaho specifically, saying that such bans violate gay couples’ equal protection rights. Alaska is part of the 9th Circuit, so presumably that ruling stands in this state as well.

The State of Alaska is likely to appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court. However, it’s improbable that the high court will overturn the 9th Circuit’s decision, just as it didn’t overturn another circuit’s ruling on Monday.

The state voted in 1998 to amend its constitution to include the gay marriage ban. A case challenging that ban is scheduled to be heard in federal court in Anchorage on Friday.

I’ve got calls into the Department of Law, the governor’s office and the ACLU. I’ll update when I get more information.

Updated: A spokesperson for the Department of Law said that the department is still reviewing the decision and as of today, the state still plans to challenge the case on Friday. Gov. Sean Parnell declined to comment pending DOL’s review. Josh Decker, executive director of the ACLU of Alaska, said that the court “squarely and conclusively rejected” Idaho’s and Nevada’s marriage bans. He also said that there is “no daylight” between what Idaho and Nevada were arguing in defending their bans, and what Alaska has argued defending its ban. And because the 9th Circuit controls Alaska, the state should declare Alaska’s ban unconstitutional. To not do so would be to “continue to waste taxpayer dollars,” Decker said.

If the state continues to insist on defending the ban, it’ll be very interesting to see what U.S. District Judge Timothy Burgess does with this on Friday afternoon. There a possibility that he could rule from the bench, which would be a lot of dramatic fun.

• Citizens all across the state will be heading to the polls today to vote on local candidates and issues. Here’s a summary from the Juneau Empire of what voters will be voting on in Juneau. KTOO has a wealth of info on Southeast. Here’s one from Fairbanks. Here’s a primer from the Home News of the mayoral races in Homer. Here’s a nice piece with local color from the Arctic Sounder about the elections in Kotzebue. Here’s one from the Frontiersman on the races in the Valley. And on this site, I profile three mayoral races across the state, and for no good reason, try to predict the winners.

• Dillingham, Alaska is the proud recipient of being named by the Washington Post as the town that could determine the fate of the U.S. Senate in November, which is kind of ironic because I wrote that Wasilla is the town that could determine the fate of the U.S. Senate. Someone else will no doubt soon write that it’s Fairbanks. Apparently we all keep forgetting that the majority of voters live right here in Anchorage. But that doesn’t work quite as well as a narrative device.

• APRN’s Alexandra Gutierrez has a great overview of the Alaska National Guard scandal and Gov. Sean Parnell’s reaction to it.

• Unlike the Anchorage Assembly, the Anchorage School Board chose to stay out of the Ballot Measure 2 issue by simply reaffirming the ASD’s commitment to promoting drug-free schools in a resolution that passed 7-0 last night.

Continue reading →

On Tuesday October 7, voters will be going to the polls in many parts of the state to vote in local elections from Ketchikan to Barrow. In some locales, voters will be voting for municipal and borough officials. In some areas there are more uncontested races than contested ones. There’s also ballot propositions, some advisory and others the real deal, and citizen initiatives too.

But probably the biggest races are the mayoral races, and the biggest of those that I feel comfortable writing about are in the City of Wasilla, North Slope Borough and the Kenai Borough. Here’s a rundown of the three.  Continue reading →

The race for the women vote is on. Watch the latest ad, which is pretty good, from American Crossroads attacking Mark Begich here:

And listen to the latest Planned Parenthood Votes $25,000 Pandora ad-buy supporting Mark Begich, which is also pretty good, here:

Monday’s Supreme Court decision was a huge win for gay rights across the country. Here’s a chart, courtesy of Fivethirtyeight.com, that shows the immediate affect of the decision:

On Monday morning, the U.S. Supreme Court refused to hear any of the seven cases pending before them regarding same-sex marriage, allowing lower court rulings that overturned statewide bans to stand. The Supreme Court took the action without a guiding opinion, which surprised legal scholars who thought that the Supreme Court would weight in one way or another. However, notwithstanding the court’s silence, the consequences for the country, and for Alaska, are huge. Most immediately, it means that same-sex couples in Utah, Oklahoma, Virginia, Wisconsin, Indiana West Virginia, North Carolina, South Carolina, Kansas, Colorado, and Wyoming will be able to marry immediately or in the near future. In all of these cases, the federal court of appeals for their respective circuits struck down bans—like Alaska’s constitutional ban–that have prohibited them to marry.

Alaska belongs to the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals, Continue reading →

The Walker/Mallott “Unity” ticket have received the endorsement of the state’s largest law enforcement and public safety unions, including the following:

• Public Safety Employees Association
• Alaska Correctional Officers Association
• Alaska Professional Fire Fighters Association
• Anchorage Police Department Employees Association
• Alaska State Employees Association
• Alaska Public Employees Association/Alaska Federation of Teachers

• Bloomberg has a graphic slideshow that distills the U.S. population down to the handful of Americans that will be deciding the fate of Congress in November. Bloomberg also has a great chart detailing the number of political ads on TV stations across the country. KTUU is number 1, with 9.672 ads, and Juneau’s KATH is in third place, with 8.409 ads. What are they doing with all the money? Who knows? They report and they decide.

• Almost all crisis communications experts agree that handling a crisis relies on having a plan, transparency, and avoiding contrary statements and confusion. Apparently, Gov. Sean Parnell didn’t get the memo. In fact, if there’s a worse way to handle the National Guard scandal, I can’t think of it. The latest: Michelle Theriault Boots reports that two top Alaska National Guard officers were fired and then re-hired one day later at Parnell’s urging. There may be good reason for doing so. (It appears that he might have wanted to avoid a conflict of interest). Maybe not. His administration appears hell-bent on keeping it all a secret. One thing is clear: All of it appears unplanned, nontransparent, and is certainly confusing.

• One way Gov. Sean Parnell could have gotten in front of the National Guard scandal was to turn it all over to a special prosecutor. He didn’t take that initiative and now others are taking it for him, including Bill Walker in the News-Miner, Jim Babb in the ADN, and Lynn Willis, who served with the Guard for 22 years, on this site.

Continue reading →