On election night in 2022, Walter Featherly led Alaska House District 11 with 45.4 percent of the first-choice vote. Republican Julie Coulombe had 38.6 percent. Republican Ross Bieling had 15.4 percent.

Together, the Republicans had most of the vote. Separately, they were seven points behind.

Coulombe won after Bieling was eliminated and his ballots were counted again. Enough of his voters ranked her second to put her over the top. Their united front worked, and the seat stayed Republican.

Bieling had run before and lost. He finished third in the top-four primary and third again in November, never close to winning. Without him on the general election ballot, Coulombe likely starts with a majority in a Republican district. Instead, his campaign collected votes that had to be handed back to her after Election Day, after no little expense, and minus the ones lost along the way.

Coordination saved the seat, but it was a salvage operation. And salvage is expensive.

Economists call this rent dissipation. It means spending money fighting over a prize that does not get any bigger. The seat still exists when the election ends. But the campaign money is spent.

When two candidates from the same party face each other and nobody else can win, every dollar spent buys the party exactly zero additional seats. District 11 was worse. Two Republicans split their voters while an unaffiliated candidate had a real chance to win. That spending could have cost Republicans the seat.

Ranked-choice voting does not make a third-place candidate disappear. When he is eliminated, his ballots split three ways. Some move to the other Republican. Some move to the opponent. Some are set aside because the voter ranked nobody else.

The system calls those exhausted ballots. I call them votes that counted until they became inconvenient.

Avoiding that requires both Republican campaigns to persuade their voters to rank the other Republican second. Some never will.

In District 11, 429 ballots were exhausted. Coulombe still won, but a few hundred different choices could have sent someone else to Juneau. Republicans made a safe seat depend on those second choices, then spent money teaching voters how to rescue them from a problem Republicans created.

A Republican-against-Republican campaign makes that harder because the money is spent attacking another Republican. That is the product it buys. Every dollar spent convincing your voters that the other Republican is unacceptable is a dollar spent convincing them to leave the second line blank. We are not just wasting money. We are spending it to manufacture the exhausted ballots that beat us.

The same thing happened in Fairbanks, and there it was on purpose. Bart LeBon had won House District 31 by a single vote in 2018. In 2022 he faced Democrat Maxine Dibert and a second Republican. When another Republican voter in a public Facebook thread urged people to rank the red, that candidate answered: “I’m telling people to only vote for me since there are only three of us.” She took nearly 25 percent of the August primary vote.

Dibert won the seat in November.

The exhausted ballots that beat us in Fairbanks were not an accident or a misunderstanding of the system. They were the strategy. Donors of both candidates paid for it in money - and the entire state paid for it politically.

Democrats faced the same problem in Anchorage House District 18, but managed it better. Cliff Groh and Lyn Franks told their supporters to rank the other Democrat second, and it worked.

Two years later, with no second Democrat running, Republican David Nelson beat Groh by 22 votes. That does not mean District 18 belonged to Republicans. It proves the seat was competitive. Democrats won it in 2022 because they did a better job putting their divided vote back together. Maybe we should learn from that.

Neither District 11 or 31 were an isolated cases. Alaska Republicans keep spending other people’s donation money fighting each other. Not fighting Democrats.

Fighting each other.

Haven’t we figured it out yet?

A conservative who campaigns on smaller government, tighter budgets and respect for other people’s money ought to apply those rules to himself. If the numbers show he cannot win, and staying in wastes donor money while putting a Republican seat at risk, getting out is not surrender. It is fiscal discipline.

A candidate cannot complain about sitting legislators wasting other people’s money, then burn through his donors’ money, and the other Republican’s, in a race he cannot win. The dollars come from donors instead of taxpayers, but the principle is the same. Staying in is not conservative. It is ego, …paid for with OPM

Donors have almost no control once the money is given. They own no part of the campaign, receive no refund for mismanagement and recover nothing after a loss. The check is gone, but the donor list survives.

Names, giving histories and response rates remain valuable after the election. Consultants and future campaigns use that list to raise more money. The one lasting asset created by a losing campaign does not belong to the people who funded it.

Vendors get paid whether the campaign was needed or not. Some are paid based on how much is spent, so bigger buys mean bigger checks. The candidate usually risks his name rather than his money, and even a loss can build recognition for another run. The donor takes the loss. Everyone else may still walk away with something.

Small-dollar fundraising spreads that loss so widely that nobody has enough at stake to demand answers. The person who gave $50 will not audit the campaign, and neither will the other 500 people who gave $50.

The damage does not stop at the district line. A safe Republican district should free the party to work elsewhere. Volunteers can help in a close race. Donors can support a candidate who needs it. Party leaders and incumbents can focus on seats that may decide the majority. A same-party fight reverses that. Instead of helping the caucus, the safe district drains it.

Same-party challenges still serve a purpose. In a safe district, another Republican may be the only person who can hold an incumbent accountable. Push consolidation too far and bad incumbents become permanent. I don’t want that either.

It is also not always clear who should leave. Ranked-choice voting counts first choices before broader support, so a candidate acceptable to most voters can still be eliminated early. District 11 was clearer because Bieling trailed badly in both elections, but not every race is that simple.

Some donors may give because they personally believe in a candidate or enjoy the fight. That is not how campaigns ask for money. They say the seat matters and the contribution could change the outcome. They sell it as an investment in winning.

Fighting your own people is not winning.

In a divided Republican field, the pitch can be turned upside down. A contribution to a third-place Republican may change the outcome against the party the donor thought he was helping.

Every candidate qualified under the same rules and had every right to run. Most believe they are the best person for the job. The problem is that each one thinks the other should leave, and nobody weighs what that decision costs the party, or ultimately, the State.

Call it ambition if you want. But the better word is ego.

District 11 in 2022 shows the fallback can work. Two Republicans who could not agree on who should run at least agreed on what to tell their voters, and it saved the seat. But coordination did not prevent the mistake. It cleaned up after it.

Republicans made a safe district competitive, spent a full general election putting it back together and ended where they started. They kept a seat they should have held all along and handed the bill to donors who never agreed to pay it.

Will we ever learn? Ego driven candidates are not good for Alaska.

Conservatives MUST rank until we get rid of RCV. Exhuasted ballots hurt us. And candidates must tell their followers to rank them first, but rank fellow republicans second and/or third.

I spent a day at Pikka last week. They told me we were the first Alaska legislators to visit the field since first oil. Pikka is the largest oil development in Alaska in more than twenty years, much of it sits on state land, and the State has a direct financial interest in every barrel that comes out of it.

Pikka may be the beginning of a renaissance on the North Slope.

The field is about two hours west of Deadhorse, and you spend most of that drive watching nothing go by. Flat country in every direction. I read the numbers the night before: 400 million barrels over the life of Phase 1, somewhere between $3 billion and $4 billion invested, 80,000 barrels a day at plateau. None of it meant the same thing once I was standing there. The pads are big. The tundra is bigger.

Repsol and Armstrong Energy drilled the discovery well in 2013. The Horseshoe discovery in 2017 confirmed this was part of a much larger Nanushuk play, and that year the U.S. Geological Survey estimated a mean 8.7 billion barrels of undiscovered, technically recoverable oil in the formations it studied. For years we had been told the North Slope was winding down. Prudhoe was old, production was falling, the big discoveries were behind us.

Pikka said otherwise.

Santos and Repsol now own it 51 and 49. Final investment decision came in August 2022, drilling started in 2023 and first oil came May 18. By August the field was producing about 23,000 barrels a day and had loaded its first 450,000-barrel cargo at Valdez. Thirteen years from a discovery well to a tanker.

Rig 272 has a 750,000-pound hook load, three Caterpillar engines and can rack more than four miles of drill pipe. The three modules together run just shy of 10 million pounds of steel.

And the rig moves itself.

When it finishes a well it drives to the next one. Instead of laying gravel across the tundra to reach more of the reservoir, they hold a small surface footprint and drill out underneath it. One Pikka well runs 27,000 feet. More than five miles from a single surface location.

I watched the driller work. A machine fed pipe up the rig while the crew staged it for the next run, and the rig can build and break down pipe strings while drilling continues. Very little wasted motion.

What struck me most was where the people are. The operations center sits miles from the rig, and the reason is safety. If something goes badly wrong on site, the people running the controls are not sitting on top of it. But automation does not replace a man walking through a facility because of what he hears and smells and sees. That is the same thinking I lived with for thirty years in a cockpit. Automate what a machine does better, and keep a human in the loop.

We went through the Nanushuk Grind and Inject facility, probably the part of the trip I enjoyed most. They take the big rocks from the rig, crush them to dust, mix them into a slurry and inject it into a permitted underground formation. Before that facility was built, Pikka trucked its waste rock to Deadhorse, a ten- to twelve-hour round trip in summer. Now nothing sits in a pit on the tundra.

They let me sit in the operator’s chair. After a career in the left seat of 747s, I will admit I liked it more than I should have. Same instincts. Watch the screens, know your limits, understand what every valve does before you touch anything.

What comes out of a well is oil, gas and water mixed together. The processing plant separates them. The oil goes into the existing North Slope system, into TAPS and south to Valdez. The water goes back down to hold reservoir pressure and push more oil toward the wells. The gas is used for fuel or put back underground. On the Slope we have been reinjecting gas for decades because there has never been a way to move most of it to market.

The piece I cannot stop thinking about sits at Oliktok Point on the Beaufort coast. The seawater treatment plant is about 145 meters long and processes roughly 100,000 barrels of seawater a day, filtering it and stripping out oxygen and sulfates before it goes inland and eventually back underground. Inside it is a maze of pipes, valves and gauges. It was built overseas, with engineering teams in Alaska, India, Malaysia and Norway, and moved across the ocean as a barge. Crews at Oliktok built its permanent berth, and when it arrived they ballasted it down and settled it into place.

They sank it on purpose. Well, technically they ballasted it.

Either way, they built a huge industrial plant halfway around the world, moved it across the Pacific into the Arctic, put it where they wanted it and settled it onto the bottom. It is designed to stay about 25 years.

Safety shows up in small ways out there. Exterior doors at the plant open into steel-bar enclosures they call bear cages. You step into the cage, check for polar bears, then head for your truck. The seawater intake is protected to keep seals out, and the water is drawn in slowly enough that fish can swim away.

A project this size is easy to talk about in totals. Billions of dollars, hundreds of millions of barrels, miles of pipe. But somebody still had to figure out what happens when a seal swims toward the intake, or how to protect workers from polar bears. That is what an oil field really is. Thousands of problems somebody had to solve.

Santos says Pikka Phase 1 should put roughly $250 million into the state treasury over the coming year at conservative prices, and closer to $7 billion over its life. Those numbers matter. Alaska still runs on oil revenue, and every new barrel through TAPS helps carry the cost of that pipeline. But the big numbers only happen because somebody worked out the small ones. Where do the cuttings go? How do we hold reservoir pressure? How slowly does seawater have to enter an intake so a fish can get away?

Half a foot per second. In a multibillion-dollar project, that may be the number that impressed me most.

Every session we vote on oil tax policy. We argue over revenue forecasts, decline curves and what a barrel will be worth eighteen months out. We do that in Juneau, hundreds of miles from the field, using spreadsheets built by people who mostly have not been there either. I am not saying the spreadsheets are wrong. I am saying a number on a page and a plant sitting on the floor of the Beaufort Sea are two different things, and you understand the first one better after standing next to the second.

It matters at home, too. Santos says about 95 percent of its North American employees live in Alaska and roughly 80 percent were hired here. Construction put thousands to work, the operation supports roughly 400 long-term jobs, and Santos spent about $59 million on three projects in Nuiqsut.

And this is one drill site. Santos is already looking past it, with a 3D seismic survey at Quokka and the Stirrup 2 well at Horseshoe both planned for the winter of 2026-27. Altogether the company holds about 1.7 million acres under lease in Alaska.

For years we heard the North Slope was dying and Alaska oil was a story about managing decline. Then somebody drilled another hole. Pikka is producing. Willow is about half built, with first oil expected in 2029. There is still an enormous amount of oil up there, and people are still willing to spend billions to find it.

We are not reading the last chapter of Alaska oil. We may be reading the first few pages of the next one.

And with that oil comes gas. A lot of gas. It goes right back down the hole for want of a pipeline, while Southcentral prepares to import gas from overseas. We are sitting on top of the answer and pumping it back underground.

New oil means new gas. Maybe it is time to stop storing our future. It is time to build the line.

#BuildTheLine

Seventeen people ran for governor of Alaska last Tuesday.

Four of them will be on your ballot in November. Two Democrats and two Republicans.

Supporters of ranked choice voting and the jungle primary told us this system would give voters more choice and clearer results. Let’s look at what it actually gave us.

This system does not produce clarity. It produces arithmetic.

Most Alaskans remember the 2022 special election for Congress. Mary Peltola beat Sarah Palin after Nick Begich was eliminated in the first round.

Then mathematicians went back and studied the actual ballots. Begich would have beaten both of them.

Jeanne Clelland, a professor of mathematics at the University of Colorado Boulder, ran the numbers from the ballots Alaskans marked. Against Peltola one on one, Begich wins with about 52 percent. Against Palin one on one, he wins with about 61 percent. He beat every opponent head to head, yet he was the first of the final three eliminated.

The simplest way to say it is this. Among voters who marked a second choice, Begich won an overwhelming share. The system threw those votes out before counting them.

Mathematicians call a candidate who beats every opponent one on one the “Condorcet winner.” Clelland found Begich was the Condorcet winner in 2022, and Palin the Condorcet loser. The candidate who could beat either opponent was eliminated first. The one who could beat neither made the final round.

That was not voters filling out ballots wrong. Those ballots did exactly what voters told them to do. The result came from the counting method itself.

