Alaska Elections

Republican Bert Stedman won his re-election bid Tuesday, and will return to the Legislature as the new District Q senator.

Stedman, the former District A senator from Sitka, beat his opponent, Democrat Albert Kookesh of Angoon, the former Senator from District C.

Stedman won about 65 percent of the votes cast on Tuesday. He said he’s pleased to continue his work as a Southeast senator.

“I’m very pleased that the folks in District Q decided to support me and send me back to Juneau for another four years, to continue to try to create some jobs and expand our economic base in Southeast,” he said. “It’s nice to be re-elected, no doubt about that.”

Redistricting pitted the two incumbent senators against each other. The two had worked cooperatively in the Senate, and ran a congenial race. Each touted his own record without denigrating the other’s.

“Albert and myself worked together in the coalition for six years, and helped each other on different issues throughout Southeast and other areas of the state, and I think that helped in how we addressed the campaign,” Stedman said.

Kookesh has served 16 years in the Legislature, eight each in the House and Senate. Stedman has served nine years in the Senate and is co-chair of the powerful Finance Committee.

Stedman said he’s not sure whether he’ll continue in that role.

“We’ll have some organizational meetings over the next couple of days and it really comes down to how many Republicans are elected out of Anchorage and Mat-Su, and how that dominant population center deals with other areas of the state,” he said.

Stedman said that some of the issues that likely will come up in the next session are the state’s oil tax structure and energy. He said he’ll continue to work on hydroelectric expansion for Southeast.

Southeast representatives will have to work harder to get support for projects.

“One of the bigger challenges that will inherently come up is that Southeast will have less representation after redistricting than we had before,” he said. “From the numeric side of things, it’s going to be a little more difficult to move Southeast issues forward.”

Kookesh was not available for comment. There was a constant busy signal Tuesday from the phone number provided by his office.

The new Senate District Q covers most of Southeast Alaska with the exception of Juneau. Capital City Senator Dennis Egan, a Democrat, was the only state lawmaker whose seat was not on the ballot this year following the state’s once a decade redistricting process.

U.S. Rep. Don Young had no trouble defeating Democrat Sharon Cissna to win an unprecedented 21st full term in the House.  Alaska’s lone congressman, a Republican,  now passes the late U.S. Sen. Ted Stevens’ record of 40 years representing the state.

With more than 98 percent of the statewide voted counted, Young garnered 140,056 votes (64.5 percent) to Cissna’s 61,458 votes (28.3 percent).

The Anchorage Democrat and seven-term legislator had trouble formulating a platform. She did not gain National Democratic Party support and the state party had little to say about her candidacy.

Cissna said the election was more about Constitutional rights than winning.

“I don’t think I ever felt that it was about winning. I felt it was really critical that I did run because I am really concerned about the TSA issue,” she said.

Cissna got into the race after she made national headlines in a fight against the Transportation Security Administration.  The cancer-survivor from Anchorage’s university district still refuses to fly through airports where she has to be screened by TSA and might have a pat down. She travels to Whitehorse, Yukon by car to fly to the Lower 48.

Cissna says her campaign against Don Young took her to nearly 70 communities across Alaska.  She says she’ll continue to work for Alaska now that she’s lost the election.

Though she won’t have her  Alaska House seat to help her do it, she says she’ll continue “traveling through Alaska, finding out exactly what is happening across the state and how do we build strength in community after community, and create a state where the focus in on giving communities power to create their own economies of scale. ”

With the defeat of Mitt Romney and no prospect of Republicans taking the U.S. Senate, Young and other Republicans will now quickly go into a lame duck session to deal at least temporarily with the longstanding budget standoff.

 

 

 

 

Incumbent Peggy Wilson will represent the newly-created House District 33.

The new district includes Wilson’s hometown, Wrangell, Ketchikan and northern parts of Prince of Wales Island. The Republican captured 58 percent of the vote on Election Day. Initial numbers out of Wrangell put her ahead with 642 votes to Olsen’s 90 and Johansen’s 56.

In the end Olsen had 33 percent of votes and Johansen captured about 8 percent.

Wilson had the financial backing of her party and the most campaign cash in the race. She says she was pleased by the support from voters, but thought the race would be a little tighter.

Wilson says her track record while representing Wrangell in the Alaska Legislature paved the way for her victory.

“During the 12 years that I’ve served Wrangell, you know, you take care of your constituents,” Wilson said. “And so when you help people do different things, and when you help your town, they know that.”

