Politics

Republican Nick Begich III maintained his lead over Democratic Congresswoman Mary Peltola after the Division of Elections posted an updated results tally late Tuesday night.

Begich now has about 49% of first-place votes to Peltola’s nearly 46%. That’s a difference of nearly 10,000 votes. If neither of the candidates win more than 50% of first-place votes once all valid ballots are counted, the winner will be determined by ranked choice tabulation on Nov. 20.

Meanwhile, a ballot measure to repeal the state’s open primary and ranked choice voting system remains on track to pass. Though thousands of ballots remain to be counted, yes votes outnumber noes by more than 2,800 votes. That’s a margin of 1 percentage point.

The Alaska Division of Elections is expected to release at least two more result updates: one on Nov. 15 and another on Nov. 20. Tuesday’s included roughly 38,000 new ballots, mostly absentee, early and questioned ballots, plus votes from one Election Day precinct in rural Alaska that had not previously reported its tally. It’s the first large batch of ballots to be added after Election Day as officials process and count votes from within the state and around the world.

The updated results also provide some insight on some key races for state Legislature. The leaders in all races remain unchanged.

Fairbanks Sen. Scott Kawasaki, a Democrat, has increased his lead over Republican challenger Leslie Hajdukovich to more than 350 votes.

And in two key Anchorage House races, Democrats continue to lead. In North Muldoon, challenger Ted Eischeid has widened his margin over incumbent Republican Rep. Stanley Wright to 198 votes. Government Hill and Joint Base Elmendorf-Richardson Rep. Cliff Groh leads by a razor-thin margin, outpacing challenger David Nelson by just 19 votes.

Wasilla Republican Rep. David Eastman continues to trail fellow Republican challenger Jubilee Underwood. Underwood leads by 216 votes.

The results are expected to strengthen the House and Senate’s bipartisan coalitions. Shortly after Election Day, prospective leaders in each chamber announced they’d secured enough seats to form a majority. The House’s leadership would flip from a Republican-led coalition to a mostly-Democratic caucus led by new Speaker Bryce Edgmon, an independent from Dillingham.

It’s not the final word on the election. Alaska’s vote-counting process is slow. That’s due in part to the long window for absentee votes to arrive.

The count now includes nearly 48,000 absentee votes and nearly 69,000 early votes, plus more than 3,800 questioned ballots, which are cast largely by voters who show up at the wrong precinct on Election Day.

How many votes remained to be counted was not immediately clear Tuesday night. The Division of Elections issued nearly 60,000 absentee ballots, and nearly 14,000 had not arrived by Tuesday.

Final counts aren’t expected until Nov. 20, which is the last day for ballots to arrive from overseas. And even then, the winners won’t be official until the Division of Elections completes error-checking and other post-election procedures. State officials plan to certify the election Nov. 30.

Alaska lawmakers expect bipartisan coalitions to control the state House and Senate when the Alaska Legislature convenes in January, but they don’t know who the state’s governor will be.

Gov. Mike Dunleavy’s second term isn’t over until December 2026, but in a series of interviews, legislators say they believe he may be offered a job in the new administration of President Donald Trump, and in interviews, the governor has indicated that he’s open to taking a job with Trump.

“I think the expectation has been that Gov. Dunleavy will take a position with the Trump administration,” said Sen. Bill Wielechowski, D-Anchorage. “I mean, that’s probably the worst-kept secret in Juneau.”

Senate President Gary Stevens, R-Kodiak, said he’s been looking for Dunleavy’s name to be mentioned as a candidate for various cabinet positions, but he hasn’t seen it yet.

In October, Dunleavy told reporter Nat Herz that he hadn’t had a conversation with the president-elect about a job, but that he wouldn’t rule out the possibility.

The governor’s office declined an interview request by email on Thursday and said the governor hasn’t had any discussions with Trump about a cabinet position. A spokesperson referred to a Wednesday TV interview in which the governor said, “I’m more than happy to have a discussion with the President about anything, as long as it can move Alaska forward.”

On Friday, Dunleavy’s social media account shared a video from Trump in which the president-elect said he intends to accelerate development of the long-planned trans-Alaska natural gas pipeline.

“Thank you to your great governor,” Trump said. “We’re going to work together just like we have in the past, and it was a very special relationship, Mike. Thank you very much. I look forward to a long and enduring future relationship.”

If Dunleavy were to leave office, Article III, Section 11, of the state constitution would kick in automatically, and Lt. Gov. Nancy Dahlstrom would become governor. The state’s adjutant general, Torrence Saxe, is currently the No. 3 person in the state’s line of succession, and he would become lieutenant governor. Saxe leads the Alaska National Guard and the state Department of Military and Veterans Affairs.