Two other researchers, Adam Graham-Squire and David McCune, studied the same ballots and found something stranger. Their analysis showed Peltola could have lost that election by getting more votes. Under certain changes in support, gaining supporters could have cost her the race.

They also found what mathematicians call a “no-show paradox.” Some voters could have gotten a result they preferred by staying home. According to the researchers, Alaska in 2022 appears to be the first American ranked choice election ever documented to produce that outcome.

Read. That. Again. We built an election system where showing up to vote could work against the result a voter wanted.

I have said before that ranked choice voting lets an algorithm decide our elections. That is not just a campaign line. When it takes a peer reviewed study to explain why the strongest candidate lost, we have made voting harder than it needs to be.

Ranked choice voting was sold to Alaskans with a simple promise. No more winners with less than half the vote.

That is not what happened.

The Division of Elections reported Peltola with 91,266 votes and 51.48 percent in the final round. But that percentage was figured against the 177,292 ballots still active at the end, not against every ballot Alaskans cast.

Thousands of Alaskans ranked only one candidate. When that candidate was eliminated, those ballots had nowhere to go. The state counted 11,243 of them as exhausted.

Measure Peltola’s 91,266 votes against the 188,582 ballots active in the first round and she finishes at 48.40 percent. That is Clelland’s calculation, using the state’s own report.

Under half. The one thing this system promised to fix is the thing it failed to do.

Now go back to Tuesday.

Under the old system, each party held its own primary and one candidate came out of it. That primary was a filter. It was not glamorous or fun, but it did a job. It took a crowded field and narrowed it to a simpler choice before November.

The 2020 ballot measure removed that filter and replaced it with an open top four primary. Every candidate runs together and the top four advance no matter their party.

That is how seventeen candidates go into a governor’s primary and the November ballot comes out two Democrats and two Republicans.

Defenders will say this is rare. Graham-Squire and McCune examined 182 American ranked choice elections held between 2004 and 2022 and found only two that failed to elect the head to head winner.

One was Burlington, Vermont, in 2009.

The other was Alaska.

But rare is not the same as never, especially when you live in one of the two places it happened. Burlington repealed ranked choice voting after theirs.

Ballot Measure 2 is on the ballot this November. A yes vote repeals ranked choice voting and the open top four primary that came with it.

I am voting yes, and my reason is simple. An election should make the voter’s job easier and the result easier to understand, not require a mathematics paper afterward to explain what happened. This system does not do that.

Vote YES on 2. End the mess.

Until that vote is counted, these are still the rules governing every race on that same ballot.

We used to get a binary choice. Now we get a menu. If two of those four names are more acceptable to you than the other two, and for most Republicans they will be, rank them both, because a ballot that stops after one name stops mattering after one round.

Marking only one name does not give that candidate extra support. Ranking someone second does not take a vote away from your first choice.

Eleven thousand Alaskans found that out the hard way in 2022.

You can dislike the rules and still know how to use them. We lose this race in the third round or we don’t.

That part is up to you, not to them.

_Sources

_{Alaska Division of Elections, 2022 Special General Election RCV Tabulation, August 16, 2022.}

_{Jeanne N. Clelland, “Ranked Choice Voting and Condorcet Failure in the Alaska 2022 Special Election,” The Mathematics Enthusiast, Vol. 23, No. 3.}

_{Adam Graham-Squire and David McCune, “A Mathematical Analysis of the 2022 Alaska Special Election for US House,” arXiv 2209.04764.}

Zero.

That same year, 562 fires burned more than three million acres. Over the five years leading up to it, about 92 percent of the Division of Forestry’s budget was spent preparing for fire and fighting fire. We eventually renamed the division to match what it had become. We are not really running a forestry program in Alaska.

We are running a fire department that happens to own a lot of trees.

That is backwards, it is expensive, and it is not what our Constitution tells us to do. Article VIII says the state should develop its resources and make them available for maximum use consistent with the public interest. Section 4 is even clearer:

Fish, forests, wildlife, grasslands, and all other replenishable resources belonging to the State shall be utilized, developed, and maintained on the sustained yield principle, subject to preferences among beneficial uses.

Forests are in that list by name, right next to fish and wildlife. And the word is shall. We understand sustained yield when we talk about salmon, moose, and caribou. It means managing a resource so it keeps producing, and using what it produces without destroying what comes next. I do not know why we decided forests should be treated differently.

From fiscal year 2013 through 2022, state timber sales brought in about $6.6 million. That is the whole decade. The 2019 fire season alone cost the Division of Forestry $224.9 million. Add the federal share and the total topped $300 million. So, we pay the fire bill either way. We just turn down the timber revenue first. In a bad summer, Alaska can spend more fighting fire in a few weeks than our timber program returned in a decade.

We have three state forests: Haines, Southeast, and Tanana Valley. Together they make up about two percent of state land. There is no Southcentral state forest. The fastest growing part of Alaska, with the people, highways, ports, and rail needed to support an industry, sits in the middle of a landscape hammered by spruce beetles, yet we do not have one acre of designated state forest here.

The beetles took about a million acres on the Kenai in the 1990s and millions more across Southcentral. Nobody harvested most of that timber. The beetles took it. Dead spruce does one of two things. It rots, or it burns. There is no third choice where it stands there forever being scenery. When it burns, it burns where people live. I am not arguing against spending money to defend those homes and communities.

I am asking why we wait until the forest is on fire before we decide it is worth managing.

The areas around our communities are also the areas we can reach. We can thin them, harvest them, reduce fuel around homes, and put usable timber into the economy at the same time. They are also the areas people see from the road, which is part of the reason this argument gets emotional. Cutting trees is visible. A million acres of beetle-killed timber is easier to ignore until the smoke shows up.

If carbon is your concern, follow the carbon. A tree that rots eventually gives its carbon back to the air. A tree that burns does it much faster. A tree we turn into lumber can spend generations sequestered in a house. Every board we mill here is also one we do not have to haul fifteen hundred miles from Washington or British Columbia. Alaska is covered in trees, yet we import most of the lumber we use to build houses. We pay for the lumber, pay to ship it north, burn the fuel to get it here, and then wonder why building a house costs so much. There is no version of taking climate seriously in Alaska that includes shipping wood past our forests.

Managing forests helps wildlife too. Moose need the young willow, birch, and aspen that come back after fire or harvest. The big Kenai fires of 1947 and 1969 created some of the best moose habitat Alaska has ever had. Fish and Game says moose numbers tend to peak about fifteen to twenty years after a burn and then decline as the forest matures. Other wildlife need older stands. That is the point. We need a mix, and management gives us one instead of letting beetles and lightning make every decision.

Responsible development does not mean cutting everything down. It means taking what the land can produce without destroying its ability to produce again. Stay within the allowable cut. Protect salmon streams. Leave nutrients on the ground. Replant where necessary and cut in patches where it makes sense. Most of those protections are already in Alaska law. Nobody is talking about turning Southcentral into one giant clear-cut.

We have also removed one of the biggest barriers that kept Alaska timber out of Alaska homes. In 2023, the Legislature passed and the Governor signed SB 87, creating the Alaska Lumber Grading Program. Before that, small Alaska mills faced expensive outside grading requirements. Now Alaska lumber can be graded here and used to build Alaska homes.

The Governor signed that bill at Papoose Milling in Big Lake, in my district. Andrew Traxler owns the place and talks about managing our forests through sustainable harvest with an eye toward natural regrowth. That is the industry we are talking about. Not some multinational company clear-cutting its way across Alaska. A guy in Big Lake with a mill, buying Alaska timber, employing Alaskans, and selling lumber that can go into an Alaska house. I was proud to be a cross-sponsor of that bill.

The market is here. What is missing is reliable timber supply and access to it. A mill cannot buy timber the state will not sell, and it cannot harvest a stand it cannot reach. That is why roads and access matter. A road is not the end of a forest. It can be the difference between a stand somebody harvests and replants and a stand nobody touches until beetles, disease, or fire manage it for us.

We can keep spending hundreds of millions of dollars in a bad fire year defending communities from fuel we refused to manage, while importing lumber from Canada and the Lower 48 to build the houses we are defending. Or we can do what Article VIII actually tells us to do: utilize, develop, and maintain our forests on sustained yield.

Grow it here. Cut it here. Mill it here. Build with it here. Put the carbon in the wall instead of the sky, give the moose something to eat, give local mills something to mill, and keep more of the money in Alaska.

We are going to spend it either way. The question is whether we get a house out of it.

Ballot Measure 1 says it only caps what individuals can give a candidate at $2,000.

It does not cap what a wealthy candidate can spend on himself. The Supreme Court settled that years ago. It does not cap what an outside group can spend independently. That is another court case called Citizens United.

So if Measure 1 passes, does the money leave Alaska politics?

No. It moves.

It moves out of the candidate’s account, where you can see it and hold someone accountable for it, and into places where you cannot.

When a candidate takes a big check, that candidate owns it. You can ask him about it at a forum, criticize him for it, and vote against him for it in November. It may not be pretty, but the candidate is accountable.

Move that same money to an independent expenditure group and the candidate can tell you he has no control over it. And he is telling the truth.

Look at the current governor’s race. The Republican who has raised the most has put more than a million dollars of his own money into it. Another Republican is being supported by a large union-funded outside group. Measure 1 touches neither one. Not a dollar.

We would be tightening the one faucet we can see while leaving the other two wide open.

Plenty of that independent money comes from Outside, from people who do not live here, do not work here, and do not have to live with what they do to this state. Alaskans have complained about outside money for years, and rightly so. Measure 1 gives it more room, not less.

House Bill 16 was virtually the same as Ballot Measure 1, and when it reached the House floor last April I offered several amendments aimed at those loopholes. One would have capped what any person could give an independent expenditure group. Another would have put a line on the mailer and the television ad telling Alaskans that more than 30 percent of the money behind it came from outside this state. Every one of them was voted down by the same Majority Coalition that carried the bill, and the sponsor objected to each one because he wanted the bill to match the ballot measure word for word.

There is a reason for that. If the Legislature passes a law substantially the same as a pending ballot measure, the vote on that measure is canceled. Any change to the bill risked breaking that match.

I can’t tell you he was hiding anything. He had four separate chances to address the loopholes he says concern him, but he did choose to protect the vehicle instead of fix the problem. This is worrisome to me.

That’s not an oversight. It’s a choice. And I believe it was the wrong choice.

Measure 1 also changes how contributions are counted.

The old law counted by the year. Measure 1 counts by the election cycle, generally two years. Alaska’s cap on what a PAC can give a candidate was never struck down. Political parties are a separate category with much higher limits, but a PAC that is not a political party is still capped at $1,000 a year under AS 15.13.070. Over two years, that is $2,000.

Measure 1 makes it $4,000.

Same two years. Twice the money, in a measure being sold as restoring campaign finance limits. Weird, right?

Measure 1 allows $2,000 to a candidate per election cycle, but $5,000 to a group per year. Over the same two-year period, that means $2,000 to the candidate and $10,000 to the groups.

They used the election cycle when it capped you. They could not even find it when the money went to the groups.

Supporters argue that changing to an election cycle helps challengers because an incumbent can file early and collect money over two years while a challenger who enters later may have only one.

There might be some logic to that, but the larger disadvantage for a challenger is not the calendar. It is the ceiling.

An incumbent already has a donor list, name recognition, political relationships, and association networks. A challenger usually has none of those things. He needs somebody willing to back him early, before most voters even know his name.

Changing the calendar does not give him a donor list, name recognition, or an organization. It lets him hit the same ceiling on a different schedule while organized groups get to give more.

Individuals down. Organized groups up. And organized groups have their favorite incumbents.

Contribution caps are sold as a check on the powerful. But In practice, they can protect the people already holding the seats.

There is another problem. In 2021, the Ninth Circuit struck down three parts of Alaska’s campaign finance law, including the cap on what a candidate could accept from out-of-state donors. Measure 1’s own ballot title says it restores limits on out-of-state contributions.

Alaska spent years litigating that case. If this provision is challenged again, we could end up right back in federal court paying lawyers to defend it.

Strip everything else away and Measure 1 limits what you can give directly to a candidate. It does not limit what a wealthy candidate can spend on himself. It does not put the same cap on independent expenditure groups. It doubles what organized groups can give directly to a candidate. It allows $10,000 to flow into groups over the same two-year period in which you are capped at $2,000 to the candidate. And it takes Alaska back into an area where we have already lost in federal court.

Those are not side issues. That is the measure.

Your first amendment right to back a candidate you believe in is not the problem with Alaska politics. Huge super PACs and Outside dark money is.

Protect your First Amendment Rights. Vote no on Ballot Measure 1.

Speaker Mike Johnson was in Palmer today and said there are now 41 communists serving in the United States House of Representatives. That’s Speaker Johnson’s number, and he didn’t hedge about it. Nick Begich made the larger point. The socialists aren’t hiding anymore.

I know there are differences between communists, socialists, democratic socialists, and progressives. but I also think they are just different outhouses along the same communist hiking trail. What matters to me isn’t what somebody calls themselves.

What matters is where they want to take my country.

So I went to the Democratic Socialists of America and looked at what they actually want. Their new national program, Workers Deserve More, calls for government-funded health care, publicly owned housing, universal rent control, publicly owned energy and transportation, a federal jobs guarantee, a 32-hour workweek with full pay, aggressive wealth taxes, and public ownership of America’s largest corporations and essential industries. They want to abolish the Electoral College and the Senate, replace the President and Supreme Court with an executive subordinate to Congress, and eventually write a new constitution.

Nobody is hiding any of this. It is right there in their platform.

What concerns me is how normal these ideas have become. For most of my life, calling a politician a socialist was an accusation. Today politicians proudly run as democratic socialists and win. Ideas that would have been far outside mainstream American politics a generation ago are now debated in Congress as serious policy. The Overton Window has not just shifted left, it has departed scene - stage left - with extreme prejudice.