Wilson says now that she has won, she’ll get right to business.

“The first thing I’ll do, is you fly to Anchorage for reorganization,” she said. “And that’s to see who’s in leadership positions and who gets chairmanships, and what committees you’re on.”

She says she isn’t sure what to expect when it comes to positions of leadership or committee seats. Wilson currently serves as majority whip and is chair of the House Transportation Committee. She says she is looking forward to the upcoming session and plans to focus on the state’s economy.

Olsen congratulates Wilson on her victory. He says now that the race is over he will focus on his duties in Ketchikan as a city council member and educator. But he mentions that he isn’t against another run in the future.

“I just caught myself the other day saying, ‘You know, the next time we do this,'” Olsen said. “So I’m not too beat up to say I’m never going to run again. It was a great process and it was a lot of fun, and I enjoyed going around and meeting folks and talking to people across the region.”

Olsen says he hopes lawmakers focus on the oil tax issue during the next legislative session.

Johansen says he offered a helping hand to Wilson as she takes over his old district.

“I called Peggy and congratulated her and offered her my assistance in any way that I can,” Johansen said. “So, you know, there are winners and losers and Peggy won fair and square, and I’ll do everything I can to help the transition.”

Wilson will be sworn in to office during the first day of the upcoming session. Wilson says until then she will be on the hunt for staff.

It’s still too close to call for Republican state Representative Bill Thomas and Democratic challenger Jonathan Kreiss-Tomkins in Southeast’s House District 34.

With 100 percent of precincts reporting, Thomas trails Kreiss-Tomkins by 44 votes. That’s less than a full school bus of voters. Absentee, early and questioned ballots will have an impact in this race.

“We’ve been looking at the data and probably 800 absentee ballots are yet to be counted, although I’ve heard all sorts of different numbers,” Kreiss-Tomkins said on election night.

This is the 24-year-old’s first run for political office. He said his campaign focused on turning out early voters.

“It’s going to make a big impact. We put a real concerted effort into banking ballots early. My vote has not yet been counted – it’s an early vote,” Kreiss-Tomkins said. “And ditto for probably the majority of the people that are at our election night party at Worldwide Headquarters.”

That would be Kreiss-Tomkins’ home in Sitka.

Thomas could not be reached on election night.

Both ran intense campaigns, especially in the last couple weeks. Local newspapers were saturated with advertising, and mailers were sent to local homes, some from the campaigns themselves and others from supporters. Scores of letters to the editor ran in support of both men. And they appeared together at public events in Sitka and Haines.

Thomas leaned on his relationship with state Sen. Bert Stedman, a Sitka Republican who co-chairs the powerful Senate Finance Committee. Stedman plugged Thomas’s candidacy and lent his image to ads for Thomas.

Kreiss-Tomkins also worked the advertising angle, and made his presence known in Sitka and surrounding communities. He showed up in person on front porches to talk to voters about the election.

“It was neighbors talking with neighbors, friends talking with friends,” he said. “I knocked on multi-thousands of doors and we ran a real hard, hard campaign. It feels great.”

Kreiss-Tomkins says he’s happy with his campaign regardless of what the final results show. That won’t be known until the absentee, early and question ballots are counted. That has to happen no later than 15 days after the election.

House District 34 includes Sitka, Haines, Klukwan, Hoonah, Kake, Angoon, Port Alexander, Pelican and Elfin Cove.

This newscast includes selected election results from around Southeast Alaska.

Alaska history repeats itself, at least when it comes to the state’s constitution.

Voters soundly defeated Ballot Measure 1 on Tuesday. It asked whether there should be a constitutional convention.

Had it passed, the state’s entire governing document would have been up for review. But it didn’t.

With most precincts reporting, no votes outnumbered yeses by more than two-to-one. To put it another way, close to 75,000 more people expressed opposition than support.

That matches the sentiment of all previous every-10-years votes on the matter.

While Alaskans were down on a constitution rewrite, they were up on funding transportation infrastructure.

Bonding proposition A passed with 56 percent of ballots cast in favor, and 44 percent opposed.

The $453 million measure will fund road, harbor and rail improvements throughout the state.

Many of the larger projects – such as $50 million toward Anchorage Port Expansion – are for Southcentral communities.

But $65 million is targeted for Southeast projects. They include work on Ketchikan’s Shelter Cove Road, the Haines Boat Harbor, Sitka’s Katlian Bay Road, the city’s industrial park dock and Juneau’s Glacier Highway and Mendenhall Loop Road.