YouTube/Majority Forward, a Democrat-aligned PAC
Outside help AK Dems don’t need
What, in God’s name, are Democrats thinking in trying to tie Sen. Dan Sullivan, R-Alaska, to trawler bycatch that has absolutely nothing to do with the so-so dipnetting on the Kenai River this year?
How is it possible to be so tone-deaf to Alaska fisheries that a 12-year-old can figure out you’re pushing the most misleading piece of propaganda run up the pole this election cycle?
It would be nice to blame this sort of campaign shenanigans solely on Majority Forward, a Democrat-aligned entity in Washington, D.C., knowing nothing about what goes on in the 49th state.
But here’s the Alaska Democratic Party itself:
And on the back, this mailer proclaims that “while Alaskans struggle to catch just one king salmon,” Sullivan is part of a trawl-led conspiracy to wreck Alaska salmon fishing.
First off, there’s no evidence – absolutely none – that trawling has done any damage to the Kenai sockeye fishery, or any Alaska sockeye, or to coho or chum salmon fisheries, and certainly not to the pink salmon fishery which floods the state with fish in odd-numbered years.
When it comes to those fisheries, there is better evidence that whatever damage has and is being done is due to the state’s ocean-farming salmon hatcheries, which have been backed for decades by both Alaska Democrats and Republicans.
Not to mention that in the big picture, kings have always been a bit player in the state’s personal-use and sport fisheries – the fisheries in which average Alaskans participate – because kings, the biggest of the Alaska salmon, have never been all that abundant.
Even when king returns were at their peak, seasonal limits were capped at three to five fish per year for Alaska resident anglers because of the low number of kings the state produces. Most Alaskans weren’t filling their freezer with kings.
The exception came in parts of rural Alaska where almost no one lives.
Thus when it comes to asking the question of how the fishing is going for the average Alaskan, an out-of-touch Majority Forward back in the Beltway came closer than the Alaska Democractic Party to identifying one of the fisheries around which that question revolves, if you can believe that.
But then Majority told The Big Lie. If you haven’t seen the video, click this link.
But you don’t really need tobecause all you really need to know is that the video says this: “Dipnetting in Kenai, AK. No fish. Thank Dan Sullivan. Out-of-state factory trawlers are crushing us.”
Nonsense
The problem with this claim is that dipnetters know what is crushing them, and it’s not trawlers. It’s a commercial salmon fishery in Cook Inlet that this year caught about 935,000 sockeye salmon, according to Alaska Department of Fish and Game numbers.
That took a bite out of an already smaller-than-forecast sockeye return to the Kenai. Dipnetters suffered the consequences. The commercial catch, though only a fourth or less of the forecast harvest, will likely end up accounting for four times or more the number of fish caught by dipnetters.
So with Inlet’s commercial fishery netting 935,000 how many more died at sea in trawls? That’s hard to say. Why?
Because the sockeye bycatch in the trawl fisheries is so small that the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) appears to have given up tracking it.
When NOAA did monitor Community Development Quota (CDQ) trawlers for sockeye from 1990 to 2001, the catch averaged 49 per year. No, that is not a typo. There are no missing zeros there.
The average, anal trawl by-catch was 49 sockeye, or not quite twice the number of sockeye allowed two Kenai dipnetters lucky enough or patient enough or skillful enough to fill their permits.
And it has to be understood that these trawl bycatch sockeye, like all trawl bycatch, came from streams and rivers spanning the North American coast from Alaska’s Yukon River in the north to Canada’s Fraser River in the south. Forty-nine fish likely amounts to less than one sockeye per river or creek for all the sockeye-producing systems between these two points.
A catch of 49 sockeye so small that a commercial salmon fisherman working in the Inlet or off the mouth of the Copper River would consider it a bad day’s catch, while a day’s catch of this size would be a disaster for a commercial fisherman in Bristol Bay, where a decent day’s catch starts at 1,000 and goes up to 3,000 or sometimes more.
So trying to link trawl bycatch to what happened in the Kenai dipnet fishery isn’t just hogwash; it’s stupidly bad hogwash that many Alaskans will immediately see through.