But here’s what’s interesting: socialism isn’t rising among working people. It’s rising among the educated elite.

C.S. Lewis understood this. In That Hideous Strength, he wrote about why utopian ideas spread through the educated class: “When did you meet a workman who believes the papers? He takes it for granted that they’re all propaganda and skips the leading articles… But the educated public, the people who read the highbrow weeklies, don’t need reconditioning. They’re all right already. They’ll believe anything.”

Working people are natural skeptics. They don’t trust grand promises from government. They’ve seen too many of them fail. They understand that somebody has to pay the bill. They know the difference between talk and reality. In the military we would say truth talks, bullshit walks.

Socialism spreads through universities, media, publishing, and government bureaucracies, institutions run largely by educated elites. It appeals to them because it flatters the assumption that if only smart people were in charge, we could plan society rationally. It promises that intelligence and good intentions can overcome human nature. Working people know better. They know good intentions don’t build houses, and smartness doesn’t change the fact that somebody still has to provide the land, labor, equipment, materials, and money.

The bill doesn’t disappear. It just moves.

I think part of the reason educated people fall for socialism is that we raised a generation that knows plenty about the failures of capitalism and very little about the failures of socialism. Universities teach about robber barons, inequality, corporate greed, and exploitation. They should. Those things happened. But far fewer students seem to leave school understanding what happened in the Soviet Union, Cuba, China, Cambodia, and Venezuela.

Those countries were different, and their governments were different, but they shared the same basic mistake. They concentrated more and more economic power in government because government was supposedly going to make life fairer. Eventually economic power becomes political power, and the educated people who helped build the system often became its enforcers.

The promises always sound good. Free health care. Affordable housing. Guaranteed jobs. Cheap energy. Secure retirement. Who wouldn’t want those things?

The problem is that calling something a right doesn’t make it free. Declaring housing a right doesn’t build a house. Declaring health care free doesn’t educate a doctor or build a hospital. Declaring energy a public good doesn’t build a power plant. Somebody still has to provide everything.

That is where capitalism, with all its faults, has an advantage. Prices tell us what people need, what they value, and where more supply is needed. Profit gives somebody a reason to take a risk, invest money, hire people, and produce more. Sometimes businesses fail. Sometimes people get greedy. Sometimes markets get things wrong.

Compared to what?

Compare our imperfect system to the actual record of governments that tried to replace markets with government control. Venezuela has some of the largest oil reserves on earth, yet millions of Venezuelans have fled their country. Hugo Chávez didn’t campaign by promising poverty and authoritarian government. He promised fairness and a better life for ordinary people. The people running the system believed they could manage the economy better than markets could. Government took greater control, and political power followed.

America isn’t Venezuela, Cuba, China, or the Soviet Union. We have a Constitution, divided government, courts, elections, and private property rights designed to keep too much power from ending up in one place. But those protections only work if we understand why they exist. And we only understand why they exist if we remember what happens when they don’t.

That’s why Speaker Johnson’s warning matters. He says there are 41 communists in the House. Someone will argue that some of them are really socialists, democratic socialists, progressives, or something else. Fine. I’m less interested in what label belongs on each of the 41 than I am in what this movement is proposing.

When a growing political movement says capitalism itself is the problem, wants public ownership of major businesses, greater government control of health care, housing, energy and employment, and eventually wants to rewrite the Constitution, we should probably believe them.

They’re telling us where they want to go. We don’t have to guess, and we don’t have to argue about labels. We can read their platform, look at history, and decide whether that’s the road we want to travel.

We ought to pay attention.

My pastor once told me, “There is no right way to do a wrong thing.” Right now, the Alaska Legislature is doing a wrong thing. We are putting at risk the energy our kids and grandkids will need to stay here. If we can’t provide reliable heat and power, young families will move somewhere that can.

It doesn’t much matter why legislators are doing it. Some don’t like the governor. Fine. But do they dislike Alaska’s young families too? Some think Hilcorp should pay more taxes. Great. Bring that bill next session. Some want a better deal for their community. Also great. Have that fight before final investment decision. Just don’t kill an energy project, in the middle of an energy crisis, to settle arguments that can wait.

I sat in the Anchorage Legislative Information Office on August 6 and listened to more than two hours of testimony before the Gasline Caucus. Fully one third of the entire Legislature was in the room or on the line. Hundreds of Alaskans were watching. Here is what we heard.

John Sims runs ENSTAR Natural Gas. He told us that if Cook Inlet deliveries keep coming at the rate ENSTAR is getting them now, the utility will be three billion cubic feet short this winter. Then he put it in plain English. Three BCF is eighteen winter days when ENSTAR cannot serve its customers. If deliveries improve to what was originally promised, the shortage drops to about one BCF. Six days, in normal weather.

Listen to Mr. Sims’ testimony here.

Sims knows people will call this fear mongering. But ENSTAR is one of the only parties in this whole debate with a legal duty to serve. Producers can decide not to drill. Investors can put their money in Texas. Legislators can go home. ENSTAR still has to find the gas.

What bothered me most was his plan for this winter. They are hoping for an El Niño. He didn’t dodge it. “Right now, we are hoping for an El Niño. That is the situation we’re in.”

I do not believe hope is a great business strategy for an Alaska utility where heat and electricity equal survival.

Sims also told us there is $6.9 billion in planned federal investment at JBER. Someone from that base came to ENSTAR about gas for a new 60,000-square-foot building. Sims’ answer was short: “I don’t have gas for them.”

Seems we have reached the point where Alaska can’t fuel new construction at one of the most strategic military bases in the country, so I have to ask:

What in the hell are we doing?

Tony Izzo, CEO of Matanuska Electric Association, explained how we got here. MEA serves about 150,000 Alaskans and burns roughly six BCF of gas a year to make 85 percent of its power. ENSTAR’s possible shortage is half of MEA’s annual supply. Izzo has 46 years in this business, and he watched Alaska build this problem with its own hands.

Listen to Mr. Izzo’s testimony here.

In 1999, Cook Inlet gas sold for about 25 cents. MEA pays around $9 today, and that’s a good price. The pattern is always the same. We invite investment, then we change the rules.

Utilities once fought LNG exports to save Cook Inlet gas for Alaskans. They lost, and then they were denied recovery of their legal costs. Later, Marathon signed a long-term contract with ENSTAR tied to Henry Hub prices. State officials objected. In 2006 the Regulatory Commission killed it on a 3-2 vote. Marathon, Conoco and another producer told Izzo that Alaska was closed for business and they were leaving.

They left.

The Legislature saw the damage and passed the Cook Inlet Recovery Act. It worked. Izzo counted nineteen new companies coming into the basin. Utilities were signing ten-year contracts for gas at about $5.

They were literally signing those contracts when the phone rang. It was ING, the lender, saying goodby. Governor Bill Walker had just line-item vetoed $200 million of the state’s $700 million obligation for those tax credits. The credits were still written in law. The money simply wasn’t going to come. Banks had lent against those credits because the state had paid them in full every single year. Walker vetoed another $430 million the next year. Two vetoes that arguably did more to create the situation we are in than anything else.

Izzo says he can’t recall a single one of those nineteen companies still being here.

Sims previously told us that that Hilcorp came in afterward and spent about $1.5 billion drilling 192 wells. Now, in the middle of a shortage, some legislators want to reopen Hilcorp’s taxes inside the gasline bill. Izzo asked the obvious question: “Who created the situation that required an S-corp to come in and bail us out? We did.”

Yes, there is still gas under Cook Inlet. Izzo knows it better than anyone. He helped commission a Department of Energy study years ago that confirmed trillions of cubic feet. But gas in the ground doesn’t heat a house. “If I can’t get it under contract, it might as well not exist.” There is no X on a map where a utility goes to pick up the gas it needs.

Renewables are part of the answer. MEA is already about 15 percent renewable and wants more. But the Bradley Lake expansion, one of the few big projects actually moving, offsets about 1.5 BCF against roughly 70 BCF of Cook Inlet demand. Izzo said that even if MEA somehow hit 80 percent renewable, it would still need about three BCF of gas every year. Wind and solar save fuel when they’re running. But there are no renewable projects under development right now. And, in any case, they can’t keep the lights on during a windless January night at forty below.

MEA has firm gas under contract for two years and seven months. That’s it. Izzo summed the whole thing up in one line: “What’s the enemy of energy security? Uncertainty is.”

Uncertainty is exactly what we produce in Juneau.

Rebecca Logan of The Alliance represents 575 companies employing about 35,000 Alaskans. Roughly 500 businesses and individuals have signed on in support of AK LNG, and more than 300 left comments. 300.

Listen to Ms. Logan’s testimony here.

She pointed out that while legislators argued over whether a resolution should say the project “will create jobs” or “may create jobs,” Wells Fargo put $250,000 into the Fairbanks pipeline training center to train the people who would build it.

Logan urged legislators to talk to the Alaskans who work in business development. She said the message they keep hearing from investors is the same one: We are going to wait and see what your Legislature does.

Capital doesn’t have to come here. Investors have choices, and they are watching to see whether the rules we agree to today are still the rules tomorrow.

Matt Kissinger of AGDC answered the question I hear most often. Why not build a smaller pipeline?

Listen to Mr Kissinger’s testimony here.

Because only about 10 percent of the pipeline’s cost is the pipe itself. The rest is moving dirt, equipment, people and pipe across Alaska. Shrinking the phase one pipe saves far less than people assume. What it does cut is export volume, and export volume is exactly what spreads the cost across more gas and brings the price down for Alaskans. The 42-inch line is sized to serve Alaska and export markets both, and it is already permitted.

The alternative is importing LNG. Kissinger said imported LNG is already north of $20 before you ship it and turn it back into gas, which adds about $7 more. That price moves with every war and shipping crisis on earth.

Then there’s the billion dollars in property taxes we’re supposedly giving away. We aren’t. Under the current structure the project could owe roughly another billion a year, but as Kissinger put it: “There is no billion, because the pipeline just doesn’t get built unless we get these barriers out of the way.”

You cannot tax a project that doesn’t exist. A billion a year from a pipeline nobody will finance is zero dollars a year. Ten percent of something still beats a hundred percent of nothing.

Adam Prestidge of Glenfarne told the caucus the property tax bill was on the one-yard line. Today, in my opinion, it’s close to dead.

The other side of the argument is this: If we lock in a tax structure now and the project still falls apart, we gave up leverage and got nothing for it. That’s a real risk, and the people making that argument aren’t fools.

I just don’t think it’s the bigger risk. ENSTAR may be eighteen days short this winter. MEA has two years and seven months of firm gas. JBER is being told we don’t have any. Investors are waiting to see what we do. Do we really want to put our children, and their children, in the same situation we are in?

A shortage doesn’t wait for a better deal.

This bill isn’t a subsidy or a giveaway. It restructures the tax on a permitted project so private investors have a reason to finance it. Want to change Hilcorp’s taxes? Bring the bill next session. Want a different revenue split for your community? Have that discussion before final investment decision. Want to fight the governor? There will be plenty of chances. None of that requires using Alaska’s energy future as the weapon.

My pastor was right. There is no right way to do a wrong thing. Killing a project that could give us generations of energy security, while the utilities responsible for keeping Alaskans warm are telling us they’re running out of gas, is the wrong thing.

A wrong thing doesn’t become right just because we had a good reason.

#buildtheline

Most people have heard of the little book Who Moved My Cheese? by Spencer Johnson. It’s short enough to read in an afternoon. The story is about four characters who depend on a pile of cheese. One day they discover it’s gone.

Two of them don’t waste time arguing with reality. They pull on their boots and go looking for new cheese.

The other two don’t.

One becomes angry. He blames everyone else for moving the cheese. He insists things should go back to the way they were. Instead of searching for what comes next, he stays beside the empty shelf, convinced someone will eventually bring the old cheese back.

It’s a simple story.

But it describes something very real.

Recently, Michael Smith, an American Thinker and essayist, wrote a piece called The Living Years. He wasn’t writing about cheese. He was writing about politics. In one paragraph, Smith argued that too much of today’s politics is driven by spite. He wasn’t talking about ordinary political disagreement or honest differences over policy. He was describing something more destructive. Spite is being so determined to stop someone else from finding the cheese that you’re willing to hurt yourself if it means they don’t get what they want.

Whether you agree with Smith or not, his essay made me think about Alaska.

In Alaska, the cheese has moved more than once. Oil production has declined. Timber markets have changed. Cook Inlet gas is running short. The easy money that built much of modern Alaska is not as easy as it once was. Whether we like it or not, the cheese moved.

Most sourdoughs would pull on their boots and go looking for new cheese.

Somewhere along the way, Alaskans developed a different habit.

Every time someone points toward a new piece of cheese, whether it’s a gas line, a mine, a timber sale, a road, a data center, or a new power project, the pattern begins all over again. The first response is opposition. Then comes the demand for more planning. A task force. Another review. Another permit. Another public process. Another special session and another reason to wait.

Planning is important. Every major project ought to be tested, challenged, and improved before it is built. But there comes a point where planning stops being about making a better decision and becomes a way to avoid making one. Endless planning slowly turns into endless delay.

Eventually the investors move on, the opportunity disappears, or the economics no longer work. The search for the cheese dies, not because someone proved it was impossible, but because we never stopped studying it long enough to decide.

Then comes the regret.

A few years later we wonder why our energy costs keep climbing. We wonder why the Permanent Fund Dividend keeps shrinking while our energy costs keep rising. We wonder why our roads aren’t getting fixed, why schools need more money, why young families are leaving Alaska, and why someone else built the jobs we thought we had time to debate.

Then another opportunity comes along, and the whole cycle starts over again.

