Category: Alaska News

This story was originally published by the Anchorage Press. 

The improbable rise of a long-shot Democratic candidate now has the party positioned to capture the Alaska governor’s mansion for the first time in more than two decades, veteran political observers from across the ideological spectrum said this week.

Jonathan Kreiss-Tomkins, a 37-year-old former state House member from Sitka who’s never run for statewide office, won Alaska’s open primary with 22.5% of votes, according to official results released Monday.

The second-place finisher and the only other Democrat in the field, former state Sen. Tom Begich, dropped out of the race last week — leaving Kreiss-Tomkins, known as JKT, with what insiders say is a clear path to victory amid a splintered Republican field and voter disaffection with incumbent GOP Gov. Mike Dunleavy, who’s term-limited and can’t run again.

Last month, Begich’s campaign had touted analysis by political and polling forecaster Nate Silver that gave his campaign a 71% chance of winning the primary — and Kreiss-Tomkins a 0.0% chance. Prediction markets similarly gave Kreiss-Tomkins long odds.

Now, after a primary campaign that blanketed voters with text messages and sent him to far corners of the state, Kreiss-Tomkins’ political stock is booming and those markets show him as the favorite.

“Jonathan carved 20 points out of thin f—n’ air,” said Joelle Hall, president of the Alaska AFL-CIO, the state’s largest organized labor group, which has endorsed Kreiss-Tomkins. “Everyone else is stuck in another century. JKT is the only one running communications and a campaign that exists in 2026. Everyone else is running a 1990s playbook, and it’s not working.”

Lest you think that’s an opinion held only by his allies, even some of Kreiss-Tomkins’ political adversaries agree.

“He is running a campaign unlike any that has ever been seen in Alaska history,” said Suzanne Downing, the prominent conservative blogger and former spokesperson for the Alaska Republican Party. “He’s running circles around people, because they don’t even know the questions to ask.”

With the Democratic field clear, Kreiss-Tomkins is now poised to also draw support from national groups. The chair of the Democratic Governors Association, which boosts the party’s candidates across the country, issued a statement Tuesday saying the organization “looks forward to working alongside Jonathan to deliver the change Alaskans deserve.”

The Republican Governors Association, meanwhile, has not issued a statement on the Alaska gubernatorial race since primary voting took place last month. Officials there did not respond to a request for comment this week.

Will Republicans ‘rank the red’?

Alaska’s last Democratic governor was Tony Knowles, who left office in 2002. The state has twice as many Republicans as Democrats — some 24% of registered voters to 12% — but nearly 65% of voters are independent, meaning that Democrats can occasionally make competitive runs for statewide office.

Of 17 primary election candidates in the governor’s race, 12 were Republicans, who collectively won some 49.5% of the vote — more than the combined total of 43.3% for Kreiss-Tomkins and Begich.

But many observers say they expect the conservative vote to be split between the three Republicans who advanced to the general election.

Those Republicans include conservative activist Bernadette Wilson, who won 10% of votes in the primary; former Anchorage mayor Dave Bronson, who won 8%; and businesswoman Candi English, who was on the ballot as the running mate to a former Alaska attorney general, Treg Taylor, who was ultimately disqualified from the general election due to violation of the state’s financial disclosure law.

Alaska has a ranked choice voting system that theoretically should allow the top GOP candidate to consolidate the second- and third-choiced votes from supporters of the two lower-finishing Republicans. Supporters of the system say it works best when party candidates cooperate.

But political insiders say that they expect infighting among the Republican campaigns to cause a significant fraction of conservative voters to rank only their favorite candidate and not the others — meaning that some of the votes for the lower-placed Republicans may not help the top GOP candidate in a final tally against Kreiss-Tomkins.

Downing, who’s a friend and supporter of Wilson, is one example. She described Bronson as “pugnacious” and “pigheaded” and said his campaign has been attacking Wilson for weeks through third-party surrogates.

“There’s nothing you could do today to get me to rank Dave Bronson,” Downing said in a phone interview.

Downing and other Republicans noted that if Kreiss-Tomkins is elected, he’s likely to get legislative cooperation from the same type of ruling coalitions that have led the state House and Senate for the past two years — which have tilted Democratic. Primary results suggest those coalitions are likely to persist into next year.

One veteran GOP operative, who spoke anonymously to share frank opinions about the party’s odds in November, also said he was deeply pessimistic about the chances that conservative voters will rank more than one Republican gubernatorial candidate.

He cited the 2022 U.S. House race, in which Republicans Sarah Palin and Nick Begich III traded attacks on each other leading up to the general election. The pair together won more than 50% in the early ranked choice vote count — but ultimately lost to a Democrat in part because nearly 14,000 people who ranked Begich declined to rank Palin, meaning their ballots were “exhausted.”