There wouldn’t be a special election unless Dahlstrom were to also leave office, making Saxe governor.

Wielechowski said that if Dunleavy leaves, it could be a net positive for progress on a variety of issues where lawmakers have significantly different views from the governor.

Last year, legislators overwhelmingly passed a bill that would have permanently increased funding for public schools. Dunleavy vetoed it, and lawmakers failed by a single vote to override that veto.

Dunleavy also vetoed a swath of projects from the Legislature-passed budget and a series of policy bills, some of which passed by wide margins.

“I think the governor has burned a lot of bridges with the Legislature in the last few years,” Wielechowski said. “I think the state’s due for a fresh start there.”

Rep. Andrew Gray, D-Anchorage, offered a similar view on Election Day in a streamed broadcast, saying that if Dunleavy were to join Trump in Washington, “that is a silver lining for Alaska.”

Stevens said he’s trying to stay prepared to work with whoever occupies the governor’s office in January.

“If he’s still here, we’ve got to work with him. He’s the governor, and he stays through the next two years. We’ve got to find a way to make it work, and we haven’t in the past. You know, he’s vetoed our budgets. He’s not agreed with us in so many areas, so that’s a real concern. We’ve got to make sure that we are able to work with him. So I don’t — the last thing I want to do is offend the governor,” he said.

“If you want things to work for Alaska, you’ve got to work together. So we’re prepared to work with whoever the governor is,” said Rep. Louise Stutes, R-Kodiak and the House’s incoming rules chair.

Asked whether Dunleavy had burnt his bridges with the Legislature, Stutes said she doesn’t personally think so.

“My job is to represent my constituents and work with whoever the governor might be, and if he hurt my feelings last year, let’s start over this year.”

A Dunleavy departure wouldn’t be without precedent: former Alaska Gov. Wally Hickel left office in 1969 to become secretary of the Interior for President Richard Nixon.

Nixon fired Hickel from the job after about a year.

During his first term in office, Trump didn’t announce his cabinet picks until late November or early December.

Sen. Löki Tobin, D-Anchorage, said she doesn’t know whether Trump will appoint Dunleavy, and “If I’m looking at a crystal ball, I don’t really have an answer other than that the president cannot appoint their cabinet until Congress is seated, and that means after the inauguration, and so I anticipate on Dec. 15, we will have a budget from Gov. Dunleavy,” she said. “I anticipate when I swear into office, Gov. Dunleavy will still be our sitting governor. And after that, I don’t know what will happen, but either way, I am preparing myself for an administration in the state of Alaska, who is in a different political party than myself and may have different views.”

There are still tens of thousands of votes across the state left to be counted, and some key races remain undetermined. But in the Alaska Legislature, members of bipartisan coalitions in the House and Senate are wasting no time in announcing their leadership and organizing their caucuses.

Lawmakers announced Wednesday that the House would flip from Republican-led majority control. The speaker of the House will be Dillingham Independent Rep. Bryce Edgmon.

“There’s still a little bit of the dust-settling factor in play here, but we’re confident at this point we’ve got enough members to form a majority organization,” Edgmon said Thursday morning.

That means the Legislature as a whole will be more moderate than it has been for the past two years. Though Alaskans voted for Donald Trump this year by a wider margin than four years ago, the trend at the state level runs counter to the rightward shift seen across the country this cycle.

Edgmon said the majority has four key principles it’s organizing around: balanced budgets that don’t overdraw the Permanent Fund, stable funding for public education, reforming the state’s 401(k)-style retirement system and boosting energy development.

Two other leadership posts in the bipartisan coalition would go to moderate Republicans: Kodiak’s Louise Stutes would chair the Rules Committee, and Chuck Kopp of Anchorage would be majority leader.

Right now, Democrats, independents and the two Republicans announced as coalition leaders are ahead in 22 House races. They need 21 to secure control, but there are two Anchorage races where Democrats hold leads of under 100 votes.

Challenger Ted Eischeid leads incumbent Republican Stanley Wright in North Muldoon by 111 votes. And in Government Hill, parts of Northeast Anchorage and Joint Base Elmendorf-Richardson, incumbent Democrat Cliff Groh has a razor-thin lead over Republican David Nelson. The difference in that race is a mere 28 votes.

With those two key races undetermined, House Republican leaders say it’s too soon to say anything definitive about who will hold power next year.