I’m not saying every project should be approved. I’ve voted against projects before, and I’ll do it again when I believe they’re wrong for Alaska. Some deserve to fail. Some simply aren’t worth building.

But there is a question that has to be answered every time we say no.

What’s the replacement? What’s the plan?

If this isn’t the new cheese, where do we find it? If we’re going to reject one source of jobs, investment, and future revenue, what takes its place? Schools still have to be funded. Troopers still have to be paid. Roads still have to be maintained. The budget still shows up every January.

That is why Smith’s essay struck a nerve with me. I don’t think every opponent of development is motivated by spite. Many sincerely believe they’re protecting Alaska, and I respect that. But the pattern sometimes looks like spite because we don’t just refuse to accept that the cheese moved. And we oppose every effort to go find new cheese.

Then we regret being hungry.

The old cheese isn’t coming back. We can keep arguing with reality, which doesn’t give a crap about us, or we can pull on our boots and go find the next one.

I’ve been thinking about something that doesn’t get enough attention in Alaska.

We spend a lot of time on social media talking about what we’re afraid of. We’re afraid a mine might change the landscape. We’re afraid a gravel pit or a road might bring more traffic, noise, and dust. We’re afraid a timber sale might change the view. We’re afraid a data center will use too much water and too much power.

Too many public comments boil down to one sentence: “No, because…”

Fear has its place. It makes us ask hard questions. But fear is not an economic policy. Fear only tells us what not to do. It never tells us what we should do. At some point the numbers still have to work, and right now those numbers are one of the reasons people keep leaving Alaska.

Every week we discuss one problem at a time. Electric bills. Housing. Schools, troopers, roads, ferries, the Permanent Fund Dividend. We argue each issue as though it stands alone.

But every one of those problems comes back to the same thing.

The math.

Right now, a family in Anchorage is paying about $4.36 a gallon for heating oil. The average electric bill is around $591 a month, and electricity costs about 27 percent more than the national average. A median house runs roughly $410,000 to $428,000. That isn’t just expensive. It’s the kind of math that makes families sit around the kitchen table and ask whether they can afford to stay.

In Fairbanks, some small businesses spend 25 to 30 percent of their revenue just keeping the lights on before they pay a single employee. In many rural communities, electricity costs 55 cents a kilowatt-hour, and in some villages more than $1.30. That’s thirty-five times the national average. Those aren’t just numbers on a utility bill. They’re why families leave, businesses close, and employers can’t find people willing to stay.

Then we all wonder why Alaska keeps losing families and our schools keep losing kids.

Those aren’t separate problems.

They’re all part of the same equation.

The first warning should have been obvious. In 2016, Alaska stopped paying the full statutory Permanent Fund Dividend. We haven’t paid a full one since. That wasn’t just about the dividend. It was the first sign that the state’s math no longer worked.

Most Alaskans want the same things. Their full dividend. The Parks Highway fixed instead of patched. The Talkeetna Trooper Post reopened. A fire and EMS station in Willow. Good schools, a strong university, safe communities, reliable ferries. Beautiful parks and modern senior centers in Meadow Lakes. I don’t know many people who disagree with any of that.

Most Alaskans are also pretty clear about what they don’t want. No state income tax. No statewide sales tax. No higher borough property taxes or fuel taxes. I understand that because I don’t want those things either.

That’s where the conversation usually stops.

We’ve become very good at asking, “What if this project goes wrong?” That’s a fair question, and we should ask it. But we almost never ask the other one.

What if saying no goes wrong?

What if it means another young family packs up and leaves? Another small business closes? Another school gets smaller? Another generation decides its future is somewhere else?

Those are consequences too, and they deserve to be part of the conversation.

So let’s ask the question nobody seems to want to answer.

If we’re not going to raise taxes, where does the money come from? Not where we’d like it to come from. Where does it actually come from?

For years we’ve said no to one major project after another. Susitna-Watana. New mining. Roads to resources. Timber sales. Oil and gas. Now data centers and gravel pits. Every one deserves a careful review, and some deserve to be rejected. That’s not my point.

My point is simple.

If the answer to a project is no, then something else has to be yes.

Take Susitna-Watana. Many of the same people who celebrated stopping that project now complain about the price of electricity. Yet it was expected to produce power for less than ten cents a kilowatt-hour for generations. We rejected one of the largest sources of low-cost power Alaska has ever considered.

That was a choice.

Every choice has consequences.

The same thing is happening in rural Alaska. More than 150 communities still rely on diesel generators. Families pay utility bills that would be hard to imagine anywhere else in America. Small businesses struggle. Teachers think twice about taking a job. Young families pack up and leave.

Every form of economic activity has impacts. A mine changes the landscape. A timber sale changes a forest. Roads bring traffic. Data centers use electricity. A pipeline is not all that pretty. Tourism brings crowds. Gravel pits bring noise and dust.

Those are the impacts we spend most of our time talking about.

We almost never talk about the math of saying no.

Fewer jobs. A smaller tax base. Higher costs spread across fewer people. Young families moving away. Schools shrinking. Communities slowly emptying out.

There has never been an economy without consequences. The real question isn’t whether there will be impacts. It’s which impacts we’re willing to live with.

Some people accuse me of being personally invested in projects like data centers. I’m not. I live off the grid. My electric bill isn’t driving this. I’m trying to figure out how we pay for the things Alaskans keep telling me they want without coming back to them for more taxes.

If the answer is no to data centers, no to new mines, no to more timber, no to oil, gas, and pipelines, and no to roads that open new opportunities, then tell us what replaces them. How do we pay a full Permanent Fund Dividend? Rebuild the Parks Highway? Reopen the Talkeetna Trooper Post? Build the Willow fire station? Make it possible for young families to stay in Alaska without asking everyone else to pay higher taxes?

If the answer is simply no, then tell us what the yes is. Tell us how you pay for the services Alaskans expect. Tell us how you keep young families here. Tell us how you make Alaska affordable again.

Every equation has two sides, and every budget has to balance.

And the math always wins.

Socrates could have walked out of Athens a free man. The court gave him two ways out. He could leave the city or he could stop asking uncomfortable questions. Either one would have saved his life. He refused both because, to him, asking hard questions was the whole point of being alive. Not to embarrass people. Not to win arguments. Simply because truth mattered more than comfort.

I’ve been thinking about that lately because there is one question I keep asking in Alaska that almost nobody seems willing to answer.

What’s your plan?

For years I’ve watched the same pattern repeat itself. A new project comes along, whether it’s the Susitna-Watana Dam, Ambler Road, the Alaska Gas Line, West Susitna Road, ANWR, timber sales, data centers, or another mining project, and before anyone has finished reading the proposal, somebody is organizing to stop it.

Many of these groups genuinely believe they occupy the moral and eco-ethical high ground. They see themselves as protecting Alaska, and I don’t doubt that many are sincere. But sincerity and public policy aren’t the same thing. Sooner or later, every public policy has to survive the arithmetic.

The schools still have to open in August. Troopers still answer calls. Snow still has to be plowed. Bridges still have to be inspected. Heating oil in many rural communities still costs more than most Alaskans think is possible. We still haven’t restored the Talkeetna Trooper Post. Willow still needs a fire station. We still argue every year about paying the Permanent Fund Dividend the law says belongs to the owners of the resource.

None of those obligations disappear because another development project gets voted down. None dissapear because of the fear of a project, mine, or business. Every session the Legislature still has to pass a balanced budget. That’s why I keep coming back to the same question.

What’s your plan?

I don’t ask that as a debating trick. I mean it literally.

Suppose you succeed. Suppose the mine doesn’t happen, the road doesn’t get built, the timber sale is canceled, the data center goes to another state, and the carbon sequestration project dies. Let’s assume every one of those victories goes exactly the way you hoped.

Now what?

Walk me through the next budget. Where does the money come from?

I’ve asked that question for years, and I honestly can’t remember hearing a complete answer. What I usually hear is another explanation of why the project was a bad idea or how it won’t make “enough” money to matter. Sometimes those arguments are thoughtful. Sometimes they’re persuasive. Sometimes they’re right.

But that’s still only half the conversation.

The budget is still there waiting for us next January.

Government has only so many ways to pay its bills. We can develop resources and encourage private investment. We can collect more taxes. We can reduce what government does. Usually it’s some combination of all three. There isn’t a secret fourth choice hidden somewhere in the Constitution.

If someone tells me they oppose offshore drilling because the environmental risk is simply too great, and they’re willing to support a state income tax to replace that revenue, I respect that position. We disagree, but they’ve finished the thought.

If someone tells me they don’t want another road into a mining district because they value wilderness more than economic development, and they’re willing to accept fewer public services as the price of that decision, I respect that too. Again, they’ve finished the thought. They’ve made a choice, and they’re willing to own the consequences.

What I have a much harder time respecting is opposition that never gets past the word no.

That’s where too much of Alaska’s political conversation lives these days. No mine. No road. No timber sale. No drilling. No data center. No carbon sequestration.

Ok. But finish the thought.

Those bills don’t disappear because another permit was denied or another lawsuit succeeded.

The Legislature still has to balance the budget.

Investment goes where people are willing to permit it. If Wyoming approves carbon sequestration projects and Alaska doesn’t, the investment goes to Wyoming. If Texas builds data centers while we spend years arguing about whether we should even consider one, Texas gets the jobs and tax revenue. Canada isn’t waiting for us to decide whether to sell natural gas. They’re already signing export contracts. Mining companies invest where projects have a reasonable chance of being approved. Timber production shifts somewhere else.

None of that happens because those places are smarter than Alaska. It happens because they eventually make a decision.

Then we look around a few years later and wonder why we can’t afford the things we all agree are important.

That’s the part I don’t understand.

We’re trying to hold three ideas in our heads at the same time. We want excellent schools, better roads, more law enforcement, a full Permanent Fund Dividend, and no statewide taxes. At the same time, many of the same voices oppose almost every major project that could help generate the private investment and state revenue needed to pay for those things.

I don’t know how that math works.

Maybe someone else does. If they do, I’d honestly like to hear it.

I’ve voted against projects before, and I’ll do it again if I think they’re bad for Alaska. But when I vote no, I owe my constituents more than a press release. If I’m taking one option off the table, I owe them an explanation of what replaces it. That’s part of the job. Governing isn’t just deciding what we’re against. It’s deciding what we’re for and being honest about what it costs.

Socrates understood that asking uncomfortable questions comes with a price. Sometimes people would rather attack the question than answer it.

That’s fine.

I’ll keep asking anyway.

What’s your plan?

Because if all you’ve got is no, you don’t have a policy.

You have an objection. And objections are not a plan.

At a recent joint hearing of the House Judiciary and State Affairs committees, Chair Andrew Gray argued that ranked-choice voting did not create the Decoy Daniel situation. His claim is that same-name candidates existed before RCV, so the real issue is ballot access, and anyone blaming RCV is confusing the ballot with the reform.

That is not right. Once you look at the difference between the old system and the new one, the claim falls apart.

Under Alaska’s old closed primary, a same-name candidate could file against a sitting senator. But the system decided his fate before November. He had two choices. Beat the incumbent in the Republican primary, which almost never happens against a two-term senator with the party behind him. Or lose and go home. The party was the filter. Democrats could not vote on the Republican ballot. Only one Republican name went to the general election.

The top-four open primary changes that. The challenger no longer needs to beat the incumbent. He only needs to finish in the top four of a nonpartisan field. Once he clears that bar, he sits on the November ballot next to the real senator and creates the confusion the strategy wants. This is why Republicans fought to keep a closed primary.

Chair Gray can call this a ballot access issue. But ballot access under a closed primary and ballot access under a top-four jungle are two different things. The difference comes from the reform he defends.

Under the old closed primary, party ballots were separate. Republicans got a Republican ballot. Democrats got a Democratic ballot. A same-name Republican challenger faced only Republican and Republican-leaning voters. Democratic voters had no way to touch that race.

That firewall made the decoy strategy pointless. A Democratic operative trying to hurt a Republican incumbent would have needed Republican voters to cast the wrong vote using only Republican turnout. That is not a strategy. In decades of closed primaries, Alaska never saw a serious decoy candidate for a major statewide office. The structure blocked it.

The top-four open primary removes that firewall. Every voter gets the same ballot. Democratic turnout, Democratic money, and Democratic operatives can now help a Republican-labeled decoy advance.

That is what is happening here. Metadata reviewed by Fox News shows the launch announcement for Daniel J. Sullivan of Petersburg was written by Amber Lee, a Democratic consultant who worked on Mary Peltola’s 2022 special election win, her 2022 general election win, and her 2024 loss. She has a professional and financial interest in Peltola winning the Senate seat, and has said publicly she wants Peltola to unseat the incumbent this year. Under the old system, her help would have been worthless because her voters could not have voted for that candidate. Under the current system, her help is the point.

The chair’s argument requires you to pretend the primary structure did not change in 2020. It did.

We only have to watch who fights hardest to defend RCV to learn who it serves. Scott Kendall, the Anchorage attorney who wrote the 2020 ballot measure, is still the attorney defending it in court every time it faces a challenge. When the 2024 repeal failed by fewer than a thousand votes, Kendall celebrated. Then he went to court to try to block the 2026 repeal from qualifying for the ballot. That is not the behavior of someone defending a popular reform.

Unite America, a national group that has spent tens of millions pushing RCV across the country, poured money into the original 2020 Alaska campaign. They are back this year spending to defeat the repeal. Alaska is one piece of a larger national project run by people who do not live here and will not live with the results.

Amber Lee. Scott Kendall. Unite America. That is the coalition defending Decoy Daniel’s place on the ballot.

