4 Special Coverage

The deadline to file to run for one of Juneau’s seats in the Alaska Legislature is fast approaching. But, just a little over a week out, only incumbent lawmakers have done so. 

Juneau has one seat in the Alaska Senate, currently filled by Jesse Kiehl, and two seats in the Alaska House of Representatives, filled by Sara Hannan and Andi Story. All three are Democrats who first took office in 2019 following the 2018 election.

Kiehl represents Juneau, Haines, Skagway, Gustavus and Klukwan. Story represents parts of the Mendenhall Valley, Haines, Skagway, Klukwan and Gustavus. Hannan’s seat represents downtown Juneau, Douglas Island, Thane, Lemon Creek and parts of the Mendenhall Valley.

Both Kiehl and Hannan have officially registered to run for reelection. Story has filed a letter saying she intends to. No other candidates have filed paperwork indicating they’re running. 

In the most recent legislative session, which ended last week, all three lawmakers were pretty busy. They all were strong supporters of increasing education funding – an issue that dominated the session.

Kiehl also sponsored a bill to ban harmful “forever chemicals” in firefighting foams and was a major proponent for another that put more guardrails around the state’s property assessment process. Both bills passed the House and Senate by wide margins and are on the way to Gov. Mike Dunleavy to be signed into law.

Story also sponsored bills that passed both bodies. One adds several Indigenous languages to Alaska’s list of official languages, among other actions. Another requires safety ladders at public harbors. 

Hannan sponsored a few bills as well, including one that sought to ban licensed practitioners from performing “conversion therapy” and another to raise the minimum age to buy tobacco products. Neither passed before the session ended. 

The last day to file to run for state office is June 1. The statewide primaries will take place in August. 

A new poll suggests the race for Alaska’s congressional seat is too close to call.

The poll by Data for Progress shows Democratic Congresswoman Mary Peltola would win the first round of voting with 44%, followed by Republicans Nick Begich III and Nancy Dahlstrom. But after ranked choices are tallied, the poll shows a 50-50 split between Peltola and Begich.

Data for Progress Executive Director Danielle Deiseroth said one strength Peltola has is that she’s well known and 51% of respondents view her favorably or very favorably.

“To be an incumbent representative viewed favorably by your electorate is, you know, certainly a good sign. That definitely stood out to me,” Deiseroth said.

The poll of 1,120 likely Alaska voters closed March 2 and has a three point margin of error. Data for Progress funded it. That’s a progressive group with a highly rated polling department. The political news site 538 gives it a nearly perfect score for accuracy and lack of bias.

The poll also shows that Dahlstrom is largely unknown among Alaskans, even though she’s the lieutenant governor. It found that 65% of Alaskans don’t know enough about her to say whether they view her favorably or not.

“Typically, state level elected officials do carry more name recognition. So that was a little bit surprising to me,” Deiseroth said.

You can expect to hear a lot more about Dahlstrom in the coming months. Political action committees associated with U.S. House Speaker Mike Johnson have picked Dahlstrom as their candidate. They are likely to spend millions to try to convert Alaska’s seat to the Republican column.

Election forecasters The Cook Political Report and Sabato’s Crystal Ball say the Alaska race “leans Democratic,” meaning they think Peltola has an edge on the challengers.

The poll asked about all of Alaska’s statewide officeholders. About half of respondents rated U.S. Sen. Lisa Murkowski favorably. The poll found she’s better liked among Democrats and independents. Two-thirds of the Republicans surveyed gave Murkowski an unfavorable rating. Murkowski is a Republican who frequently angers conservatives by taking moderate positions and opposing Donald Trump.

Few statewide Alaska polls are made public. Deiseroth said the state is on the group’s radar in part because one of its senior advisors, Jason Katz-Brown, lives in Anchorage, and the organization is interested in ranked choice voting.

UNALAKLEET – They’re selling love by the slice at the local pizzeria.

Encouraging messages from all over the globe come with each pizza that the Peace on Earth restaurant delivers to this Iditarod Trail Sled Dog Race checkpoint, about three-quarters of the way into the 1,000-mile race. The mushers have been arriving here at the edge of Alaska, cold and tired after long stretches with only sled dogs to keep them company.

Their family, friends and fans began placing pizza orders by phone weeks ago. The calls kept coming as the front-running sled dog teams came in Sunday.

The messages say things like “Good luck” and “Keep on mushing.” Some are inside jokes or written in a language other than English that Peace on Earth owners Davida and Bret Hanson, who cook the pizzas and write the messages in marker atop each box, don’t even understand.

“You get moms and dads, you know, ordering their kids pizzas,” Davida said. “And so you get, ‘Love, from Mom and Dad. Oh, and can you put a heart on there?’”

And, yes, they will draw a heart on the box, she said.