Here it should be noted that the “big lie” propaganda technique first suggested by Adolph Hitler, but later more widely linked to Nazi propaganda chief Joseph Goebbels, who was reported to have said that “if you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it, people will eventually come to believe it” came with a big caveat.
As Goebbels pointed out, the big lie worked only as long as the citizenry was stupid or kept in the dark because “the truth is the mortal enemy of the lie, and thus by extension, the truth is the greatest enemy of the state.”
Or, in this case, the truth is the greatest enemy of your political candidate because voters, even the stupid ones, don’t take kindly to being treated like they are stupid.
The truth
It’s just hard to wrap your head around why state Democrats would want to try to make trawl by-catch, an issue pushed by Native corporations in far Western Alaska and Salmon State, a Kenai dipnet issue.
The Native corporations in question have long been angry because they didn’t get a share of the money from the revenue-generating CDQ trawl fisheries, and Salmon State is an entity backed by the social warriors of the D.C.-based New Venture Fund, which feels sorry for the impoverished, primarily Native population of Western Alaska, as we all should.
The region needs some sort of economy. There are basically no private sector jobs there now. Unemployment is so high that many people have simply stopped looking for work. Unfortunately, putting an end to trawling wouldn’t change this fundamental problem.
And none of this has anything to do with “how is the fishing” for the vast majority of Alaskans, who live in urban areas or along the state road system and fish for salmon in fisheries unaffected by trawling.
It’s hard to believe Alaska Democrats think Alaskans are so stupid they’d believe dipnetting was bad on the Kenai, or the Copper River for that matter, because of the trawl bycatch of almost no sockeyes.
Or at least I don’t want to believe that because I know Democrats who know this is a big lie.
Kenai dipnet success, or lack thereof, was this year, as it is every year, linked to how many fish commercial fishery managers let move into the river. The issue isn’t “bycatch;” it’s direct catch with the commercial fishery first in line at the dinner table.
Commercial fishermen, at this point it should be noted, think the fishery managers were too restrictive this year because they always think that. And dipnetters think the opposite because they always think that.
The number of sockeyes that made it into the Kenai before the dipnet fishery closed on July 31 was significant at just under 1 million. That was about a third the number by the same date last year or about 58 percent of the same date in 2024 or about 20,408 times the annual sockeye bycatch in the trawl fishery.
The problem for dipnetters this year was that almost 60 percent of these returning Kenai sockeyes hit the river from July 24 to July 27. If you were at the mouth of the Kenai on the weekend of July 25-26, when more than 100,000 sockeye per day were swarming the river, the fishing was great.
If you missed that weekend, you had to work hard to get fish.
The tally on the dipnet harvest is not yet in. But given the below forecast return of sockeye, the lowish number of Kenai salmon escaping the commercial nets and the shape of the return, the catch is likely to be on the lower end of harvests that have ranged from 165,000 to 378,000 sockeye over the course of the past 10 years, according to state data.
From 18,5000 to 27,100 people per year have been reported to have been involved in scooping up these fish. The commercial fishery is limited to approximately 1,300 permit holders. Some of those permit holders are still fishing the permits the state gave them for free when it limited entry into state salmon fisheries in 1973.
Others sold their permits, pocketed the cash and wished luck to the buyers. Some of the buyers were under the impression the permits were buying them ownership of some sockeye, even though the state made it very, very clear when the Limited Entry Act was written that the permits were no more, and no less, than a “use privilege.”
The only real difference between the limited entry permit and a standard Alaska fishing license is that the “use privilege” granted the permit holder is not restricted by daily or seasonal bag limits, and the holders of the commercial “use privilege ” are allowed to use much more efficient fishing gear than a dipnet or rod and reel.
Built-in resentments
Dipnetters pretty much all understand how this works. So do Kenai anglers and friends of Kenai anglers and friends of Kenai dipnetters. Their understanding has helped fuel decades of Cook Inlet “fish wars” because no one involved with the region’s salmon believes he, or she, is being treated fairly.
The commercial fishermen believe they were there first and should get all the sockeye, although they weren’t there first. Alaska Natives were fishing for subsistence before the Russians arrived in the region, and the Russians joined the Natives in fishing for subsistence before commercial fishing took hold.