Some say voters can just rank both Sullivans and it will sort itself out. That treats voters like they live in a lab. A voter who thinks he is ranking the incumbent first but is actually ranking the retired teacher from Petersburg has already given his first-choice vote to the wrong man. If Decoy Daniel advances on those confused votes, the incumbent may be the one eliminated. Second-choice rankings do not save you from that. Confusion and exhausted ballots get worse under RCV, not better.

Confusion is a feature of this scheme, not a bug. Decoy Daniel knows he cannot win. That is the point. He is on the ballot to create confusion, and RCV makes the effort worthwhile even if he loses.

Chair Gray raised legitimate concerns about how the Division of Elections handled this. And perhaps Director Beecher reached too far. The courts said she did. That’s a fair debate. But the problem the Division was trying to solve is not a problem the old system produced. It is a product of the new system. Under the old system, no elections director ever had to judge a candidate’s intent. The party primary and the separate ballots handled it. That structure is gone.

In 2022 we got the forty-eight-candidate special primary for Don Young’s seat. In 2024 the winner was decided by second- and third-choice votes after the first-choice leader was eliminated. In 2026 we have Decoy Daniel and a governor’s race with seventeen candidates on the same nonpartisan ballot.

Every cycle since RCV took effect has produced a national embarrassment the old system never produced. The chair cannot point to a single election under the previous system that looked like the three we have had under RCV. The burden now sits with the defenders.

In November 2024, voters in Nevada rejected RCV. Voters in Colorado rejected it the same night. The national momentum has flipped. Alaska’s 2020 vote was a squeaker. RCV passed by about one percentage point, roughly 3,700 votes out of 344,000 cast. That is not a mandate.

We do not have to keep it.

If Alaska keeps ranked-choice voting, the top-four primary becomes permanent. Decoy candidates become a repeatable playbook any well-funded operation can run again. The confusion, the exhausted ballots, and the strategic games will continue.

If the repeal passes, the closed primary returns. The firewall goes back up. Same-name decoy schemes go back to being what they were for decades in Alaska: pointless.

None of this would be happening under the system Alaska used to have. That system is on the ballot this November.

Chair Gray is free to keep arguing the reform he defends has nothing to do with the mess it produced. He is a democrat and this is a democratic strategy. Alaskans have watched three cycles of these games.

In November, we can decide whether to watch a fourth.

The Ballad of Decoy Daniel

Now gather close, my neighbors all, and hear a curious tale,
Of a scam that blew northward on a well-financed gale.
It wasn’t born in Talkeetna, nor Nome, nor Katchemak Bay,
But it found Alaska fertile ground, and here it came to stay.

They wrapped it up in pretty words, reform from shore to shore,
But every passing election left us wanting something more.

There once was only party roads that led to autumn’s fight.
A Republican earned his place before November’s night.
If someone shared his very name and sought to steal the race,
He first had to beat the voters who didn’t know his face.

The party was the gatekeeper. The firewall stood strong.
The Democrats chose Democrats. Republicans came along.
A trick could not survive there because the path was plain.
You had to beat your own side first before you sought to reign.

Then came the grand experiment that promised something new.
They tore the old gate off its hinges, as reformers often do.
“Top Four,” they proudly called it. One ballot for us all.
They never spoke about the cracks that followed with the fall.

Now enters Decoy Daniel, with a name you’ve heard before.
He didn’t need to win the field, just finish in the four.
And suddenly confusion did what it had not before.
The very thing the old rules stopped was welcome through the door.

Some folks cried, “It’s ballot access!” Others swore, “It’s fair!”
But the rules that built the opening had plainly put him there.
The field was broad as tundra. Every voter cast alike.
Confusion found a smoother path than any man could hike.

A consultant lit the campfire. Lawyers drew the trail.
National groups supplied the grub and swore they could not fail.
It looked less like Alaska’s way than something shipped up here,
By people who won’t live with it another single year.

Now some folks say, “Just rank them both. The system will decide.”
As though mistakes are harmless once the ballots take their ride.
But when a voter marks the wrong man thinking he’s the right,
That first-choice vote is gone before they start the second fight.

We’ve watched this picture growing through elections one by one.
Forty-eight upon one ballot. Rankings for Don Young.
Now seventeen for governor. Another curious show.
Each cycle brings another thing the old rules didn’t know.

I’ve flown above Alaska through the darkest winter skies.
I’ve learned that when your compass fails, you trust your seasoned eyes.
You do not blame the mountain when the chart is drawn askew.
You fix the course that brought you there. That’s what good pilots do.

So this is not of Daniel. He’s only one small part.
It’s of a voting system built to reward a clever start.
Confusion is the strategy. The rules became the tool.
Democrat games that failed before now play the voters for a fool.

The snow will fall on Petersburg. The tide will flood Cook Inlet.
Campaign signs will weather till the autumn sun has set.
One choice still belongs to us beneath the northern dome:
To choose the kind of ballot that will guide Alaska home.

And if, this coming November, the old firewall returns,
Perhaps we’ll leave behind these tricks for simpler, steadier turns.
For every strange election has a place where it began,
And every trail can still be closed by free Alaskan hands.

This November, Alaskans vote on our election system for the third time in six years.

Three votes in six years. Why? Because the first two didn’t settle anything. In 2020, Ballot Measure 2 passed by 3,781 votes. In 2024, the repeal failed by 743 votes. Out of more than 320,000 ballots cast.

Those are the numbers of a system Alaskans never really wanted. It only survives because somebody keeps paying to keep it alive.

Who is that somebody, and what does this system do to our elections, our candidates, and our votes. I’ve written about ranked choice voting many times. This piece puts the whole case in one place. It’s simple, and you don’t need a law degree to follow it. In fact, the people defending this system are counting on you not to follow it.

They think we’re stupid. We’re not.

The Short Story

Ranked choice voting trains candidates to hide what they believe and lets a computer algorithm throw out legal ballots. It just handed us two Dan Sullivans on one Senate ballot.

It was never an Alaskan idea. A tiny club of Outside billionaires paid for it: John Arnold, the former Enron trader; Kathryn Murdoch, Rupert Murdoch’s daughter-in-law; and Pierre Omidyar, the eBay founder who has spent over half a billion dollars trying to re-engineer how Americans vote.

They outspent Alaskans 12 to 1 to pass it in 2020 and more than 100 to 1 to save it in 2024, with millions flowing through a Virginia group that hides its donors. The law they sold as a dark money ban is defended by dark money. And the lawyer who wrote it, Scott Kendall, uses his own rules to fine the Alaskans trying to repeal it.

In 2024 repeal lost by just 743 votes. This November we finish the job. Vote YES on the new Ballot Measure 2. The receipts are below, every claim linked to its source.

Part One: What RCV Does to Candidates

Start with the basics. A republic works when candidates tell you what they believe, and you pick one. Clear choices. Clear results.

Ranked choice voting breaks that.

Under RCV, a candidate can’t just win your first choice vote. He needs second and third choice votes from people who disagree with him. So what does he do? He goes quiet. He softens his message. He blurs his positions. If he says something strong about life, guns, or spending, he loses those second choice votes. So he learns not to say it. That’s not moderation. That’s dishonesty built right into the rules. I call it political camouflage.

Look at Australia. A hundred years of ranked voting has left them two big parties that sound exactly the same. Different labels, same product. When every candidate is a shade of beige, voters stop picking the strongest ideas and start picking the most polished face. That’s where this road ends: a uni-party of interchangeable winners.

Our founders were not beige. They were stubborn, difficult, and clear, and their bold ideas built the strongest, freest country on earth. A voting system that punishes conviction isn’t a reform. It’s a slow poison.

Part Two: What RCV Does to Your Vote

The old way was simple. One person, one vote. Most votes wins. You could count it yourself.

RCV replaces that with a computer algorithm. Your ballot gets shuffled through rounds of elimination that you can’t watch and can’t check. And here’s the part they don’t advertise. If you don’t rank enough candidates, your ballot can get thrown out along the way. They call it an exhausted ballot.

Your vote is extinguished. Gone. You followed the rules. You voted legally. Yet your ballot isn’t in the final count. Then the winner claims a majority. But it’s a majority of only the ballots left after the machine finished with them. That’s not a real majority. That’s math dressed up as one.

And notice what candidates say now. If I can’t be your first choice, rank me second. I’m not that bad. Campaigning for second place is like a participation trophy. That’s not the Alaska way, and it’s not the American way.

Part Three: The Two Dans

Think I’m exaggerating? Look at what’s happening right now.

A second man named Dan Sullivan filed to run for U.S. Senate against Senator Dan Sullivan. The Division of Elections kicked him off. He sued. Now judges are racing ballot printing deadlines to sort out a race that could help decide control of the U.S. Senate.

The decoy isn’t the problem. The system is. Before 2020, to run as a Republican against a Republican senator, you had to beat him in a Republican primary. Republican voters were the gatekeepers. Ballot Measure 2 ripped that safeguard out. Now anyone can slap Republican next to his name, and the state itself admits the label means nothing. No endorsement. No vetting. Just two Dans on one ballot, waiting to hijack your ranking.

The system they said would end political games invented a brand new game. Now bureaucrats and judges, not voters, decide who gets on your ballot.

Part Four: Follow the Money

Who paid for all this?

Not Alaskans. Not even close.

The 2020 campaign for Ballot Measure 2 raised 6.8 million dollars. More than 90 percent came from just two Outside groups: 3.4 million from Unite America in Denver, and 2.9 million from the Action Now Initiative in Houston [1]. The opposition raised under 600,000 dollars, mostly from real Alaskans [2]. Outspent nearly 12 to 1.

Follow those groups and you find the people actually running this show. A tiny club of billionaires.

John and Laura Arnold. John Arnold made his fortune as Enron’s star natural gas trader [3]. If Enron doesn’t ring a bell, look it up [4]. Enron hid billions in debt behind accounting so complex almost nobody could follow it. When the truth came out in 2001, the company collapsed. Twenty thousand people lost their jobs. Thousands of employees lost their life savings. Arnold was never accused of any wrongdoing. But he walked away with an 8 million dollar bonus, the largest in Enron history, right before the bankruptcy. He used it to start the hedge fund that made him a billionaire.

Here’s what sticks with me. Enron ran on complexity nobody could check. So does ranked choice voting. When a system is too complicated to follow, insiders win and everyone else pays. Arnold watched that lesson up close. Now his fortune funds a voting system built the same way. By one watchdog’s count, the Arnolds put about 39 million dollars into RCV ballot campaigns in 2024 alone [5]. They move money through several groups, including one called Article IV in Virginia that refuses to say where its own money comes from [6]. Dark money. In Missouri, over 98 percent of the pro-RCV campaign cash came from a group called Article IV [7]. Remember that name.

Kathryn Murdoch. Rupert Murdoch’s daughter-in-law. She’s the main funder of Unite America. She gave 3.8 million of the 5.1 million it raised in 2019 and has pledged to help raise 100 million for its agenda [8].

Pierre Omidyar. The founder of eBay. Born in Paris to Iranian immigrant parents, his foundations have poured millions into FairVote, the national RCV flagship. But with Omidyar, the money is only half the story. The other half is why. And the why should worry every Alaskan.

Start in 2016. Omidyar gave 450,000 dollars to super PACs working to stop Trump from winning. His Democracy Fund Voice gave another 250,000 to Stand Up Republic, the anti-Trump group run by Evan McMullin [12]. Then came the explosion. Since 2014, his Democracy Fund and its lobbying arm have committed over 550 million dollars, every dime from Omidyar himself [13].

Where does it go? His Democracy Fund sits in a funding network called the Funders Committee for Civic Participation, right alongside George Soros’s Open Society Foundations and the Ford Foundation. That network publishes its own playbook, and the playbook is blunt: fund democracy groups, push structural reforms, gain power [14]. Their words, not mine. And watchdogs who tracked the grants found they flow overwhelmingly to one side, despite the bipartisan branding [12].

So connect the dots. Omidyar looked at elections where voters picked candidates he didn’t like, and he decided the voters were the problem. He couldn’t win the argument. So he’s spending half a billion dollars to change the machinery instead. Ranked choice voting is one of his fixes. It’s not a fix for democracy. It’s a fix for you.

George and Jonathan Soros have given money too. But their role here is small compared to the others. This movement doesn’t need them. It has richer friends.

None of these people live here. None of them drive our roads or heat their homes with Cook Inlet gas. But they picked Alaska as their test lab. Small population. Cheap ads. Easy to buy.

They thought.

Part Five: One Hundred to One

In 2024, Alaskans gathered signatures and put repeal on the ballot. The empire struck back.

The campaign defending RCV raised almost 14 million dollars. Where from? 5.5 million from Unite America. 4.4 million from Article IV, the Virginia group with secret donors. Two million more from Action Now [9].

The repeal side raised about 117,000 dollars. No single donation over 10,000 dollars. Just Alaskans chipping in fifty and a hundred bucks at a time.

That’s more than 100 to 1, the most lopsided campaign in Alaska history.

And Alaskans almost won anyway. Repeal failed by a mere 743 votes. That number should scare them. It means their money isn’t buying belief anymore. It’s just barely buying time.

Standing in the middle of it all is one Anchorage lawyer: Scott Kendall. He wrote Ballot Measure 2. He defended it in court. His firm is still the campaign’s counsel today. The billionaires fund the national groups. The national groups fund the Alaska campaign. The Alaska campaign retains Mr. Kendall. He even used the disclosure rules he wrote to win about 95,000 dollars in fines against the volunteers trying to repeal his own law [10]. And he’s not done. This month he filed fresh complaints against the 2026 repeal campaign [11].

His side gets 14 million and a law firm. Our side gets complaints filed against it.

Part Six: The Dark Money Lie

Here’s the part that should enrage every Alaskan.

Ballot Measure 2 was sold as the cure for dark money. That was the pitch on every ad in 2020. Transparency. Accountability. Know who’s buying your vote.

