Yahoo Finance A Crazier Path to 270: Can Harris Wrest Alaska Away From Trump?
(Bloomberg) -- Under a cold drizzle that hints at the region’s long winter, Beverly Hoffman is busy putting up campaign signs in Bethel, a city 400 miles west of Anchorage, Alaska, only accessible by boat or plane and perhaps best known for its dog race that winds along the Kuskokwim River.
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Bethel's streets are already dotted with placards for Democrat Mary Peltola, who hails from the remote town and in 2022 flipped the state’s sole congressional seat to her party for the first time in nearly 50 years. But Hoffman, an outspoken community activist, is nailing the town’s first sign for Kamala Harris right on top of one for Alaska's Republican Senator Lisa Murkowski from two years ago.
“Lisa’s not running this year, so it’s fine,” Hoffman, 73, said.
Alaskans tend to refer to lawmakers by their first names — Lisa, Mary or Sarah, as in Palin — reflecting intensely local politics. The state has voted for Republican presidential candidates in every election after 1964, but on the rest of the ballot, it's one of the most bipartisan states. Its state legislature is ruled by coalitions of Republicans, Democrats and one independent, and its US congressional delegation is known for bucking party lines.
Now the state has also become an unlikely talking point for Democratic fundraisers and strategists as a small but tantalizing presidential election prize after a poll last month showed Harris trailing former President Donald Trump by just 5 percentage points.
Polling there has been more sparse than in traditional swing states. But in an election year in which crazier things have already happened, it suddenly seemed not impossible for the Harris campaign to scoop up Alaska's three electoral votes, offering an alternative path to the 270 electoral votes needed for the presidency.
A Bloomberg News/Morning Consult poll conducted last month shows Harris and Trump in tight races in the seven states most likely to decide the election. If Harris loses Pennsylvania, North Carolina and Georgia, but wins Arizona, Michigan, Nevada and Wisconsin, she’s likely to have 268 electoral college votes. Alaska’s three would give her the 271 needed to win. Election forecaster Nate Silver last month said his widely followed election model found that this “contingency is possible, albeit unlikely.”
There are sparks of enthusiasm for Harris and her running mate, Tim Walz, whose Carhartt-and-camo appeal resonates in a state of 734,000 people scattered across a land area more than twice the size of Texas. Jessica Cook, the vice chair of the state Democratic party, said President Joe Biden’s decision to step down and endorse Harris sent a jolt of energy through the state. Some of her fellow teachers wear pearls and Chucks sneakers to school in a subtle tribute to Harris’ signature style. Cook says she hears people quoting Walz, suggesting that even the vice presidential candidate has made an impression.
Winning Alaska this year is most likely out of reach for Harris. Its voters have traditionally backed Republican presidential candidates perceived to be friendlier to Alaska’s legacy extraction economy — oil and gas, mining, timber and fish. And it will be hard for Harris, running a national campaign, to replicate Peltola’s win by focusing on uniquely Alaskan issues.
The state is not a key area of investment for the party. The Democratic National Committee has spent only six figures to support the state party's operations and data this cycle, according to DNC officials. Neither Harris nor Walz have plans to campaign there.
John-Henry Heckendorn, a strategist credited by some for pulling Alaska's legislature to the left, said the national party should be paying more attention to his state. He suggested that it’s hard to know what could be achievable for Harris without more investment in the state, maintaining that pundits underestimate Alaskan voters’ openness to a Democratic candidate.
“I doubt you’re going to find an Alaskan who thinks Harris will actually win,” Heckendorn said. “When a Democratic president ultimately does win Alaska — if and when that happens — Alaskans will be as or more surprised than anybody.”
Peltola, meanwhile, faces a tough reelection fight as a Democrat in a Republican-leaning district. The Cook Political Report rates her race a toss-up, and a win is crucial for her party’s hopes to take back the US House.
The congresswoman has kept her distance from Harris. She hasn’t endorsed her and she didn’t go to the Democratic National Convention where Harris formally accepted the nomination. Peltola was one of six Democrats who voted with Republicans to condemn the vice president over her handling of the border.
Peltola is also a very different kind of Democrat. She ran on a platform that highlighted “Fish, Family, Freedom” in 2022 after winning a special election to replace Don Young, the Republican who had represented Alaska in the House for nearly 50 years until he died in office.
Peltola, an Alaska Native, successfully lobbied the Biden administration to approve ConocoPhillips’ Willow Project to drill in the National Petroleum Reserve, amid howls of disapproval from environmentalists — many of them outside the state. At a candidate forum hosted by the Alaska Oil and Gas Association, she began her opening remarks by yelling “Willow!”
That friendliness to the fossil fuel industry is unorthodox for a Democrat, but it has worked in a place where oil and gas production accounted for 64% of the state’s revenue in fiscal 2023, in addition to a corporate and property tax paid by the industry. Alaska's politics also haven’t become as nationalized as in the rest of the country.
Harris hasn’t taken a specific position on the Willow Project; she has dodged that question in the past, and her campaign declined to comment on whether she would support Biden’s approval for the site that aims to begin producing oil in 2029, eventually as much as 180,000 barrels per day.
On other issues, Harris’ agenda sometimes lands differently in Alaska. While nearly two-thirds of Americans say they support a ban on assault rifles, as Harris has proposed, many Alaskans fiercely protect their right to hunt with rifles like the AR-15, which could be included in that category.
Still, Heckendorn, Cook and other local Democrats point to ways the state is changing that will likely benefit Democrats. Around 40% of the population lives in Anchorage, where the party is gaining ground. Alaska’s population is relatively young and diverse compared to other states.
And Peltola has already been helped by the state’s switch in 2022 to a new primary system that sends the top four candidates to the general election, regardless of party. Voters then rank the remaining candidates.
Defenders of the system say it makes sense in a state where more than half of voters are unaffiliated with any party. Scott Kendall, an Alaskan attorney who worked on Lisa Murkowski’s successful write-in campaign after she lost the Republican primary in 2010, said she and Peltola in 2022 were beneficiaries of the model.
“They both prevailed under this system mostly because they are the types of centrist, broad-support candidates that would do poorly in a closed primary,” Kendall said. “The typical partisan frames don't work up here.”
Alaska’s new primary and ranked-choice system is less likely to have an impact on the presidential election because the national parties determine the main candidates. While Robert F. Kennedy’s name will still appear on Alaska’s ballot, even though he exited the race and endorsed Trump, polls suggest that is unlikely to sap enough support from Trump to help Harris.
An initiative on November’s ballot will ask voters whether they want to get rid of the open primary and ranked-choice voting system. Local Republicans are urging people to support the ballot measure and go back to party-run primaries.
Hoffman, the activist in Bethel who proudly wears a Harris-Walz pin on her jacket, concedes that Harris has a harder pitch to win over her community than Peltola does. But she said since Biden passed the baton to Harris, she felt like a darkness had lifted.
“It made me so happy,” Hoffman said, “because all of a sudden I had hope.”
--With assistance from Akayla Gardner and Allan James Vestal.
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