“I just think it may be just a little bit premature,” Wasilla Republican and House Majority Leader Cathy Tilton said by phone Wednesday evening shortly after the multiparty coalition claimed control of the House in a news release. “There’s a lot of votes still out there.”

Chuck Kopp said that as of Thursday afternoon, there are more than 22 members committed to joining the bipartisan caucus. That includes the Anchorage Democrats who hold slim leads and at least one more Republican, who Kopp declined to name.

Kopp said he expects more to join, and coalition leaders are leaving the door open.

“We’re intentionally keeping the invitation open for a good amount of time so that people can hopefully go back to their districts and talk to their leaders and the people they respect, and ask them, ‘How can I best represent you? Should I do it in the minority, or should I do it with a seat at the table in the majority?’” Kopp said Thursday afternoon.

Kopp said he expects the coalition to announce its full membership, including committee chairs, before Thanksgiving.

A bipartisan coalition will also continue to lead the Senate under very similar leadership to the past two years. Kodiak Republican Gary Stevens plans to stay on as Senate president.

“I think we want to address the elections issue as early as we can, and also the funding of education as early as we can,” Stevens said Thursday. “Those are the two big issues right now, but there’ll be a lot of others that come up when the Senate gets together later in December or January.”

The size of the Senate majority is up in the air. Two coalition Republicans from last session will not return to the Legislature, and it’s not clear if their replacements will join the bipartisan group. Wasilla Republican Robert Yundt, on track to defeat David Wilson, did not return messages, nor did Mike Cronk of Tok, who is slated to replace Click Bishop. Another incumbent coalition member, Fairbanks Democrat Scott Kawasaki, has a slight lead in a close race for reelection.

If five or more senators decline to join the coalition, they could form a minority caucus that would guarantee them seats on Senate committees.

A spokesperson for Republican Gov. Mike Dunleavy, Grant Robinson, said in a statement that the governor looks forward to working with “anyone in the legislature who is focused on moving Alaska forward.”

But whether Dunleavy will be in the governor’s mansion is an open question. He has attended campaign events for Donald Trump and congratulated the president-elect late Tuesday night — that’s before the race was called. Four years ago, the Dunleavy administration joined a lawsuit attempting to overturn the 2020 presidential election results in four swing states.

In an interview with Alaska’s News Source on Wednesday, Dunleavy left the door open to joining the Trump administration.

“I have not had the discussions with the President about jobs. I have not had discussions with his people about jobs,” Dunleavy said. “If those discussions come, I’d be certainly interested in hearing what the President is thinking, but that hasn’t happened yet.”

Spokesperson Jeff Turner said Dunleavy “remains fully committed to serving as Governor and moving Alaska forward.”

If Dunleavy does leave, he would be replaced by Republican Lt. Gov. Nancy Dahlstrom, a former corrections commissioner and state lawmaker who represented Eagle River.

Alaska Republican leaders said they’re elated by Tuesday’s election results and hopeful they will create more opportunity for oil drilling and other development on Alaska’s federal lands.

Not only did Donald Trump win back the White House, but Republicans regained control of the U.S. Senate. That means both Alaska senators are back in the majority, increasing their ability to advance their agenda in Congress.

U.S. Sen. Dan Sullivan sees the wins as good for Alaska.

“Those are bipartisan issues that we want to get done here — the King Cove road, ANWR, NPR-A,” he said at an election night watch party. “I mean things that are very bipartisan in Alaska, the Biden administration sought to shut down, successfully.”

Alaska voters opted decisively for the Trump ticket. With nearly all precincts counted, 55% of Alaska voters picked Trump while 40% picked Kamala Harris.

Alaska Republican Gov. Mike Dunleavy also celebrated Trump’s victory. In a livestream Wednesday morning, Dunleavy said the former president was good for the state during his first term, and the governor expects similar priorities in Trump’s second term.

“He sees Alaska’s oil resources, our gas resources, our mining resources, our timber resources, our location on the globe, our military, as assets, not just for Alaska, but as solutions to the country’s problems,” he said.

The Biden administration has until Jan. 20 to try to carry out its Alaska policies. Just Wednesday it issued a decision on the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge that infuriates development advocates. The Interior Department decided to open just 400,000 acres to oil leasing, the minimum required by Congress. The first Trump administration had proposed to open an area three times as large.

U.S. Sen. Lisa Murkowski achieved major agenda wins under the Trump administration, including the law that requires oil leasing in the Arctic Refuge. But her relationship with Trump is rough. She voted to convict him after his second impeachment. Earlier this year she called him flawed “to his core” and indicated he lacks the character to be president. Trump has called Murkowski “disloyal” and in 2022 flew to Alaska to help promote a more conservative challenger.

