Spokeswoman “Jane M,” Outside actress or concerned Alaskan? Who knows.
Fairy tales and blindness
The great dream of ranked-choice voting in Alaska was that voters wouldn’t “need to worry about ‘spoilers,’ or feel forced to vote for the lesser of two evils.”
Those are not my words. Those are the words of Fair Vote, the organization that helped bring the ranked-choise idea to life in the 49th state.
Then came Doppleganger Dan, the retired teacher from the isolated, backwater community of Petersburg on Mitkof Island in the middle of the Alaska Panhandle. Name recognition was the big, and only, thing DD had going for him when he entered the Alaska race for the U.S. Senate.
Only it wasn’t his name. It was the name he shared with incumbent Sen. Dan Sullivan, R-Alaska. What followed was a bitter argument between Alaska Republicans and Alaska Democrats as to whether DD was in the primary race as a spoiler or a legitimate candidate.
That debate has never been settled. It could be that DD is neither. It could be that the old fart was merely inspired by the behavior of fellow old fat Donald Trump, who entered politics late in life in a search for national attention, and ended up elected president in 2016.
And social media in this country would indicate the country has an overload of folks craving attention. Doppelganger Dan, aka Decoy Dan, could well be one of them. But he is only a small part of this ranked-choice-voting story.
After DD came Democrat Tom Begich, a legitimate contender to be Alaska’s next governor. Now, before getting into what Begich did, another statement from Fair Vote is needed.
Yes, they can. They can run that way and then abandon all those who voted for them by withdrawing from the general election in the belief they are “splitting the vote with like-minded opponents.”
Voters didn’t decide
This is exactly what Democrat Begich did in the wake of the open-to-all primary. This is how he explained the act to the more than 30,000 people who voted for him:
Say goodbye to the idea that the partisan divide now tearing this country apart is going to be solved by ranked-choice voting. All the new system seems to have done is encourage a Democratic Party increasingly influenced by holier-than-thou Progressives that it can play the ranked-choice-game better than a Republican Party now heavily influenced by the Make America Great Again (MAGA) crowd.
Meanwhile, playing in the background is a debate over repealing the ranked-choice system in Alaska, which has “dark-money”-funded defenders of ranked choice running a fear campaign that claims the repeal effort is a “dark money” plot.
If you have any doubts about dark money behind “No on 2”, just try to find out who is funding Voters for the American Center, one of the major groups supporting the “no” vote.
In advertising, it lists its address as a post office box in Washington, D.C., but its physical address, according to the Colorado election department, tracks back to “registered agent Peter Dumanian,” who claims to work out of 10th floor of a Vermont Ave. NW office building using a phone he doesn’t answer.
More is known about one of No on 2’s other major contributors, the Denver-based Unite America PAC. Ballotpedia reports it is mainly funded by a gang of millionaires and billionaires, among them Michael Bloomberg, 13th on the Forbes list of richest Americans, Kathryn Murdoch of Rupert Murdoch & Family, 38th on the list, and Arthur Blank, 105th on the list.
Musk’s $1.5 billion is about a third of what Ballotpedia reports Kathryn Murdock donated to Unite America, which doesn’t seem to be doing a very good job of uniting anybody.
Heroes and villains
None of this is meant to suggest that any of the billionaires, millionaires, or ordinary working-class Americans deeply involved in the politics of today are inherently bad people because of their allegiance to the Progressive mob or support for the MAGA gang.
The former is built around a lot of well-to-do, wannabe social warriors guilty about their success and wanting to help the underclass with government support of one kind or another. And the latter is full of angry working-class folks or children of working-class parents who have watched the once greatest manufacturing power in the world farm out much of its manufacturing capability to China.
You’d think they’d at least be able to unite around the idea of bringing manufacturing jobs back to this country, because a halfway decent job beats any sort of welfare. But you’d be wrong if you thought this, because the U.S. has become a country now lacking political visionaries capable of steering the masses toward any sort of middle ground.
American politics today is dominated by a bombastic, President-again Trump on one side and a whole lotta Trump mimics on the other side. All of whom traffic in accusations that they are the good guy, or gal, battling villains of various sorts.
At the moment, Alaska might be the posterboy/girl for this behavior.