“Some of them get pretty personal,” Davida said. “Some of them are long, you know, so you’re sitting there, and you don’t want to mess up on the message, and it might be a couple sentences, and you’re actually writing a whole note to this person.”

A few make you want to cry.

That’s what happened last year when Australian musher Christian Turner’s wife called in an order from their home in Queensland, over 6,500 miles away. She included a message from their baby daughter.

“The message on there says, ‘Love you, Daddy, from your bubby girl,’” Davida said, holding up her phone to show a picture of Turner eating the pizza. “And when he read that, he just teared up, and it got the whole Iditarod checkpoint emotional.”

Even a year later, standing in her kitchen at home, Davida’s eyes were welling up.

“It was the most gut-wrenching happiness I’ve ever seen, because it was just, when he saw that, you know, there was that connection,” she said. “Maybe they haven’t seen their family in a long time, and when you get a message like that on one of these pizza boxes, it gives you that extra push to say, ‘OK, I’m almost there. I can do this.’ Or, you know, it kind of just lights that spirit back up in them, I think.”

The Hansons have recognized that connection for years. They’ve operated Peace on Earth since they fired up the pizza oven the day after Christmas in 1996. Their house is right next door, and when the Iditarod racers are coming through, they’re often going back and forth between home and the restaurant, taking orders and making the pizzas: rolling out dough, spreading the dark red tomato sauce, sprinkling toppings like pepperoni and sausage and firing the pies in the oven.

Bret is constantly checking the Iditarod’s GPS tracker to make sure he’s ready to cook the right pizza for the right musher at the right time, to get it to them still hot when they get here.

“It’s just important,” Bret said. “It’s important to the people that made the orders, and it’s important to the mushers, because I’ve seen it in their eyes, to have something special and a little message from whoever is sending it.”

Bret remembers the first time he saw a musher’s eyes light up when they got a pizza and a message from afar.

Swiss musher Sven Haltmann, by way of Fairbanks, had mushed in after more than 700 miles on the Iditarod Trail and was trudging along with buckets of water to mix with food for his dogs. Bret told Haltmann he had a pizza for him, from an order someone called in from the Lower 48.

“He turns around and says, ‘Wow, really?’” Bret recalled. “His face changed, and his eyes lit up and everything lit up all at the same time … and the change in his whole posture and emotion is just so memorable in my mind that I just think of him as the first one.”

Iditarod musher Matt Hall arrived here in fourth place Sunday, the musher and dogs all wearing red jackets that were only a slightly brighter hue than the pizza sauce. It had gotten down to 45 below zero the night before on the trail. After bedding down and feeding his dogs, Hall ambled into the checkpoint building to get something to eat for himself.

Hall spotted a stack of three pizza boxes with the name “Matt” on it, but thought at first it was for his competitor Matt Failor. Hall was going to take a piece anyway, then he realized the box had his bib number, 16, on it.

“I would’ve still stolen a piece,” Hall said.

Hall took a big bite of the cheese pizza. It was much better than the freeze-dried meals he’d been eating on the trail, he said.

“Yeah, this is super cool,” Hall said. “This is really hitting the spot. Mm hmm. This is delicious.”

Scrawled atop the box were the words “Good luck at the race. Have fun.” It was from a 4th grade class in West Newbury, Mass.

The pizza messaging really took off, the Hansons said, with a group of fans known as the Ugly Dogs, cultivated online by Wisconsin writers and dog mushers Blair Braverman and Quince Mountain, a married couple who’ve both run the Iditarod. (Ugly Dogs is a reference to a message Braverman got on the social media platform then called Twitter, in response to something she’d written about Taylor Swift, when a Swift fan told her to, “Go back to you ugly dogs, Karen.” Braverman and Mountain thought that was hilarious, and the name stuck).

The Ugly Dogs comprise a wide and active network online, and when they learned they could buy pizzas for mushers about five years ago, the orders started pouring in from all over, the Hansons said.

At first, the Ugly Dogs would order pizzas for specific mushers, Bret said. But some mushers would have a stack of them at the checkpoint, and others wouldn’t have any, he said.

“They decided that nobody should go without a pizza, and they made sure everybody down to the Red Lantern had a pizza,” Bret said. “And that was all the Ugly Dogs.”

Nowadays, the mushers come in anticipating the pizza and heartfelt messages. They walk into the checkpoint building, a part of the post office a short walk from the dog yard, asking if there’s a pie waiting for them, Davida said.

A former Iditarod musher had recently explained how good it felt to get a hot pizza with a warm note, Davida said.

“I was like, ‘OK, that’s why that’s why we do it,” she said. “So somebody knows they’re being thought of.”

Art Hackney, co-chair of Nikki Haley’s Alaska campaign, eyes Donald Trump’s major wins on Super Tuesday and posits a theory to explain what’s come over Republicans in Alaska and beyond: “We live in a world where a substantial number of people have lost their minds.”