Murkowski said they can still have a productive term.

“If that just means I need to approach things in a different way, I will do so,” she said during a news conference on Wednesday. “But at the end of the day, regardless of how a given president feels about me, personally or politically, my job, my role, is to make sure that Alaska stands to gain, and that’s what I intend to do.”

Murkowski said with the Senate Republican majority, she could become chair of the Indian Affairs Committee and also chair of the subcommittee that holds the purse strings of the Interior Department.

Alaska’s election results will take some time to come in following Election Day.

Though officials will begin releasing first-round results starting shortly after the polls close at 8 p.m. Tuesday, in close races, there’s only so much Alaskans will know on election night. In any race where no candidate gets 50% of the vote, any victory celebrations will have to wait until at least Nov. 20.

That’s partly due to the state’s long window for absentee ballots to arrive after Election Day. Though they have to be postmarked by Election Day, mail ballots can arrive up to 10 days after Election Day from within the U.S., or up to 15 days for those mailed from outside the U.S., said Brian Jackson, the election program manager for the Alaska Division of Elections. That’s one reason tallies that are reported election night will only include a portion of the ballots cast in the election.

“We’ll count Election Day votes on Election Day, of course. [Also] included in the election night tallies will be the early voting ballots voted through Halloween, … as well as some absentee ballots,” Jackson said.

The exact cutoff for absentee ballots to be counted on Election Day varies by region, Jackson said. It depends on how busy the regional elections office is. But in any case — there will be a significant number of votes that have not been counted.

Those can add up to a significant fraction of the overall total. In 2022, some 60,000 votes were counted after the final report on election night. That’s almost a quarter — 22.7% — of all votes cast in that election.

And while those who are ahead on election night often maintain their lead once all ballots are counted, that’s not always the case.

Looking again at 2022: at 1 a.m. the morning after Election Day, Kelly Tshibaka had a roughly 3,000-vote lead in first-place votes. By the time all the votes were counted two weeks later, Lisa Murkowski had pulled ahead by some 2,000 first-place votes.

(In that race, it didn’t really matter who was in first place.They both made it to the final round of ranked choice tabulation, where Murkowski wound up winning. But it goes to show: votes counted after Election Day can make a significant difference.)

So, for that matter, can the order in which voters rank their choices. All that’s reported on Election Day — and the seven- and 10-day counts after Election Day — are first-choice votes.

If it’s close between the second and third place candidates, or the third and fourth place, a small number of votes can make a difference. So, Jackson said, election officials run the ranked choice tabulation on one day, Nov. 20, to “include as many countable ballots in it as possible.”

There’s not much the Division of Elections can do to speed up the process, Jackson said. The division could tabulate the ranked choice votes more frequently with a change in state regulation, but ultimately, the deadlines for absentee ballots to arrive are set in state law.

“It would take legislation to change this to make it faster,” he said.

All of that said: voters should expect the first results “somewhere in the neighborhood” of 8:30 or 9:00 p.m., Jackson said. The Division of Elections anticipates publishing updated counts every 30 to 40 minutes thereafter, until about 11 p.m., when updates start to slow as officials wait for the state’s rural hand-count precincts to call in their votes, he said.

“Our goal is to try and report 100% of the precincts” on election night, Jackson said.

Jackson also emphasized that the state’s vote-counting process features a variety of safeguards against both technical errors and intentional malfeasance.

Voting machines are tested by a bipartisan board twice ahead of the election to ensure they function properly, he said. Absentee and early votes are counted in secure areas of regional elections offices.

Some polling places in remote communities failed to open, or opened late, during the primary election in August, leaving hundreds unable to vote in that election. In 2022, some ballots didn’t arrive from rural Alaska precincts until after the general election had been certified.

Jackson said the division has plans in place to ensure that people across the state are able to vote if polling places or election workers are unavailable. He said the division “works very hard to check in with our workers ahead of Election Day.”

At the same time, Jackson said, “things do happen.” Election workers may get sick or be otherwise unavailable. A building where voting was supposed to take place may be inaccessible.

“If something like that were to happen, we would try and reach out to a community partner, someone that we could get additional materials to, and get somebody in the community to kind of raise their hand and and do what they can to ensure that Alaskan voters are able to vote on Election Day in their community,” Jackson said.

There have already been some missteps ahead of Election Day. The Anchorage Daily News reported that more than 90 voters at absentee-in-person voting locations in Dillingham, Aniak and King Salmon were given the wrong ballots during the early voting period, listing judges for the Fourth Judicial District rather than the correct Third Judicial District. Division of Elections Director Carol Beecher said the division would contact the voters and allow them to either cast new ballots or have their already-cast ballots counted with the exception of the incorrect judicial races.