It features incumbent Sen. Dan Sullivan, R-Alaska, under attack for raising “our gas prices” because he supported the war on Iran and former Rep. Mary Peltola, the Democrat for all of Bethel, taking heat for not backing pay raises for those serving in a U.S. military, which now costs American taxpayers close to $1 trillion a year.
There are legitimate reasons to be opposed to the war in Iran, just as there were legitimate reasons to be opposed to former President Barack Obama’s war on terror that saw a swarm of drones at work randomly killing terrorists, along with a fair number of innocents, including children.
That warring against other countries or other people raises the cost of gasoline for your truck and costly motorized toys is not one of the reasons to be opposed to the war in Iran now any more than it was a reason to be against Obama’s drone war increasing your tax bite.
Worrying about what killing people does to your cost of living isn’t moral; it’s simply selfish, which appears to be what the political strategists behind these ads seem to think is the Alaska norm.
Much of the campaigning for Alaska’s statewide offices is centered on who did, or didn’t, financial aid or federal tax dollars to Alaskans, one way or another. Or the big, bad trawler myth that the Bering Sea pollock fishery is somehow threatening ‘our’ highly valuable salmon, as if the possibility of a few more salmon in some Alaska rivers was more important than the national interest in maintaining a sustainable fishery that now produces 35 percent of the nation’s seafood, according to the American Fisheries Society, a more than 150-year-old, non-partisan professional groupd dedicated to “advancing fisheries and aquatic science and promoting the development of fisheries professionals.”
And never mind that there are no indications, let alone evidence, that the Bering Sea trawl fishery has any effect on the salmon dear to the hearts of most Alaskans.No matter what you might see in the form of TV or YouTube ads, trawlers have nothing to do with how good the fishing is or isn’t on the Kenai River.
One could make an argument, though the evidence is extremely weak, that the pollock fishery might have some effect on king and chum salmon returning to the Yukon and Kuskokwim rivers, but damn few Alaskans are involved in harvesting those fish. Less than 5 percent of the state population lives along these rivers.
Why so few?
Because there are no jobs.
A different time
Once a home to political visionaries looking to build an economically stable society on the edge of the Last Frontier, Alaska is now home to a whole bunch of politicians largely campaigning on who does, or did, the best job of protecting government handouts for what’s left in the north.
The late Alaska Gov. Wally Hickel, who embraced resource development of all sorts along with railroads to connect Alaska to the rest of the globe, might have had a far different vision of Alaska’s future than the late Gov. Jay Hammond, who wanted to turn the Alaska heartland into the continent’s next great agricultural region, but they both had visions.
It’s a little ironic that Hammond, arguably the greenest governor in Alaska history, wanted to jumpstart industrial agriculture to convert millions of acres of wildland to farmland, the greatest destroyer of wilderness in American history, but it is what it is.
U.S. Department of Agriculture figures would indicate that those states have 74 million to 77 million acres of land now devoted to growing crops and about the same tied up in use for ranching. Alaska would be a distinctly different place today if Hammond’s vision of “vast amber waves of grain” had worked out.
His 1980’s plan was to convert a half-million acres to farming by 1990 with a plan to increase the volume of cropland to 20 million acres as soon as possible because Hammond, who was about as politically opposite Hickel as two men could get, shared one thing in common with the man he unseated in a dramatically close race for governor in 1978.
Both men understood the importance of jobs. Hardly anyone in Alaska politics talks about jobs now, other than those who try to use them to leverage the decades-old dream of an Alaska gas pipeline that would, at best, offer short-term employment to ensure the long-term production of a resource from which Alaska would gain little benefit.
Meanwhile, the state is bleeding population due to a lack of job. While the national population grew by 6 percent from 2015 to 2025, Alaska’s population fell by 0.25 percent, and that smallish-appearing decline is misleading in that it masks a major demographic shift.
While younger people have been fleeing the state, older people have been hanging around to take advantage of relatively low taxes and state benefits. Between April 2010 and July 2023, the population of Alaskans over the age of 65 – the standard American retirement age – increased by 101 percent, according to the Alaska Commission on Aging, and those over age 60 had come to represent more than 20 percent of the state’s population.
Alaska has become a nice place to retire, especially for those with the financial resources to split their time between the frozen north and the friendlier climates to the south when the days get really short in November, December and January.
