Fractured GOP field, candidate's improbable rise could clear path for a Democrat in Alaska governor's mansion

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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 fuckin' 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.