After Election Day, the state has safeguards in place to ensure votes are counted accurately, Jackson said. The Division of Elections also details the checks on its process in a document posted on its website.

Boards that determine whether absentee and questioned ballot voters are qualified are bipartisan, Jackson said, and observers are allowed at every stage of the process. Jackson says no part of the process occurs behind closed doors.

“There can be many eyes watching the process, being a part of the process, et cetera,” Jackson said.

There’s also a post-election audit conducted by the State Review Board. Jackson said the body is typically made up of 10 to 12 members, featuring at least two members from each of the two major parties. During that process, Jackson said, officials hand-count a random precinct’s ballots from each state House district to make sure the machine’s count matches the human count. If it’s off by more than 1%, all ballots would be counted by hand.

The process is meant to catch systematic counting errors in the tabulators used at most precincts, but a full hand-count has never been necessary since post-election audits began in 1998, Jackson said.

Though the final count is expected Nov. 20, the results are unofficial until the State Review Board certifies them. The target date for certification is Nov. 30.

Jackson said the board works on consensus: there’s “not really a collective vote at the end” to determine whether the review board should certify the election, he said.

“The board really works as a team,” he said. “Everybody trusts the work that everybody else is doing in the room. We share information with each other — issues that might come up — so everybody’s in the know, because they all sign off on each other’s work at the end, certifying the election.”

State law says the director of the Division of Elections “shall certify” the winners after the review board completes its work.

KTOO will carry Alaska Public Media’s live state election coverage from 9 to 11 p.m. on Tuesday. That follows special live election coverage from NPR with all the highlights from around the country.

Spending in Alaska’s U.S. House race has exceeded $40 million, putting it near the top of the list of the most expensive House races in the country.

The fundraising operations of Democrat Mary Peltola and Republican Nick Begich haven’t been slouching. Combined, they’ve raised a total of more than $13 million, with Peltola, the incumbent, outraising Begich five to one.

But that sum is dwarfed by the $28 million that’s come from political committees and other groups buying their own ads and otherwise trying to convince you to vote for or against one of the Alaska candidates. The total of the independent spending isn’t just big in comparison to what the candidates have raised. It’s big on a national scale.

“I was actually really shocked that Alaska is the fourth race in terms of Super PAC spending this cycle,” said Sarah Bryner, research director for OpenSecrets, which tracks money in politics. “This one is seen as a gettable win for the Republicans, and that’s not common this cycle, and so they’re going to do what they can to pick that up, presuming that they will also lose some of their races in other places.”

Democrats are trying just as hard to keep the seat.

The money is an indicator of how uncertain the outcome in the Alaska race is, and how important each seat is in a closely divided Congress. Alaska isn’t a swing state in the Presidential election, but it could swing control of the U.S. House.

The outside spending is almost divided evenly between Peltola and Begich. It comes to more than $13 million for each side, most of it spent on negative advertising.

Bryner noticed something else interesting about the outside groups spending on the Alaska race: Most are part of the national party infrastructure, like the Republican and Democratic congressional campaign committees.

“It is pretty wild, actually, that the funding for this is almost entirely the party committees, or their related Super PACs. Because that’s not normal,” she said. “Usually you have some other PAC involved, some interest or, you know, the oil industry or something. But this is clearly just the two parties squabbling over who’s going to get this seat, and very little other spending.”

(The “other” spenders include some deep pockets, though. Vote Alaska Before Party, which is working to reelect Peltola and previously helped Republican Sen. Lisa Murkowski, has spent more than $8 million on the 2024 House race. And Fairshake PAC, representing the cryptocurrency industry, has spent nearly $2 million to promote Peltola.)

The other reason the Alaska race is attracting so much money is that there aren’t a lot of other races that are worth investing in. Political Science Professor Bernard Tamas at Valdosta State University said that’s a trend that’s been building for 50 years.

“it’s gotten really extreme, with only a handful of districts that the major parties actually consider competitive,” he said.

Gerrymandering is a factor, he said. In many large-population states, district lines are intentionally drawn to favor one party or the other.

“But there are a number of others that actually might be even larger in terms of what’s leading to this,” he said, citing demographics, education and economic variation.

He said voters are sorting themselves into ideologically similar areas as they look for jobs and choose to live in urban or rural communities.

But Alaska, with its one U.S. House seat, can’t be gerrymandered for a federal race, and its House member represents people from across the spectrum.