One can’t really call all these folks a drain on the economy just because they’re living on retirement incomes, but what one can fairly observe is that they’re not big spenders.
Retirees eat out less, spend significantly less on services and clothing, and reduce their spending on transportation, primarily because they drive less. Thus they don’t need to buy as much fuel, or pay to have the car serviced as often, or buy a new vehicle to replace the one wearing out.
So Alaska’s economic problem is bigger than a slowly shrinking population. The state has a shrinking population saddled with an increasing number of people who spend way less than they once did, and the economic consequences ripple through Alaska society.
The state’s economic problems are hard to ignore given the homeless taking over parts of the Anchorage Metropolitan area, home to more than half the state’s population. The situation hasn’t quite reached the proportions of the beggars of India, but it is an in-your-face display of a society with big economic problems.
The MAGA crowd would solve the homeless issue by throwing a lot of the homeless in jail for committing petty crimes with no thought as to how insanely expensive it is to house people in prisons. The Progressive mob would warehouse the homeless in shelters with no thought as to how hard it is to keep those with nothing to do out of trouble.
The history of the world is a history of economic failures fueling social chaos, and the socio-economic problem is especially difficult in Alaska today because of people from rural areas migrating to urban areas, where they lack the education and/or skills to obtain employment.
Skills matter. It’s why many, maybe most, urban Alaskans would look even more like ducks out of water in rural Alaska. A goodly share of them might well freeze to death for lack of knowledge of how to start a fire if dropped off in a village cabin with a wood stove.
Starting a fire is no longer a vital skill in America. It’s been replaced by knowing how to access and take advantage of the internet and the interconnected internet world, which has already taken over the lives of many. This is only going to increase in the future because this is what technology does.
Alaskans need look no farther than a once profitable commercial salmon fishing industry – the oil-industry of its day in the old Alaska – which was swallowed whole by technology. Farmed salmon, which some Norwegians started experimentally growing in saltwater net pens in 1970, grew steadily and then took over the world.
Today, more than 75 percent of the salmon consumed by humans come from salmon farms, and the volume of farmed salmon in production keeps growing, which means the Alaska commercial fishing business keeps losing for two reasons.
First off, the farmed fish now control market pricing. Secondly, the farmers keep getting more and more efficient at what they do, which holds down prices. Now semi-retired Alaska economist Gunnar Knapp has been warning of the tech problem for a long, long time now.
Somehow the message that Alaska needs to give up on its horse-and-buggy fishing operations and transition to the future. But nobody seems to want to hear that. In fact, one of the state’s main candidates for governor is now actually promoting a move back to the future in the hopes of winning the votes of commercial fishermen.
JKT Junk
Democrat Jonathon Kreiss Tomkins from Sitka, the old capital of Russian America, has vowed to end the statewide influence of the Kenai River Sportfishing Association if elected governor.
Why?
Because the Kenai association has fought long and hard to preserve the Kenai’s troubled run of high-value, king salmon; allow more sockeye salmon to escape commercial fishermen to boost tourism businesses and supply the thousands of Alaska dipnetters who participated in the state’s by far largest “food security” fishery; and generally shift Cook Inlet fisheries away from commercial harvests that produce salmon worth cents or dollars per pound to recreational and tourism fisheries that produce salmon worth tens of dollars, or more, per pound.
The pitch from Kreiss Tomkins, or JKT as prefers to be called, surely sounds great if you’re one of the few thousand commercial fishermen – many of them nonresidents – making a living catching salmon in Alaska, or one of the Seattle-based salmon processors profiting from Alaska fish.
These are the folks who have dictated state salmon fisheries policy since Statehood and steadily devalued Alaska salmon while doing their best to cut off the salmon supply for Alaska residents and tourism businesses that lure people north to leave money in the state.
There’s a simple spreadsheet issue here. Tourists come to Alaska only to spend. Commercial fishermen come to Alaska and spend, too. No doubt about that. They bring money into the Alaska economy, but that isn’t their main goal.
They’re commercial businessmen, and their goal is to turn a profit. They want to leave Alaska with more money than they arrived with, and a whole lot more if it’s a good fishing season.