It was a lie.

The law’s toughest disclosure rules apply to candidate races, not ballot measures. Yet ballot measures are exactly where the big money flows. That’s not an accident. That’s the loophole the authors built for themselves. They’ve pushed roughly 20 million dollars through it across two elections.

And Article IV’s 4.4 million dollars? Nobody knows whose money that really is. Secret donors. Layered groups. Out-of-state cash. Spent to defend a law sold as a dark money ban.

That’s dark money by any honest definition.

The Legislature has tried more than once to close these loopholes with faster reporting and real limits on Outside money in ballot campaigns. The Democrat lead majority killed those amendments every time. The very people who campaign against dark money vote to protect it.

One more thing. Repealing Ballot Measure 2 doesn’t repeal disclosure laws. Alaska had campaign finance rules before 2020. APOC will still enforce them after repeal. What repeal removes is a rigged structure built by people who exempted themselves from their own promises. So don’t fall for the dark money sales pitch.

Part Seven: No More Excuses

For years, RCV defenders blamed everything else. Slow counts? Blame the Division of Elections. Confusion? Blame the voters. Rejected ballots? Blame paperwork. Everything but the root of the problem: rank voting.

Yes, some problems were real. Wrong ballots sent to Dillingham, King Salmon, and Aniak. A locked state bag with a completed ballot found in a ditch off an Anchorage road. Over a thousand legal ballots tossed for fixable clerical errors.

But those problems are being fixed. Voter rolls are being cleaned up. Audits and ballot tracking are coming online. And the state must now release the round-by-round RCV numbers so everyone can see exactly how the machine picked the winner.

Watch what happens next. Every excuse disappears. The system has to stand on its own. A confusing, conviction-punishing, Outside-funded algorithm that erases ballots and invites decoy candidates.

It can’t stand on that. That’s why they need the 14 million dollars.

The Choice in November

Let’s put it all together.

They spent 6.8 million telling us Ballot Measure 2 would stop Outside influence. It was the most Outside-funded campaign in state history at the time. Then they broke their own record defending it. They promised transparency, then ran millions through a Virginia group with secret donors. They promised civility, then gave us decoy candidates and emergency court hearings. They promised majorities, then gave us math.

They’re not reformers. They’re an Enron trader, a Murdoch, and an eBay billionaire running a science experiment. Alaska is the lab rat. And the lab rat keeps refusing to cooperate.

In 2020 they won by 3,781 votes. In 2024 they hung on by 743. They can buy every ad on your TV. They can’t buy your ballot.

Elections should reward courage and clarity. Winners should be chosen by voters, not assembled by algorithms. And Alaska’s elections should belong to the people who live with the results. Not to whoever writes the biggest check from four time zones away.

Vote YES on the new Ballot Measure 2. Vote YES to end this mess.

Let’s take our elections back.

Sources

_{1. Ballotpedia, Alaska Ballot Measure 2 (2020), campaign finance: https://ballotpedia.org/Alaska_Ballot_Measure_2,_Top-Four_Ranked-Choice_Voting_and_Campaign_Finance_Laws_Initiative_(2020)}

_{2. Ballotpedia News, who funded the 2020 RCV campaigns: https://news.ballotpedia.org/2021/02/22/who-funded-the-campaigns-for-and-against-ranked-choice-voting-ballot-measures-in-2020/}

_{3. InfluenceWatch, John D. Arnold profile (Enron career, bonus, no wrongdoing alleged): https://www.influencewatch.org/person/john-d-arnold/}

_{4. Britannica, the Enron scandal explained: https://www.britannica.com/event/Enron-scandal}

_{5. Carolina Journal (Honest Elections Project), Arnold RCV spending in 2024: https://www.carolinajournal.com/opinion/the-lefts-ranked-choice-voting-scheme-to-replace-honest-elections/}

_{6. St. Louis Post-Dispatch, Article IV does not disclose its donors: https://www.stltoday.com/news/local/govt-and-politics/who-s-behind-effort-to-change-elections-in-missouri-a-couple-from-texas/article_71325b4d-503a-5cc9-870a-15c594fdd44c.html}

_{7. Ballotpedia News, over 98 percent of Missouri RCV campaign funding from Article IV: https://news.ballotpedia.org/2022/04/27/campaign-for-ranked-choice-voting-ballot-initiative-in-missouri-has-raised-millions-ahead-of-signature-deadline/}

_{8. InfluenceWatch, Unite America and Kathryn Murdoch funding: https://www.influencewatch.org/political-party/unite-america/}

_{9. Common Dreams, 2024 No On 2 fundraising breakdown: https://www.commondreams.org/opinion/rank-choice-voting-states-2024}

_{10. Anchorage Daily News, APOC fines over 94,000 dollars against repeal groups: https://www.adn.com/politics/2024/01/04/alaska-ranked-choice-voting-opponents-fined-over-94k-for-campaign-ethics-violations/}

_{11. KTOO, July 2026, new campaign finance complaints against Repeal Now: https://www.ktoo.org/2026/07/10/group-seeking-to-repeal-alaskas-ranked-choice-voting-hit-with-campaign-finance-complaints/}

_{12. InfluenceWatch, Democracy Fund (anti-Trump giving, left-of-center grantmaking): https://www.influencewatch.org/non-profit/democracy-fund/}

_{13. Democracy Fund, over 550 million dollars committed, solely funded by Omidyar: https://democracyfund.org/who-we-are/}

_{14. Capital Research Center, the Funders Committee and its theory of impact: https://capitalresearch.org/article/omidyars-political-machine-part-3/}

If you’ve followed the news this year, you’ve heard two arguments coming out of Juneau. One says Cook Inlet producers aren’t doing enough to keep Southcentral Alaska supplied with natural gas. The other says those same producers should pay a new 9.4 percent state income tax.

What you may not have noticed is that both arguments come from the same corner of the Capitol. For years, some of the loudest voices demanding that the “Texas billionaire” pay more in taxes have also demanded that his company drill more wells in Cook Inlet.

Those two positions cannot both be good policy. Can Alaska demand more gas from Cook Inlet while raising the cost of producing it?

In June 2023, Sen. Bill Wielechowski wrote state officials arguing that Cook Inlet’s biggest producer had failed to meet its obligation to explore and develop the basin and suggested the company could face litigation. In August 2024, he joined Sen. Cathy Giessel in asking the Federal Trade Commission to investigate that same company, after earlier letters urging Alaska’s Attorney General to do the same. Whether through committee hearings, public letters, or interviews with the press, the message never changed. The companies operating in Cook Inlet should be doing more.

The State looked into it. The Department of Natural Resources answered that after more than a decade of monitoring, it is confident Hilcorp is meeting its lease obligations, and it warned against inviting federal regulators to second-guess Alaska.

In 2023, Sen. Wielechowski introduced legislation extending Alaska’s corporate income tax to privately held S corporations that do not pay it today. By every account, it was aimed at the very producer he wanted drilling more wells. That bill failed. In 2024, he inserted the same language into the Governor’s carbon storage bill. That failed too. This session, a stand-alone S corporation tax bill has been sitting in the Senate Rules Committee for more than a year. Instead of moving that bill on its own merits, the Senate attached the tax to the gasline tax restructuring bill, the one piece of legislation Alaska needs most. That decision has already consumed two special sessions, drawn a veto threat from the Governor, and triggered a third special session. As the Senate passed it in June, Sen. Wielechowski’s parting words to House members who objected were, “Go ahead. Vote for the Texas billionaire.”

When the conference committee report on HB 381 came to the House floor with the S corporation tax attached and no opportunity to amend it, I voted no. It was one of the most disappointing votes I’ve cast in the Legislature, not because I doubted the project, but because attaching a major tax policy to the gasline bill changed what members were being asked to vote on. The Senate could not decide what it wanted more, the pipeline or the tax, and it was willing to put the pipeline at risk to get the income tax. Alaskans should never have to watch their energy future used as a bargaining chip.

Hilcorp, the basin’s largest producer, has been investing between $400 million and $500 million a year in Cook Inlet. Two land rigs drilled through the winter. The Spartan 151 jack-up rig returned offshore after breakup. Crews are drilling from the Tyonek Platform right now. Since coming to Alaska, Hilcorp has invested nearly $30 billion in our state.

Still, Cook Inlet is a mature basin where every new well is harder and more expensive than the last. The people doing that work are not executives sitting in Houston. They are welders, drillers, mechanics, crane operators, engineers, vessel crews, and thousands of other Alaskans whose jobs depend on continued investment.

Here is the part many in Juneau ignore. Cook Inlet is a thin-margin play. After Hilcorp was once again the only bidder in the State’s 2024 Cook Inlet lease sale, the Commissioner of the Department of Natural Resources acknowledged that the lack of competition reflected the basin’s difficult economics. Only one company stayed in the game, and now we’re talking about thanking that company with a new income tax.

Hilcorp also has a choice about where it invests its next dollar. The company operates on the North Slope, where geology is different and returns are generally stronger. Capital goes where the numbers work. Raise the cost of drilling in a thin-margin basin, and you don’t get more wells. You get fewer wells, less gas, imported LNG, and higher utility bills for the very ratepayers Juneau says it wants to protect. The gas will still get produced somewhere. It just won’t be here, where Southcentral Alaska needs it.

The conference committee report on HB 381 included a carve-out exempting Cook Inlet gas producers from the very tax being imposed on everyone else. That tells me the tax’s own supporters recognize the conflict they have created.

If the tax would not discourage Cook Inlet production, no exemption would be needed. If it would discourage production, and the carve-out says it would, then years of demanding more drilling while pushing this tax were never a coherent energy policy. Those two positions simply cannot be reconciled.

The challenge in Cook Inlet is geology and economics, not a lack of effort.

If our priority is keeping the Railbelt supplied with affordable natural gas, then we must pass a clean gasline tax restructuring bill while keeping investment conditions stable in Cook Inlet.

If the Legislature wants to debate the S corporation tax, let’s do it honestly in the stand-alone bill already waiting in committee, during the regular session, and out in the open.

Those two debates simply should not be tied together.

Alaska needs more gas. Juneau needs to get out of the way.

If you’ve followed the news this year, you’ve heard about the “S corp loophole.” You’ve heard that Alaska is giving away $100 million a year to a billionaire in Texas while our schools struggle. You’ve also heard the other side: that the state is trying to punish a company that followed the law.

Both sides are shouting past each other. Neither side is explaining. So let’s slow down and answer the basic questions. What is an S corporation? Where did it come from? And how did Alaska end up in this mess?

An S corporation isn’t a special kind of business. It’s a federal tax election. The “S” comes from Subchapter S of the Internal Revenue Code. Most large companies, like ConocoPhillips or ExxonMobil, are C corporations. Their profits are taxed at the company level, and shareholders may pay taxes again when those profits are distributed. That’s the double taxation people talk about.

In 1958, Congress decided that system wasn’t fair for many small businesses. A family company wanted the legal protection that came with incorporation. If the business failed or was sued, the owners’ homes and savings were protected. But it didn’t seem right to tax the same dollars twice simply because a small business incorporated.

So Congress created the S corporation. A qualifying small business could keep the legal protections of a corporation while paying income tax only once. The company itself pays no income tax. Instead, the profits pass through to the owners, who report that income on their personal tax returns. Congress wasn’t trying to eliminate taxes. It simply changed who paid them.

That system works exactly as Congress intended in almost every state because a personal income tax is waiting for those profits when they reach the owners. The company doesn’t pay. The owners do. Everybody pays once, and everybody understands the rules.

Alaska changed one piece of that equation in 1980.

When Prudhoe Bay was producing enormous wealth, Alaska repealed its personal income tax. At the time, it made perfect sense. Oil money was paying the state’s bills. Nobody imagined we’d someday be debating the tax treatment of a pass-through business operating one of the largest oil fields in the world. Nobody stopped to ask what would happen to income that federal law expected to be taxed at the personal level in a state that no longer had a personal income tax.

C corporations continued paying Alaska’s corporate income tax, just as they always had. S corporation profits continued passing through to the owners, exactly as Congress designed. But when those profits reached the owners, Alaska had no tax there to collect. The money wasn’t taxed at the company level because federal law says it passes through. It wasn’t taxed at the personal level because Alaska had eliminated that tax.

This wasn’t a carefully written exemption, loophole, or a clever accounting trick. It was the unintended result of two tax systems that no longer fit together.

For forty years, almost nobody cared because the dollars were small. Alaska’s S corporations looked just like the businesses Congress had in mind: family businesses, contractors, fishing operations, medical practices, and other closely held companies. Oil money was still carrying the budget. There was no reason to look twice.

That changed in 2020, when Hilcorp bought BP’s Alaska assets, including Prudhoe Bay. BP was a C corporation and paid Alaska’s corporate income tax. Hilcorp operates through pass-through entities. Under Alaska law, that organizational difference suddenly mattered enormously. According to the Department of Revenue, the practical effect was roughly $100 million a year in income tax that Alaska no longer collects from the operator of Prudhoe Bay.

Hilcorp didn’t invent this setup. It didn’t ask the Legislature for a special break, and it didn’t reorganize itself after buying BP’s assets. Hilcorp has been structured this way since long before it came to Alaska. It bought those assets under laws Alaska had already written and followed the tax code exactly as it exists.

Like the outcome or not, that distinction matters. The question isn’t whether Hilcorp followed the law. By every indication, it did.

The question is whether Alaska still wants its tax laws to produce this result.

I’ve never thought “loophole” was the right word for any of this. A loophole suggests somebody found a hidden crack in the law that lawmakers never intended. Nothing here is hidden. Alaska’s tax code works exactly the way it was written. Pass-through businesses don’t pay the corporate income tax because the law says they don’t.