“I don’t think there’s any way conservatives rank the red,” the operative said. “Dave and Bernadette are going to be Sarah and Nick all over again.”

A spokesperson for Bronson’s campaign, Jesse McCarty, said Bronson was unavailable for an interview but added that “we have made it very clear that we will not speak poorly of Republican candidates publicly.”

“Dave and this campaign will be asking the voters to rank the conservatives,” McCarty said in a text message.

The Alaska Republican Party’s chair, Carmela Warfield, did not respond to requests for comment Tuesday. Wilson did not respond to requests for comment, and a spokesperson for English declined to make her available for an interview.

Kreiss-Tomkins targets moderate voters

Kreiss-Tomkins, meanwhile, was busy campaigning Tuesday. He said he started the morning with an 8 a.m. coffee with a state legislator after working until 2:30 a.m. the night before, then spent the rest of the day on calls and meetings with other donors, business and labor leaders and campaign staff.

“We’re just going to be super heads-down, a heat-seeking missile toward Nov. 3,” Kreiss-Tomkins said in an interview, referring to the general election date. “We just want to focus on the fundamentals and outwork every other campaign, out-raise every other campaign, out-travel every other campaign.”

Kreiss-Tomkins’ primary campaign took him far across the state, from boating down the Yukon River to driving a snowmachine in Alaska’s Northwest Arctic. He also raised more money than any other candidate — though not without drawing criticism for taking hundreds of thousands of dollars from California-based employees of an AI company, Anthropic.

He has been using a texting service that’s allowed him to directly exchange messages with hundreds of voters, he said in an interview last month.

Now that the primary election is over, Kreiss-Tomkins said, he’s planning more outreach to moderate Republicans who are “disillusioned with the Dunleavy era and want change.”

Kreiss-Tomkins has hired national campaign consultants who have supported strident progressives like former U.S. Senate candidate Graham Platner in Maine and New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani. But he noted that one of those consultants has also worked with centrist candidates like independent Nebraska U.S. Senate candidate Dan Osborn, who’s volunteered to help Trump build a border wall.

“I’m not an ideological zealot — I never have been,” Kreiss-Tomkins said.

Underscoring Kreiss-Tomkins’ bid to consolidate support among moderates, he spent part of last week in conversations about taking on a new running mate: Click Bishop, a moderate Republican former state senator who also ran in the gubernatorial primary but finished outside the top four.

Kreiss-Tomkins declined to comment directly on those discussions, but a spokesperson for Bishop, Shannon Mason, confirmed that they took place.

Hall, the labor leader, said she expects Kreiss-Tomkins to make inroads with conservative leaning voters who assume the candidate is more liberal than he actually is because of his relative youth.

“Just because he’s young, they believe that he is less moderate than Tom Begich,” Hall said. “He’s 100% a negotiator. He’s the kind of guy who’s going to bring everybody in a room.”

Downing, the blogger and Wilson supporter, said she hasn’t totally given up hope that her preferred candidate could still come out of the race as the winner.

She’s hoping Bronson can still be convinced to suspend his campaign and consolidate support for Wilson. And she said she also thinks that English, the third GOP candidate, may have to drop out: Her current running mate is Jodi Taylor, the wife of the former attorney general who was disqualified for financial disclosure violations. Jodi Taylor made the same omissions on her financial disclosure — some of the details of her sources of income — that her husband did.

“I see a path,” Downing said. “But it’s a narrower path with Bronson in.”

Disclosure: Kreiss-Tomkins facilitated some early-stage meetings around the revitalization of the Anchorage Press. He has no involvement with the organization today.

The post Amid fractured GOP field, a Democrat could be headed for the Alaska governor’s mansion appeared first on Chilkat Valley News.

The suicide-death rate for young Alaskans hit a 10-year high last year and the rate of suicide attempts has increased over the past decade, state health officials reported.

From 2016 to 2025, there were 174 suicide deaths among Alaska youths under the age of 18 and 4,101 documented suicide attempts, according to a bulletin released by the Alaska Department of Health’s epidemiology section. The median age of those who died was 16, the bulletin said. The fatality rate, 19.2 per 100,000 children aged 10 to 18, was the highest rate since 2016.

Overall, Alaska’s youth suicide rate is nearly six times the nation average, the bulletin said.

Boys were victims in the vast majority of youth suicides over the 10-year period, accounting for 81% of the deaths, and most used firearms. Girls accounted for about three-quarters of the documented suicide attempts, according to the bulletin.

Those statistics point to “the need to prioritize timely follow-up and intervention following attempts among females and efforts to reduce access to highly lethal means (particularly firearms) among males during periods of crisis,” the bulletin said.

For Alaska Native youths, the statistics are especially grim. Over the decade-long period, the suicide fatality rate among Alaska Natives aged 10 to 18 was 47 per 100,000 children, more than twice the state rate. The rate of documented suicide attempts was 1,098 per 100,000 children, also more than twice the state rate, according to the bulletin.