The processors spend some money here, too. But most of that goes into the savings accounts of imported laborers – most of them from Latin America or Eastern Europe – who save just about every penny to take home when they leave.
Suffice to say that the commercial fishing business, once the economic backbone of the Alaska territory, is today more of a 21st Century, government-supported welfare business, and Begich, who might have taken a reasonable view of the economics of the business, has decided to do the party thing and toss his support over to JKT because, well, in the partisan politics of today, winning for ‘your side’ is everything.
This is specifically the attitude that ranked-choice was supposed to destroy. And what it’s brought instead is a guy whose written an Open Letter to Alaska’s Commercial Fishermen announcing that if elected he will “restore balance to the Board of Fish” by ridding it of “anti-commercial fishing majority heavily influenced by Kenai River Sportfishing Association.”
“I am running to be a champion for the commercial fishing industry.” (You can ignore the ALFA link connecting to JKT’s website. It takes you to JFK’s now non-existent page. Ah, politics.)
It’s great for JKT to want to be the champion of the commercial fishing industry, but the problem for the majority of Alaskans is that if the commercial fishing industry is ”winning” most Alaskans are losing due to the simple reality that wild salmon are a limited resource.
Commercial fishermen harvest between 100 million per year and almost 200 million per year, depending on whether it is an even-numbered year or an odd-numbered year. This big variance is due to the much higher productivity of odd-year pink salmon – the smallest and least valuable of the species – and the state’s support of hatcheries to produce pink salmon for commercial fishermen.
The total, statewide, all-species catch of salmon last year was 194.8 million of which 119 million, or 61 percent, were humpies, as Alaskans commonly refer to the humpbacked pink salmon. On average, those fish were worth 92 cents each.
That’s 92 cents each, not a pound.
Given that the average, non-resident tourist to Alaska is estimated to spend nearly $1,500 in-state when visiting here, the economic value in attracting a tourist to Alaska to try to catch a salmon on sportfishing gear ridiculously outweighs the value of any off the tens of millions of salmon slaughtered in the commercial fishery.
A sensible state policy would be to promote tourism and maximize a-come-to-Alaska-and-catch-your-own-salmon policy in those areas of the state where this is realistic. But the state long ago eliminated the Alaska Division of Tourism and that Board of Fisheries, which JKT wants to alter, for decades treated commercial salmon harvests as a priority use of the resource.
The only place this changed over the years was in Cook Inlet, where the Kenai Sportfishing Association leveraged the demands of personal-use dipnetters participating in the state’s largest “food security” fisheries, resident and non-resident anglers, tourism businesses and the Matanuska-Susitna Borough to convince the Fish Board to take a more balanced approach to management.
The Mat-Su Borough is in a particularly tough spot because all of its streams and rivers are at the head of the Inlet, and salmon have to escape a gauntlet of nets to reach those waters. In mid-August, silver salmon angling was shut down in much of the area Alaskans call “The Valley” after federal managers failed to maintain the quota on the harvest of those salmon in the federal waters in the lower Inlet.
The feds claimed the overharvest in their fishery was accidental, but one has to wonder given a North Pacific Fisheries Management Council that shares the commercial-fisheries-first attitude of those old Alaska Fish Boards that JKT wants to bring back.
Over the past four decades, the coho goal has been met once. The goals for kings and sockeyes have never been met, and most of the sockeyes that have been produced have ended up in the nets of commercial fishermen, who appear to have benefited from some, maybe a lot, of those fish being sold as “Copper River sockeye” to dupe people willing to pay a premium for Copper River fish.
The state should probably have a special tax on sockeye from the Main Bay Hatchery in Prince William Sound to pay everyday, working Alaskans back for the more than $8.3 million they agreed to spend to build the hatchery in the early 1980s before the state decided to turn it over to the commercial-fishermen-controlled Prince William Sound Aquacutlure Corporation (PWSAC).
What did the average Alaskans get out of this? Almost nothing, which didn’t stop the Alaska legislature from later giving PWSAC another $2.1 million to upgrade the Main Bay hatchery it was then running. The only people to benefit from the hatchery were commercial fishermen and processors in the Sound, where PWSAC operations might actually have cost average Alaskans salmon.
And this is the economic ‘future’ that one gubernatorial candidate wants to restore?
Categories: Commentary, Outdoors, Politics