“Gap” is the better word. When Alaska repealed the personal income tax, it left a space between the federal pass-through system and Alaska’s own tax structure. For decades, that gap was too small to notice. Then the operator of Prudhoe Bay happened to fit into it.

Alaska isn’t the only state without a personal income tax. Other states faced this same question and found different solutions. States like Texas and Tennessee found ways to tax pass-through businesses regardless of how they are organized under federal law. Alaska never did, because until 2020 there wasn’t much reason to revisit the issue.

We can disagree about what should happen next. Some believe companies producing the same oil should pay the same state income taxes, no matter how they are organized under federal law. Others argue that businesses invest billions of dollars based on the rules in place at the time, and changing those rules afterward makes Alaska a less predictable place to invest. Still others want to address the gap but believe it should be done through a careful review of the entire tax code, not through amendments attached to unrelated bills or legislation that appears aimed at a single taxpayer.

Those are all honest arguments, and they deserve an honest debate.

What doesn’t help is pretending this is either a corporate scheme or a political vendetta. The truth is much less dramatic. Congress created S corporations nearly seventy years ago to encourage small, nimble businesses, trusting that the owners would pay tax on the profits. Alaska later repealed its personal income tax because oil money made it unnecessary. Those two decisions were made for completely different reasons, decades apart. Eventually, they collided.

Whether Alaska leaves the law alone or changes it is a decision for the Legislature and the governor. People can disagree about the answer. But before we accuse companies of gaming the system or politicians of giving away the store, we ought to understand how the system actually got here.

Effective public policy starts with understanding the problem as it really exists, not as it’s described in campaign slogans, memes, or bumper stickers. Alaskans deserve that much before they’re asked to pick a side.

Bottom line, for me? There is no loophole.

Alaska's tax code may need repair, but it should not be rewritten by burying tax policy in unrelated legislation and calling it someone else’s failure. Introduce a standalone bill and debate it openly, honestly, and transparently.

One of the more thoughtful and authentic responses to my recent column came from someone who is, or was, in the pollock fleet. I appreciate that. It brought firsthand knowledge into a conversation that too often gets reduced to slogans, memes, and bumper stickers. And it made an important point: not every trawl fishery is the same. That distinction matters, and anyone who wants an honest discussion ought to acknowledge it.

But once we agree that distinctions matter, we have to follow the facts wherever they lead.

The distinction that ultimately matters isn’t pollock versus cod. It isn’t the Gulf of Alaska versus the Bering Sea. It isn’t catcher boats versus factory vessels.

No, the defining question is much simpler: does the gear contact the bottom?

That’s where the seafloor is disturbed, where the sediment structure and the animals living in it are damaged, and where long-lived corals and sponges, in the places they exist, are lost. That’s where the conversation should remain focused.

The obvious example is dedicated bottom trawling, where contact with the seafloor is part of the fishing method. The more difficult question is the fishery that describes itself as pelagic or midwater. The defense has always been that because the target species is suspended in the water column, the gear stays off the bottom.

The problem is that the science doesn’t support treating that as an absolute.

A National Marine Fisheries Service analysis found that pelagic trawl gear operating in the Gulf of Alaska and the Bering Sea contacted the seafloor across anywhere from 40 to 100 percent of the width of the net during fishing operations, often while towing for miles. Other analyses presented to the North Pacific Fishery Management Council reported average bottom contact between 40 and 80 percent of fishing time, with some factory vessels approaching continuous contact. Those findings are precisely why the Council continues to examine gear modifications and performance standards intended to reduce bottom contact.

In other words, “midwater” does not necessarily mean the gear remains off the bottom. It means that sometimes it does, and sometimes it doesn’t.

That isn’t an indictment of the men and women who fish these vessels. Quite the opposite.

Every experienced trawl captain knows when the gear is beginning to touch bottom. Modern vessels have sonar, net sensors, sounders, and decades of accumulated experience. They know what they’re seeing. More importantly, they know how to adjust. They can change depth, alter the tow, modify the gear, or move to different water. No regulator sitting in Juneau or Washington can make those decisions nearly as effectively as the people on the back deck and in the wheelhouse.

That is where I believe the conversation belongs.

This isn’t about saying every trawl fishery is the same, because they aren’t. Nor is it about pretending that every vessel operates without affecting the seafloor, because the available evidence says otherwise. It’s about recognizing that bottom contact is the hidden issue, perhaps the real and most important issue, because the seafloor is the environment where the resource lives. It’s about understanding that even pelagic gear can and does contact the bottom and finding ways to reduce that contact wherever possible.

I suppose it could be a request. I would hate to think it would be regulatory.

So, if the industry chooses to lead that effort, it will find many Alaskans willing to stand alongside them.

Because I don’t believe anyone should welcome the other path(s) to a solution. Public patience is wearing thin. If the fishing industry refuses to draw the line at the bottom, the public eventually will. And when that happens, the debate will no longer be about improving gear or reducing contact. It will be about eliminating the practice altogether.

It would be far better for everyone if we solve the problem while the solution is still simply this: keep the gear off the bottom.

When Alaskans argue about Pebble, we don’t argue about ounces of copper, finite as it is. We argue about the streams, the headwaters, the salmon downstream. The extracted thing isn’t the point. The place it comes out of is the point.

So why do we buy that trawling is all about fish?

Every debate over trawling gets steered onto the same ground. How many pollock. What the bycatch quota is, a share of the catch or of the resource? All of it framed as a renewable-resource question: how much can we take and still breed back? It’s a fair question. But it’s the wrong one, and I think the industry knows it.

Because bottom trawling isn’t harvesting a renewable resource. It’s strip-mining a non-renewable one and calling the wreckage a fishing debate. Some extraction renews. Timber grows back. Farmland replants. You take the crop and leave the soil. Fish, left alone, come back, if we stay off the bottom.

But a mine is different. You cannot re-seed an ore body. And when you drag steel doors, netting, and chains across the seafloor, you aren’t taking the crop. You’re mining the soil. You’re grinding up coral gardens, sponge beds, crab nurseries, and sediment layers that took centuries to build, the habitat every fish depends on to be renewable at all.

It’s rototilling the ocean floor with no replanting, others call it clearcutting the seabed with no reseeding. Either way, this isn’t farming the ocean. It’s mining it.

What’s hard to reconcile is legislators who oppose all seabed mining yet defend bottom trawling. Somehow dragging heavy steel across living habitat is fine, so long as we don’t call it mining.

Hatcheries don’t fix it. You can breed a salmon faster than you can rebuild the bottom it evolved to live above. When the only answer to a collapsing stock is to manufacture fish in a building, that’s not a solution. That’s a confession.

The scale is staggering. Each year it re-suspends roughly 22 gigatons of sediment, as much as all the world’s rivers deposit on continental shelves. A 12-year-old halibut now weighs about half what it did in the 1980s, and the stock sits near the threshold where the fishery could close altogether.

Shut. Down. Altogether. That’s not an environmentalist talking. That’s the arithmetic.

Say what you want about Pebble, but look at what we made it do before it could break ground. Nearly two decades of environmental review and permitting. Reclamation bonds posted up front, so the public isn’t left holding the damage if the company walks. We made it prove, in advance, it wouldn’t destroy the salmon habitat around it, all for harm still only potential.

Pebble hasn’t killed a single salmon.

A factory trawler is held to none of that. It drags its gear across habitat built over centuries, posts no bond, files no restoration plan, and proves nothing about what it leaves behind, because it’s out of sight and the debate stays fixed on fish counts. That damage isn’t potential. It happened yesterday. It’s happening today. It’ll happen tomorrow. 22 gigatons a year, every year.

That’s the double standard: the strictest environmental bar in the country for a mine, and no bar at all for ocean-floor mining, so long as we call it fishing instead of extraction.

I’m not against responsible extraction. Everyone knows I believe Alaska needs to build: a gasline, strategic mining, strong fisheries, timber. But building responsibly has always meant one thing: those who take the profit account for and repair the damage. A mine that can’t post a bond doesn’t get built. Why should a trawl fleet that can’t rebuild a seafloor get to strip-mine one for free?

And here’s the kicker. These trawlers process at sea, haul billions back to Washington State, and skip past Alaskan ports on the way out. NOAA figures the state lost around $1.8 billion between 2022 and 2023, tied to collapsing crab and salmon.

In 2024, a single Bering Sea trawler pulled up 2,000 Chinook in a day, fish bound for the Yukon and the families who count on them. They never made it. Federal regulators have now closed Yukon Chinook fishing for seven years. A Seattle industry keeps the profit, and rural Alaska, much of it Alaska Native, buys its own food back at double the price. Under our own constitution, these resources are supposed to benefit Alaskans. This is the opposite.

The industry’s favorite move is to pretend anyone asking wants to shut down all fishing. Nobody does. It’s about not flattening the bottom to catch a fish.

Let’s be real about what the Legislature can do. Most of this trawling happens in federal waters, under NOAA and a council stacked with the industry it regulates. But we control our own state waters, out to 3 miles, and House Bill 203 and Senate Bill 161 would have banned bottom-contact trawl and dredge gear there. It sends the message federal managers need to hear: Alaska is done pretending symbolic gestures put fish back in rivers.

But the deeper fix is how we think. Stop treating trawling as a fishing question and start treating it as what it is: resource extraction. Ask the questions we ask every mine. What habitat is destroyed? Who restores it? Who guarantees the public won’t pay for it?

We can’t keep cashing checks on borrowed fish. And we can’t keep mining the ocean floor while advertising the catch as “sustainable Alaska fish,” not when you count the habitat it destroys.

The trawl industry wants this fight to stay about fish, because fish are easier to count than habitat. But habitat is the foundation of every fishery we hope to leave our children. That’s exactly why it can’t.

Before election day, you will hear a candidate say it. At a forum, in a mailer, or when a teacher or trooper asks where he stands on the old defined-benefit pension. He looks you in the eye and says: “I support defined benefits, but only if the state can afford it.”

It sounds responsible. It sounds like a man doing math. It is neither.

It is a trapdoor.

A defined-benefit pension is not something you buy at a sale on a Tuesday and check off your list. It is a constitutional promise that stretches 30, 40, 50 years out. A worker who signs on at 25 and retires at 65 collects that first pension check four decades later, across ten governors and twenty legislatures. “Can we afford it” is not a question you answer once at the register. It gets re-asked every year for the rest of that worker’s life, and the person who has to answer it isn’t in the room today.

Ask him the follow-up: afford it when? On whose revenue forecast? At what rate of return?

I can tell you exactly when Alaska could “afford” the last defined-benefit plan, the whole time it was quietly digging a hole now roughly $7 billion deep, about $46,000 for every Alaskan. Nobody in 1990 said “we can’t afford this.” The light stayed green until the bill came due on somebody else’s watch. These plans feel affordable precisely when they are becoming unaffordable.

To the union member in the front row, the dodge says yes. To the fiscal conservative in the back row, it says don’t worry, I’ll be careful. It faces both ways and commits to nothing, because “afford” is never defined. That is not a principle. That is a man trying to win a room without telling it the truth.

Ask why the softest “yes,” but only if we can afford it, is suddenly this cycle’s fashionable line. No accident: it comes from the people who want these pensions most.

My opponent is a retired trooper and a former president of the troopers’ union, the Public Safety Employees Association, one of the loudest voices lobbying to bring these pensions back. A man who led that union is not going to be the Valley’s firewall against it. “Only if we can afford it” is just the polite way to hold the door open without scaring you off.

And he is not alone. House Bill 78, the pension bill, is carried by legislators who lean heavily on public-sector union support to win their seats. I do not say that to demonize anyone; some of them are people I work with and will keep working with. I say it because you deserve to know whose interests that line really serves. Too often, the people pushing these bills and the people who collect on them are the same people.

The insiders learned that a flat “yes” scares the Valley, so the pitch got quieter: “maybe, if we can afford it.” Same bill. Same $9 billion risk. Same hand reaching for your dividend. Just a softer voice.

Here is what the dodge is built to skip past: even in a year we could afford it, the old pension is still the wrong tool. The whole case for reopening rests on one claim, that closing the plan in 2006 caused our teacher and trooper shortage. A new University of Alaska ISER paper, the cleanest natural experiment in the country, found it did not.

The slogan does not survive contact with the evidence.

The structure is a bad deal on its own terms. The old pension pays off your final salary, the reason you hear “sorry, gotta grab the overtime, I’m in my high-three years,” not off what you actually put in. It handcuffs a mobile workforce to one employer and shortchanges anyone who leaves early. When markets fall short, the state must top up the plan, exactly when it can least afford to. Ask Detroit, which cut “guaranteed” pensions in bankruptcy. Ask Rhode Island, which clawed benefits back from retirees. “Defined” turned out to be a suggestion.

And every dollar comes out of the same pot. Each $1 billion in new pension liability is roughly $1,500 less per Alaskan in future dividends. Under the Reason Foundation’s realistic scenario, the version we already fought runs about $17,000 per Alaskan, on top of the $46,000 we still owe on the last one. The Legislature already pulled $1.66 billion out of the statutory PFD this year because there wasn’t room for everything. Billions in new promises won’t make room. They guarantee deeper cuts to your dividend, and your kids’, for 30 years.

So when a candidate says he supports a full PFD and a reopened pension and it all pencils out if we’re careful, he is counting on you not doing the math.

I won’t insult you with “only if we can afford it,” because it is a non-answer dressed up as prudence. My opponent answers to the public sector unions, the Juneau Democrat coalition, and the insiders who write these bills and cash these checks.

I answer to the Valley, to Talkeetna, and to Healy.

So here is where I stand, no trapdoor: I will not ever vote to reopen a system that already has $7 billion leftover unfunded from the last debcle, that the evidence says won’t fix retention, and that will get paid for out of your dividend. What I will build is a retirement Alaskans can count on, one where the benefit flexes with the market so the budget, and your PFD, never take the hit.