After that, subsistence fishing, largely with rod and reel, continued even as the commercial fishing industry tried to take over all of the harvest and managed to come close to doing so by the time of Alaska Statehood.
In the years after Statehood, however, non-commerical fishermen slowly but steadily began to claw back some of the harvest, and they have slowly but steadily managed to claw back a little more here and a little more there as the population of the Anchorage Metropolitan Area has grown to become home to about 60 percent of the Alaska population.
The commercial fishermen of the Inlet fear this growth and rightly so. When the pie has long been yours, it’s tough to share a slice, and it becomes tougher with every slice. Maybe these fishermen, who were big supporters of Democrat-aligned former Gov. Bill Walker, sold state Democrats on the “trawler bycatch” pitch.
Who knows. I hate writing about politics in this state anymore because it’s become such a cesspool of deceit, given that both Alaska Republicans and Democrats have been more interested in playing the state’s fisheries for voters than establishing a plan for managing the fisheries based on the economics that produce the greatest benefit for Alaska.
Democrats in the state’s Panhandle, for instance, have for years tried their damnedest to stifle the highly valuable, tourist-driven sport fishery there. And they appear to have convinced Democratic gubernatorial candidate Jonathan Kreiss Tompkins, a fundamentally nice and usually fairly intelligent guy who grew up in Sitka, that the greatest threat to Alaska’s salmon isn’t trawlers but the Kenai River Sportfishing Association.
This is a great pitch for voters in Southeast, who’ve tried for years to strangle the sportfishing industry despite the fact the regional economy has far more to gain from selling tourists the opportunity to catch a salmon than shipping them dead fish.
Unfortunately, the politics are a lot different in Alaska writ large, and there the Kenai Sportfishing Association played a key role in getting the Board of Fisheries to set a minimum, in-river goal of 1.1 million sockeye for the Kenai. This is 350,000 sockeye above the scientifically set minimum “sustainable escapement goal” of 750,000.
Why does this matter?
It matters because that 350,000 sockeye difference – more than 7,000 times greater than sockeye trawl bycatch for those who might be interested – is intended to put fish in-river to support Kenai rod-and-reel fisheries that attract a lot of tourists to the Peninsula.
Former Gov. Tony Knowles, a Democrat, drove this change in thinking at the start of the new millennium only to take heat for it in 2010 when the late Alan Boraas, a noted Kenai anthropologist who knew little about fishery science, blame Knowles for creating “over-escapements” of sockeye to the Kenai that caused a weak 2010 return.
Borass, who it should be noted specifically observed that high-seas trawling was not the problem, thought that only 500,000 to 800,000 sockeye per year should be allowed into the Kenai. A lot of Cook Inlet commercial fishermen still believe this.
If you’re a dipnetter or angler who didn’t do well with 983,000 sockeye in-river by the end of July, think how much worse it would be if the state was managing for an in-river count of say 400,000 to 450,000 by the end of that month.
And then think about the difference between 49 fish per year from a bunch of streams and rivers versus 350,000 less from one river. Why state Ds seem to have chosen fictional, trawl-lined Kenai sockeye bycatch as a hill to stand on is mind-boggling.
That former Rep. Mary Peltola, now a challenger for Sullivan’s Senate seat, is caught up in the trawl nonsense is one thing. It’s been the biggest issue in her old hometown of Bethel for a long, long time because of the resentment about CDQ profits.
But letting the whole party get sucked into this nonsense? There are some fishermen in the party leadership. You’d think they’d know better. Selling voters a load of bull, when it is so obviously a load of bull, does nothing but cause those voters to question anything the party has to say.
And Kreiss-Tompkins blabbering about the evil Kenai River Sportfishing Association isn’t going to help the party’s cause in the Anchorage Metropolitan Area now home to about six out of every 10 Alaska voters.
Then again, much of the American polity does seem to believe we are now living in a totally post-truth world where The Big Lie will work if you repeat it enough times in social media where people are encouraged to believe whatever they want to believe and facts be damned.
Categories: Commentary, News, Outdoors