Special care should be used to address the problem among Indigenous youth, the bulletin said.

“The disproportionate burden of suicide among Alaska Native youth underscores the need for prevention strategies that are culturally responsive and community informed,” the bulletin said.

Statistics cited in the bulletin come from the Alaska Violent Death Reporting System and the Alaska Health Facilities Data Reporting system. The bulletin noted that statistics on suicide attempts likely understate the numbers because some attempts do not result in encounters with the healthcare system and therefore probably go unreported.

Suicide is also a major threat for adults in Alaska, state records show.

It was the sixth leading cause of death in the state across all age groups, according to the most recent Department of Healthstatus reportin the Healthy Alaskans program. In comparison, suicide ranks 11thamong causes of death nationally, according to the report.

There are some prevention programs in place in the state.

One is the national 988 crisis line, which in 2025 alone received nearly 44,000 calls from Alaskans.

Other programs are tailored to Alaska Native communities. One of those was designed for the rural Yukon-Kuskokwim region in Western Alaska by the Center for Alaska Native Health Research at the University of Alaska Fairbanks. And the Indian Health Service has a national program called the Zero Suicide Initiative.

While suicides have been inching up over time, that “doesn’t necessarily mean that prevention strategies haven’t been successful,” Ashley Hannigan, a state epidemiologist who helped write the bulletin, said by email.

“It’s difficult or impossible to pin down the number of suicide attempts prevented by programming like the careline/988 or the Zero Suicide initiative,” Hannigan said. “The peak we see in 2025 for youth and adolescent suicide does emphasize the need to focus on youth-specific, and culturally tailored suicide prevention strategies, however.”

One idea for preventing youth suicide emerged this year in the Alaska State Legislature, but it was rejected by the governor.

Lawmakers passed a measure, Senate Bill 41, that would have established mental health guidelines for public schools. Sen. Elvi Gray-Jackson, D-Anchorage, the bill’s prime sponsor, described youth suicide as “a crisis that impacts every community in our state,” and said the bill would expand mental health services to children who need them but might otherwise lack access. 

Gov. Mike Dunleavy vetoed the bill on June 18. In his veto message, he said student mental health was important but that the bill would place the state “in the role of imposing upon school districts to mandate the development of mental health education at a time when districts are already working to meet existing requirements.”

Lawmakers attempted the next day to override the veto, but fell short of votes to do so.

The post Suicide deaths and attempts among Alaska youth continue at high rates, report shows appeared first on Chilkat Valley News.

A three-judge panel of the Alaska Court of Appeals ruled Friday that state prosecutors misled grand jurors who indicted a Whittier resident for allegedly voting illegally.

Had jurors received accurate information, the court said, “the grand jury likely would have declined to indict.”

Tupe Smith, the plaintiff behind Friday’s decision, is one of 11 people — all American Samoans — whom the state of Alaska has accused of criminally violating state law.

Smith had filed a motion to dismiss the case against her, but a state superior court judge ruled against that motion. 

In Friday’s 20-page ruling, the three-judge panel reversed the lower court’s rejection and in the process, it also defined a high standard that prosecutors must meet in order to convict someone of voting illegally in Alaska.

“The state’s prosecution against me and my family has been extremely difficult,” Smith said in a written statement provided by her attorneys on Friday. “I feel vindicated by today’s court decision. But at the same time I worry it will not mean the end of the state’s criminal targeting of the American Samoan community in Whittier.” 

A spokesman for the Alaska Department of Law said in a statement that the department is “reviewing the Court’s decision and evaluating our available options for how to proceed.”

That could include an appeal to the Alaska Supreme Court.

If Friday’s ruling stands, it has the potential to affect the cases of the 10 other Whittier residents accused of voting illegally — and any other noncitizen voting cases that arise in Alaska.

People born in the U.S. territory of American Samoa are Americans, but they’re not considered U.S. citizens by law and are thus ineligible to vote in Alaska. 

Smith and the other defendants have argued that they were given bad information about whether they could legally vote. As a result, while they intentionally voted, they did not knowingly vote illegally. 

Smith ran for and was elected to the local school board in 2022. A subsequent investigation by Alaska State Troopers found she was not a U.S. citizen and thus ineligible to both serve in office and vote in local elections.

Attention on Smith exposed other Whittier residents who had also voted despite being noncitizens.

Smith, who was charged in 2023, was the first defendant to reach trial. The other cases were filed in 2025. 

Alaska’s felony voter misconduct law states that someone violates it if they “intentionally” affirm their citizenship falsely. The state’s misdemeanor for the same crime requires “knowingly” making a false statement while applying for voter registration. 

State prosecutors argued that “knowingly” and “intentionally” have the same meanings in that context.

