By: James Brooks, Alaska Beacon
Wasilla Republican Sen. Mike Shower will run for lieutenant governor alongside Republican gubernatorial candidate Bernadette Wilson, the two announced Tuesday night in Big Lake.
Wilson is the first of Alaska’s 10 governor candidates to announce her running mate.
The other nine candidates include former Democratic Sen. Tom Begich of Anchorage and eight Republicans: former state Sen. Click Bishop of Fairbanks; former Alaska Revenue Commissioner Adam Crum; current state Sen. Shelley Hughes of Palmer, Lt. Gov. Nancy Dahlstrom of Eagle River; Matanuska-Susitna Borough Mayor Edna DeVries; podiatrist Matt Heilala of Anchorage; former teacher James William Parkin IV of Angoon; and Bruce Walden of Palmer. Former Alaska Attorney General Treg Taylor is also expected to file for the office.
Current Rep. George Rauscher, R-Sutton, said he will run for Shower’s seat in the state Senate. Rauscher previously ran for Senate in 2018 and said he put his name in “one minute after Bernadette stated it was Shower.”
By phone, Wilson said the lieutenant governor has two jobs: taking care of the state seal, and taking care of elections.
“The Division of Elections is incredibly important and too important to get passed off to who is the politically expedient candidate,” she said.
Wilson said she believes “election integrity and the ability to vote at the ballot box is the very foundation of the Republic” and said that Shower is the right person to fix problems with voting in rural Alaska, an unusually large voter roll, and slow-to-arrive results.
“I felt very confident that Sen. Mike Shower has the knowledge in that area. It is an area that he is passionate about, which is the first step in solving any problem, and he’s worked on that extensively. So I felt that that was incredibly important and made him the best choice for Alaska’s next lieutenant governor,” she said.
Shower served over 20 years as a pilot in the U.S. Air Force and currently works as a commercial cargo pilot.
Shower was originally appointed to the Senate in February 2018 to replace Mike Dunleavy, who held the seat until resigning to run for governor. Elected on his own merits later that year and re-elected in 2022, he has repeatedly introduced proposals to make changes to the state’s elections system.
His first proposal was introduced in 2019 related to election security protocols, before President Donald Trump began lying about fraud in the 2020 election.
Currently the Senate’s minority leader, he has regularly re-introduced legislation related to the state’s elections system and has frequently been a key figure in end-of-session negotiations on the topic. Thus far, the Legislature has been unable to pass significant changes.
As a member of the Senate, Shower has consistently endorsed the idea of a large Permanent Fund dividend, going so far as to propose a statewide tax in order to pay for it.
Wilson said that she and Shower are confident in their ability to win the governor’s race, but if they finish behind another Republican in the August primary, they will withdraw and throw their support behind the leading Republican.
Under Alaska’s current voting system, all candidates for the same office run in the same race, regardless of political party. The top four-vote getters advance to the general election, where Alaskans use ranked choice voting to pick the ultimate winner.
Wilson, one of the leaders of a campaign to repeal that system, said she believes “that when you’ve got multiple people on the ballot of any party, it leads to so much confusion, it leads to voters only ranking one at the end of the day. … I think it’s very arrogant to say, Well, I’m not the top vote getter, but I’m going to stay in anyways. I just don’t think that that’s appropriate.”
