Republican gubernatorial candidate Dave Bronson is staying in the race despite President Trump’s endorsement of another Republican in the race, Bernadette Wilson, Bronson said in an interview Wednesday.
At a rally in Wasilla Tuesday and in posts on Truth Social, Trump urged Alaskans to back Wilson and said Republican candidates should have united behind her.
“She won the primary, and the other two should have dropped out,” Trump said. “And if they’d dropped out, we’d have an easier victory. One of them promised me he would drop out, and two days later he decided to break his promise to me.”
Wilson welcomed the endorsement in a post on social media. She did not respond to an interview request.
In Truth Social posts ahead of his speech in Wasilla, Trump was a bit more specific. In one post, he called Bronson and former Alaska Attorney General Treg Taylor, the third Republican in the race, “lesser candidates.”
In another, he accused Bronson in particular of going back on his word.
In an interview, Bronson said he remembers it differently.
According to Bronson, there was almost a deal. In the days after the August primary, as the deadline for candidates to withdraw from the ballot approached, Bronson said he did agree to drop out on one condition: Taylor would have to drop out, too.
He said he spoke to Trump about it on the phone. Initially, he asked Trump to back him and urge Wilson and Taylor to withdraw, he said. But Trump wasn’t interested.
“He says ‘Well, I want you to get out.’ And the deal was that Treg and I would get out and Bernadette would go forward,” he said. “And I says, ‘OK, Mr. President, I'll do that.’”
Bronson paused his campaign while the deal was pending, he said. He went moose hunting with his son for three or four days, he said, as he awaited a final word on whether Taylor would agree to drop out. He canceled some planned fundraising, he said.
But with the clock ticking and no word from the White House as to whether Taylor had agreed, Bronson resumed campaigning.
“It never happened on the other side. So finally, after two weeks, I started my campaign up,” he said.
Now, with the election less than a month away, Bronson has no plans to drop out, he said.
Bronson took issue with the president’s declaration that Wilson “won” the primary. Though she was the top vote-getting Republican, she trailed two Democrats and came in third with 10% of the vote. Bronson came in fourth with 8%. Taylor, who moved into the final four after the second-place Democrat dropped out, got 7%.
Citing the narrow margin, Bronson insisted he has a path to victory.
“Remember, 90% of the people who voted for conservatives in the ranked choice open primary did not vote for the person that came out as leader,” he said. “All those people, they have to have a place to go.”
Bronson again urged Alaskans to rank all three Republicans on their ballot in hopes of preventing Democrat Jonathan Kreiss-Tomkins, who has led in recent polls, from winning. He said he wished Trump had urged voters to do the same.
Instead, at the rally, Trump called ranked choice voting a “Democrat scam.”
Despite the harsh words from Trump, Bronson said he’s not holding it against the president. But Bronson said he felt differently about what Trump said about Taylor on Truth Social.
“He attacked me, which is, in war, that's — you expect to be attacked,” he said. “He dishonored Treg.”
Despite posing for a photo with him at the White House that features in Taylor’s campaign advertising, Trump said on Truth Social that Taylor was someone he had “never heard of.”
Taylor’s campaign manager, April Gettys, said the former Republican attorney general was “not taking calls” on Wednesday.
She said Taylor planned to release a statement on Thursday.