When you hear the dodge, you will know it for what it is. Make them give you a real answer.

I already have.

Southcentral Alaska has a problem that cannot be wished away. The natural gas that heats our homes, powers our businesses, and keeps the lights on is getting harder to find. Cook Inlet production is declining, but demand is not. Unless we bring new gas to market, families and businesses are going to pay more for the energy they depend on every day. That is why the Alaska LNG Project matters. It is not just another pipeline. And it’s not just revenue. It is our best opportunity to bring known reserves of trillions of cubic feet of North Slope gas to Southcentral Alaska and keep energy reliable and affordable for decades to come.

That’s what makes the Senate’s version of HB 381 so concerning. In the middle of a bill meant to move the gasline forward, senators added a new tax on certain oil and gas companies. They call it closing the “S corporation loophole.” On its face, that sounds reasonable. Nobody likes loopholes, and most Alaskans believe large companies should pay their fair share. I understand that argument. The problem is that this amendment reaches much farther than it first appears, and it could raise energy costs while making a major gasline project harder to finance.

Here is what most people are not told. Most large companies are C corporations, which pay Alaska’s corporate income tax on profits earned here. Other businesses, including S corporations and many LLCs, are pass-through entities. Their profits are not taxed at the company level. Instead, they pass through to the owners, who report that income on their personal returns. Because Alaska has no personal income tax, the state collects nothing on that income.

Hilcorp, which now produces much of Cook Inlet’s oil and gas, is structured this way. Before it acquired BP’s Alaska assets, BP paid Alaska’s corporate income tax as a C corporation. After the sale, the structure changed, and so did the tax treatment. That is the issue lawmakers are trying to address.

There is nothing unreasonable about asking whether that is fair. Alaska has schools to fund, roads to maintain, troopers to support, and a budget that is already stretched thin. Reasonable people can disagree about how pass-through companies should contribute. My concern is not the question. It is the answer that has been written into this bill.

The Senate version of HB381 creates a new state income tax on pass-through oil and gas companies, with a top rate of 9.4 percent. Most people hear that and assume it only applies to a few large operators. It does not. The language reaches into the full chain of getting natural gas to market: producing it, processing it, moving it through pipelines, and delivering it to homes and power plants.

Anyone who has ever run a business knows what happens next. When government raises the cost of producing something people need, those costs do not disappear. Somebody pays them. In energy, that somebody is the customer. That’s why the Alaska Chamber, the Alaska Oil and Gas Association, and the Alaska Support Industry Alliance have all warned this proposal could raise energy costs for families and employers. It is not opposition to taxation. It’s an understanding of how costs move through a system.

Investors understand that same reality. The Alaska LNG Project will require tens of billions of dollars in private capital. Investors do not commit money of that scale when the rules are uncertain or changing in the middle of negotiations. Stability is not a preference. It’s a requirement. Changing Alaska’s tax structure during financing discussions introduces risk that does not need to exist. The project developer has already warned this amendment could make financing more difficult.

Investors do not write billion-dollar checks when the rules keep changing.

What makes this more concerning is how quickly it appeared. The amendment was added late in the process, with limited time for review. The Department of Revenue could not clearly estimate what it would raise because key details were still unresolved. Lawmakers were being asked to vote on a tax without clear answers on how it would function or what it would generate. And vote they did.

The language itself is also inconsistent. In one section it says individuals are not taxed. In another, it includes sole proprietorships, which are individuals operating a business. That is not a minor drafting issue. It’s a sign the policy was not fully worked through before being placed into law. That matters when billions in investment and Alaska’s energy future are on the line.

And it matters to Alaskans who just want to heat their homes.

One more point is worth remembering. The Alaska Constitution does not allow one Legislature to permanently give away the state’s power to tax. If lawmakers decide later that pass-through companies should be taxed differently, they will still have that authority after the gasline is built and gas is flowing to Southcentral Alaska. Nothing about this decision is permanent.

That is why the priority should be clear. First, build the pipeline. First, make sure Alaska families have reliable, affordable natural gas for decades to come. After that, we can have a serious debate about whether the tax code should change. Waiting does not take away the state’s options. Getting this wrong could take away the project.

Supporters of the amendment say the language can be fixed and that a project this important will survive a new tax. That may be true. But when the stakes are this high, “maybe” is not enough. Before Alaska changes the rules on a project of this scale, lawmakers should be able to show that it will not raise energy costs or discourage investment. I have not seen that case made. Until I do, the wiser course is simple: build the gasline, secure Alaska’s energy future, and settle the tax debate afterward.

For generations, Americans have been taught that Western civilization simply appeared out of thin air, that freedom is the natural state of mankind, that progress runs on autopilot, and that the world we inherited would have arrived no matter what anyone believed.

It didn’t.

The freedoms we enjoy, the rule of law, representative government, the university, the hospital, the idea of charity toward a stranger, and the belief that every person possesses inherent worth and dignity were not accidents of history, and they were not the default setting of the human race. For most of human history, the strong ruled the weak and called it the order of nature. Something broke that pattern.

What broke it was a civilization rooted in Judeo-Christian principles.

The idea that every human being is created in the image of God transformed the world. In the ancient world, worth was measured by power, birth, or usefulness to the state, and the slave and the emperor were not the same kind of being.

Christianity made the radical claim that they were equal in moral standing before God.

From that conviction came the rest: rights that come from our Creator and not from government, a law that no king or politician stands above, and a duty to care for the poor, the sick, the orphan, and the stranger not as charity from the strong but as obligation between equals.

That foundation built the West.

Our universities began as church schools. Our first hospitals were founded by people who believed a dying beggar bore the image of God. The abolition of slavery was driven in large part by men and women who believed that same truth and who spent decades resisting the economic and political order of their day because they believed it was morally wrong.

Today, that foundation is under assault, not by armies, but by ideas.

Pete Hegseth, in The Battle for the American Mind, revives an ancient word every parent should understand: paideia. It means more than education. It is the formation of mind, character, loves, and loyalties, the quiet shaping of what a child admires, rejects, and is willing to defend. Every civilization has a paideia. Every society teaches its children what is true, what is good, what is beautiful, and what kind of person they are expected to become.

The question is never whether children will be formed. They will. The question is what they will be formed into.

For most of American history, our paideia was grounded in biblical truth, personal responsibility, family, sacrifice, and love of country. That is not nostalgia, but something written into our founding and carried through our early education.

The Northwest Ordinance of 1787 declared that religion, morality, and knowledge are necessary to good government and the happiness of mankind, and therefore education should be encouraged. Early schoolbooks taught reading through Scripture. Generations learned grammar and virtue together, and civics was taught because self-government requires citizens capable of governing themselves.

That did not happen by accident. It produced the freest and most prosperous nation in history.

Today, a different paideia is taking hold.

Children are increasingly taught that America is defined more by its failures than its founding ideals, that truth is personal preference, that faith belongs only in private life, and that our history should be met with suspicion rather than gratitude. Gratitude has been replaced with grievance, character formation with emotional validation, and objective truth with personal identity. We are not just teaching facts; we are forming a worldview that shapes a generation that asks what it is owed, but rarely what it owes.

Look across Western Europe. Cathedrals that stood for centuries now sit empty, converted, or closed. Birth rates have fallen below replacement levels, and immigration is reshaping entire societies. But the deeper issue is not demographic, it is cultural confidence. A civilization taught to be ashamed of itself will eventually lose the will to defend itself. Europe is not being conquered; it is forgetting why it was worth defending.

Our founders understood this danger clearly.

George Washington warned that religion and morality are indispensable supports of political prosperity. John Adams said the Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people and is wholly inadequate to any other. Alexis de Tocqueville observed that American liberty was sustained not by government power but by moral habits and religious belief working together in public life.

Taken together, they were saying something simple: freedom does not sustain itself. It depends on the character of the people who live under it.

America is not Europe, but it is moving in that direction.

Our churches are still open. Our families are strained but intact. Our love of country is wounded but not gone. We still have time.

But recovery will not come from Washington alone, and it will not come from Juneau alone.

It will come from parents, churches, schools, and communities willing to do the slow work of formation again, teaching young people where rights come from, why liberty requires virtue, and why America, despite every flaw and failure, remains worth preserving.

That formation will not happen by accident. It requires moral leadership in every generation, including from the pulpit. In the era of the Revolution, historians refer to what was called the Black Robed Regiment, pastors who reminded their communities that liberty and responsibility before God could not be separated. Today, as younger Americans show renewed interest in Christianity, that same kind of moral clarity and leadership will matter again in rebuilding a shared paideia.

Legislation can solve problems. Elections matter. But I will say this plainly. If we lose the next generation, no law and no election will recover what is gone. You cannot govern a people into convictions their education spent years teaching them to reject.

Civilizations endure because they remember who they are. They decline when they forget.

Our task is not merely to win the next election. It is to raise the next generation.

We must take back our education system. The future of America depends on it.

There is a constant drumbeat, in some social media posts, to move the capital out of Juneau. Legislators hear it all the time: Alaskans voted to move the capital, the measure passed, and the Legislature ignored them.

That is not what really happened.

Since statehood in 1959, voters have considered at least nine ballot measures to relocate the capital which is more than any other state. At times, they approved studying a move. In 1974, they approved relocating the capital in principle. In 1976, they selected Willow as a site. Yet on that same ballot, voters passed the FRANK Initiative, Fiscally Responsible Alaskans Needing Knowledge. FRANK requires full disclosure of all direct and indirect costs and voter approval of bonds before any relocation money can be spent. That voter-approved safeguard has been decisive in every move-the-capital discussion.

Every time voters were asked to approve the funding required to make a move happen, they said no. No relocation bond has ever passed.

Juneau’s role as capital predates statehood. After the United States purchased Alaska from Russia in 1867, Sitka served as the territorial seat of government. In 1900, Congress directed that the capital move to Juneau, and by 1906 the relocation was complete. When Alaska became a state in 1959, Juneau had been the capital for half a century, and it remained the capital under the new constitution.

As Anchorage and Fairbanks grew, frustration with Juneau’s location increased. The capital is accessible only by air or water, which makes travel expensive and time-consuming. As the centers of population and economic activity shifted north, debate about the location was inevitable.

The first two post-statehood relocation attempts, in 1960 and 1962, failed.

In 1974, during the oil boom, voters approved, in principle, moving the capital to Western Alaska. Two years later, they selected Willow. After Willow was chosen, Governor Jay Hammond followed through. A commission was appointed. Plans were developed. Infrastructure needs were identified. Costs were calculated. The state did exactly what voters directed.

Then voters saw the price tag.

In 1978, a bond to fund nearly one billion dollars for Willow failed overwhelmingly. In 1982, when projected costs rose to approximately $2.8 billion, voters were asked again. That measure failed. The no vote also repealed prior relocation laws and effectively ended the Willow plan. The concept had support; the funding did not.

In 1994, voters rejected a proposal to declare Wasilla the capital. On the same ballot, they overwhelmingly reaffirmed FRANK’s cost disclosure and bond requirements.

Then in 2002, voters considered Ballot Measure 2, formally titled the Initiative Petition Moving the Location of Legislative Sessions. It would have required legislative sessions to be held in the Matanuska-Susitna Borough, or in Anchorage if facilities were not yet available in the Mat-Su. Voters rejected it decisively, 153,127 no to 74,650 yes, a margin of more than two to one.

The pattern is clear. Alaskans have been willing to explore relocation. They have not been willing to authorize the bonds necessary to pay for it.

Even in recent years, the conversation has taken on new language in some circles. Beyond traditional arguments about access and cost, some advocates now frame relocation in terms of “decolonization” and the symbolic role of Juneau as the seat of government. We recently addressed that historical argument in greater depth in a separate essay which you can read here. The motivations behind calls to move the capital may evolve, and they do not come solely from one political perspective, but the fiscal consequences remain the same.

As co-sponsors in the 34th Legislature of House Bill 3, which would allow regular and special legislative sessions to convene in Anchorage, we support any effort to improve accessibility to lawmakers for Alaskans. HB3 bill reflects ongoing concerns about travel, attendance, and public access, yet it still faces the familiar fiscal hurdles of significant costs.

While official legislative sessions continue to meet in Juneau, some off-site hearings or meetings have been held in Anchorage. Attendance at these events is varied, highlighting a practical reality: moving sessions closer to the population center does not automatically guarantee robust public participation.

Relocation is not simply moving desks. It requires housing, utilities, digital infrastructure, meeting space, hotels, restaurants, and long-term operating commitments. The Legislature employs hundreds, from lawyers to finance staff, all requiring housing or hotels. And the fact that Juneau provides economic stability to Southeast Alaska cannot be ignored. Many Alaskans are also cautious about concentrating political power in the larger cities. These are serious financial and policy considerations.

Despite this long history, we remain committed to finding practical ways to increase public access to government. Through legislation, technology, outreach, and, where appropriate, travel assistance, we will continue working to ensure Alaskans can engage with lawmakers, participate in hearings, and be heard.

Almost since statehood, Alaskans have examined the question of relocation. Yet each time the full financial commitment was placed before them, they declined to fund it. That record is clear. The capital has not remained in Juneau because legislators ignored the voters. It has remained because voters refused to approve the bonds required to move it.

Future arguments may be framed in new ways, whether around cost, access, or decolonization. If voters choose to authorize the funding necessary for relocation, that decision will be respected by the legislature. Until that happens, the constitutional capital remains in Juneau, and our obligation is to make Alaska’s government as accessible, transparent, and accountable as possible for every citizen, in every region of this state.

Note. This Column by Rep. Garret Nelson & Rep. Kevin McCabe was originally published in the Alaska Story. I have reproduced it here merely for posterity.