Republican Bernadette Wilson is again calling on fellow Republicans Dave Bronson and Treg Taylor to drop out of the race to be Alaska’s next governor. That’s after an AARP-sponsored poll showed Democrat Jonathan Kreiss-Tomkins winning the race by 10 percentage points after ranked choice tabulation.
“That poll issues a stark warning to Alaskans,” Wilson said in a social media video Friday. “It shows us that we are at risk of electing a Democrat to the governor's race.”
The poll has fed Democrats’ optimism that they can take back the governor’s mansion for the first time since Tony Knowles left office in 2002.
It would be a startling turn in a state that reelected Republican Gov. Mike Dunleavy by a landslide in 2022 and voted for President Donald Trump by a 13-point margin just two years ago.
“Alaska hasn’t seen a gubernatorial campaign like this in a generation, and the polls are showing it,” Kreiss-Tomkins’ campaign said in a message to supporters Tuesday.
Forecasters are taking notice.
“It is a very strange race,” said Kyle Kondik, the managing editor of Sabato’s Crystal Ball, an election-forecasting outfit housed at the University of Virginia’s Center for Politics.
Earlier this month, Sabato’s Crystal Ball moved Alaska’s governor’s race from “likely Republican” into its “toss-up” category — too close to forecast.
They’re not alone. The Cook Political Report recently moved the race to toss-up, too.
Quantitative analysts are even more bullish on Kreiss-Tomkins: Nate Silver’s forecast model gives Kreiss-Tomkins an 80-plus percent chance of winning, and prediction markets show similar optimism for the Democrat.
Kondik, with Sabato’s Crystal Ball, said Democrats’ unusual opening in the race is due to a variety of factors. Some are nationwide: the president’s party generally loses support in the midterms, and Trump’s approval ratings are well below 40% nationwide. The AARP poll showed Trump with an eight-point negative net favorability rating, with 53% of the 800 likely voters surveyed disapproving of his job performance.
Democrat Tom Begich’s decision to drop out after placing second in the primary plays a big role in Kreiss-Tomkins’ lead, too, Kondik said.
“You've got one Democrat and three Republicans, and there's a possibility that you have an outcome that's sort of similar to what happened with Mary Peltola in 2022,” Kondik said.
That year, Democrat Mary Peltola faced Republicans Sarah Palin and Nick Begich III in the state’s first election using ranked choice voting. Though the Republicans split roughly 60% of the vote in the first round, thousands of Nick Begich voters declined to rank Palin, and Peltola won.
The AARP poll shows exactly that happening in November. It has Kreiss-Tomkins taking 40% in the first round, and winning in the final round by 10 percentage points over Bernadette Wilson — primarily because substantial swaths of Republican voters decline to rank Wilson.
Bronson and Taylor so far haven’t taken Wilson up on her call to drop out. They’re instead urging Alaskans to rank Republicans in hopes of overcoming the lone Democrat’s lead.
“We appreciate Bernadette’s perspective, but we have no intention of stepping aside,” Bronson said in a statement provided by a spokesperson. “There are tens of thousands of Alaskans who voted for someone other than the top vote-getter in the primary. Those voters deserve to have a candidate and a campaign that represents them.”
Despite the 10-point lead for Kreiss-Tomkins in the final round of the poll, it’s a much closer race than the headline numbers make it seem, said pollsters Bob Ward and Matt Hogan, who conducted the bipartisan AARP survey.
That’s because nearly one in five voters — 18% — told the pollsters they were undecided, so they didn’t play a role in the final tabulation.
“When you look at who those undecideds are, they lean considerably to the right,” Ward said in an interview Tuesday.
Voters who ranked no candidate in the first round — the undecideds — favored Trump by more than 30 points, according to the poll. Those who decline to rank beyond the first round tilt the undecided category even further to the right, Ward said.
And sure, Ward said, some aren’t going to vote.
“But I think many are,” he said. “Between now and Election Day, they're going to have to choose which Republican they're going to vote for. So I would look at Jonathan Kreiss-Tomkins and see that 40%, and I would be concerned.”
One of those undecided voters is Allen Bell, who stopped outside a Juneau post office to chat with a reporter. He’ll “probably” rank Republican Treg Taylor first, he said. But since Taylor came in fifth in the primary, Bell isn’t all that optimistic about his chances, he said.
“I'm a little disappointed in the lack of choice that we have,” he said. “I don't really particularly care for any of them.”
He doesn’t like the idea of ranking Republicans, he said. But he’s considering it.
“That's what we have, so I'll deal with it, and I might do so when it comes time to go in and vote,” he said.