“I can draw no other conclusion than that they are attracted to an authoritarian figure, maybe because of the complexity of life and the issues that we face,” said Hackney, a political consultant who has devoted his professional life to electing Republicans for more than 40 years. “And they (say) ‘Daddy says the sky is green. OK. I don’t have to think about it anymore. The sky is green. It’s not blue.’ That is the way people are. And I’m looking at people who I thought had brains.”

Alaska Republicans went all in for Donald Trump at the party-run election Tuesday. Trump won about 88% of the vote here, trouncing his last remaining Republican challenger, Haley, who on Wednesday suspended her campaign.

Hackney notes that turnout was half of what it was at the last such event, in 2016, when Trump finished second to Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas. Hackney figures non-Trump Republicans were under-represented on Tuesday.

But for Trump supporters, the day played out exactly as it should.

Lines formed at polling places around Alaska Tuesday night, in part because the party organized few polling places and limited hours. Some people came to vote at Anchorage Grace Church in Trump hats and sweatshirts. Airline pilot Ward Hurlburt’s support for Trump was quieter than that. He said he’s aware that a lot of people don’t approve of Trump’s behavior – the details of which Hurlburt didn’t want to discuss just then.

“We’re in a church,” he said, glancing around him. But as he sees it, a president doesn’t have to have the qualities of a religious figure.

“Probably the biggest reason I’m voting for him is I don’t think he’ll take us into war,” Hurlburt said. “He’s strong. He’s not afraid of fight. But because of that I don’t think we’ll go into war with him.”

Trump is facing 91 criminal charges in multiple cases, including alleged election interference and mishandling of classified documents. Trump’s Alaska campaign leader, Kelly Tshibaka, said she’s not worried that a conviction would hurt his chances of beating President Joe Biden.

“We’ve already had some cases come out against him and instead what I see is that his numbers just keep rising. Even his favorability,” she said. “The polls ahead of Super Tuesday looked surprisingly positive, especially in some of these swing states.”

Biden faces no strong challenger either, but Alaska Democrats will vote in a party-run primary next month.

Alaska Republicans chose Donald Trump over Nikki Haley by an enormous margin in Tuesday’s party-run election.

Trump won about 88% of the vote in the Republican contest. Haley won about 12%.

Trump voters seemed especially enthusiastic at Grace Church in South Anchorage, one of four voting locations in the city.

Retiree Jim White was astounded there was any question who he voted for.

“TRUMP! What the hell?” he said. “Do you think I’m crazy? … Because everything he accomplished was for the nation, for the citizens and for the world. OK?”

White said he only heard of the election the day before, from a friend. Then he drove to three places where he’s voted in the past, in state-run elections. But this was a Presidential Preference Poll, run by the party. Locations and hours were limited.

“People have been trying to vote all day,” said Mike Robbins, supervisor at the Grace Church voting site and vice chair of the Alaska Republican Party. Force of habit, he said, had many people turning out bright and early, even though voting locations were only open 3-8 p.m.

“They’ve been going to polling places around the city since about 8 o’clock this morning,” Robbins said.

About 10,500 Republican voters cast ballots across much of Alaska yesterday.

The party won’t finalize the numbers until next week, but if preliminary results hold, Trump has won all 29 of the delegates Alaska will send to the national convention this summer. Haley has apparently fallen short of the 13% she needed to win any Alaska delegates.

Alaska’s Super Tuesday vote was only for Republicans. Alaska Democrats will choose their nominee next month.

A ballot measure to repeal Alaska’s ranked choice voting and return to a partisan primary has cleared an initial review.

Lt. Gov. Nancy Dahlstrom, who heads the Alaska Division of Elections, announced Tuesday that sponsors of the anti-ranked choice initiative gathered nearly 37,000 signatures — about 10,000 more than necessary. She said the state is still in the process of verifying all the signatures.

Phillip Izon, director of the group sponsoring the repeal, said he doesn’t expect they’ll have any trouble meeting the threshold.

“We did a lot of work on validation, verification. Spent many months on it. So we feel very confident,” he said.

The signatures come from 34 of Alaska’s 40 voting districts – four more than the law requires.

Alaskans for Better Elections is defending the new voting system and campaigning against repeal. Its director, Juli Lucky, said her group heard of anomalies in the signature-gathering process, so they plan to examine the petitions once they’re made public.

“Just kind of auditing the signatures and checking the validity — I think that that will be the next step,” she said.

A second ballot initiative also cleared the initial signature hurdle. It aims to raise the state minimum wage and provide workers with sick leave. Organizers of that effort collected 34,000 signatures from 36 districts.

If the sponsors met the requirements, both measures will be on the ballot in November.