Smith’s attorneys argued against that position, saying that “intentionally” requires someone to know that they are wrong and to attempt to deceive officials anyway. Defining the terms differently will prevent people from being prosecuted for innocent mistakes, they argued.

That’s more than a hypothetical. 

Since 2022, the Alaska Division of Motor Vehicles has accidentally registered dozens of noncitizens to vote through errors in the state’s motor-voter program. 

Some of those people have voted in state and local elections, according to a list obtained by the Alaska Beacon. 

If the state’s interpretation of the law was upheld, those Alaskans could also be criminally prosecuted despite believing they were voting legally.

But in Friday’s ruling, the appeals court ruled against the state’s interpretation, writing, “we now hold that ‘intentionally’ for purposes of the voter misconduct statute means something different than ‘knowingly.’”

To make that determination, the appeals court examined related laws that use the two terms for different things going back to 1960, when Alaska lawmakers adopted the original version of the state’s voter-misconduct law.

“Here, the scant legislative history that exists suggests that the legislature intended ‘wilfully . . . swears falsely’ to require purposeful or deliberate action that includes a specific consciousness of wrongdoing,” the court wrote.

In subsequent laws, the 1960 word “wilfully” became “intentionally,” and thus, the court concluded, “the legislature appears to have retained the requirement of a specific consciousness of wrongdoing that is distinguishable from mere knowing conduct.”

Attorney Whitney Brown, who represented Smith in oral arguments in front of the court of appeals, applauded the ruling. “We are delighted for Ms. Smith, whose case has always centered on a simple principle: people should not face felony charges for voter misconduct absent proof that they intended to do something wrong,” she said. “The Alaska Court of Appeals’ opinion faithfully applies the law and provides important guidance on how Alaska’s voter-misconduct statute should be understood in future cases.”

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Visitors to Denali National Park will be able to motor over the full park road starting next year for the first time since a landslide made the route impassable in the late summer of 2021, the National Park Service said Thursday.

Construction crews have completed a 475-foot-long bridge that allows vehicles to avoid an ongoing thaw-induced slide at a spot called Pretty Rocks, located about midway along the park’s 92-mile road.

“This is an exciting milestone for Denali and for everyone who has worked over the past five years to restore access to the west end of the park road,” Brooke Merrell, superintendent of Denali National Park and Preserve, said in a statement.

“Building a bridge across an active landslide in one of the most remote and challenging environments in the country required extraordinary collaboration, innovation and determination. We are grateful to the Federal Highway Administration, our project partners and the many people who made this possible, and we look forward to welcoming visitors back to the west end by bus in 2027,” she said.

Visitors on foot and bicycle are now allowed to cross the bridge to travel on the road beyond, the Park Service said. However, a bit more work must be completed to ensure that the road section on the west side of the bridge is ready for vehicle traffic next year.

The bridge project cost about $230 million, officials said. The money came from the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act of 2021, disaster-response funds and other sources.

The Pretty Rocks landslide is one of about 150 documented slides along the route, which is the sole road running through the park. But it is the slide that has caused the most trouble.

It is located at a high point along the road, near the scenic Polychrome Pass area. At the slide site, the rocky slope on one side of the road has been moving gradually for several years. More recently, the movement accelerated, creating maintenance and safety problems. In August of 2021, when large amounts of slope broke away, the Park Service closed the road to traffic.

The park road is generally closed to private traffic beyond the first 15 miles. Most road traffic is by shuttle buses that deliver visitors to hiking and camping sites. The landslide made the road impassable for those buses.

The chosen fix for the problem is the bridge, which passes above the still-moving landslide, along with some work within the road. One feature of the project is the installation of thermosyphons, devices that slow permafrost thaw by releasing heat from the ground.

Thaw of permafrost and melting within rock glaciers — geologic features that are combinations of rock and ice – have been identified as prime causes of the Pretty Rocks slide and other park landslides.

The steep terrain, presence of permafrost and other geologic characteristics made the project complex.

Previously, the Park Service aimed for completion in time to reopen the full road by 2025. Unexpected problems with clay pushed that target to 2026.

During the years of traffic closures at Pretty Rocks, park managers have directed visitors to alternatives. The area beyond Pretty Rocks remained accessible to those willing to hike a detour route down to the valley floor, using a temporary staircase. Customers of lodges just beyond the road’s edge, on private property at a site called Kantishna, were able to travel there by plane. And park managers have emphasized visitor and recreation opportunities in the park’s more accessible frontcountry.

Despite those accommodations, Denali visitation has been reduced during the Pretty Rocks construction years.

In 2019, the year before the COVID-19 pandemic, the park logged about 601,000 visitors. Visitation collapsed by about 90% in the pandemic year of 2020, according to the Alaska Department of Labor and Workforce Development. Over time, visitation began to recover. The total last year was 543,300, a Denali spokesperson said.

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