Jonathan Kreiss-Tomkins is on the verge of upending Alaska’s political landscape. But when he entered the race for governor of the red-leaning state earlier this year, he wasn’t even the leading Democrat.
That was Tom Begich, a former state lawmaker and a member of Alaska’s most famous political family. But sometimes, maybe only in a state as geographically vast and electorally small as Alaska, politics really does come down to who works the hardest. And Mr. Kreiss-Tomkins had a plan from the beginning, calculating how many voters he needed to meet to finish first in the state’s crowded open primary.
It was essentially the same strategy he employed in 2012, when he dropped out of Yale at 23 to run for the State Legislature. Back then, he had “a pair of running shoes and a ferry schedule” for southeastern Alaska. He won by 32 votes.
This time, he scaled up, traveling hundreds of miles by boat along the Kuskokwim and Yukon rivers, crossing the Interior by snow machine and taking float planes to as many remote villages as possible. It’s really the only path Democrats have to win statewide in a place where Republicans outnumber them and tend to be concentrated in the relatively accessible Railbelt — Anchorage, the Mat-Su Valley and the Kenai Peninsula.
This year’s race will most likely be won by more than 32 votes, but it might come down to a few thousand or even a few hundred: Around 285,000 Alaskans are expected to vote. Mr. Kreiss-Tomkins’s three opponents are Republican, but unaffiliated voters make up 60 percent of the electorate.
Mr. Kreiss-Tomkins’s voter-engagement effort is one reason Democrats see an opening to win the Alaska governor’s race for the first time since 1998. Republican infighting is the other.
Twelve Republicans ran in Alaska’s open, top-four primary in August, collectively winning about 49 percent of the vote — more than the two leading Democrats combined. But while the Democrats united behind Mr. Kreiss-Tomkins after he finished first in the primary, Republicans went in the opposite direction.
Bernadette Wilson, a conservative activist and businesswoman, finished ahead of the other Republicans, and has led them in fund-raising. But former Mayor Dave Bronson of Anchorage and former Attorney General Treg Taylor have resisted calls to unite behind her.
Lately, the Republicans have begun attacking one another. Mr. Bronson has raised questions about unpaid debts and lawsuits involving Ms. Wilson’s waste management company, while Ms. Wilson has accused him of putting himself ahead of the party. Mr. Bronson recently told The Anchorage Daily News that Republican leaders should have done more to vet candidates and narrow the field. “We just failed as a party,” he said.
The three Republican candidates for governor were each hoping for President Trump’s help, even as polls showed his popularity slipping while the cost of oil rose in a state he carried three times.
All three candidates skipped recent debates to attend Alaska rallies by Vice President JD Vance and Mr. Trump. Only Ms. Wilson got what she wanted: Mr. Trump endorsed her, demanded that Mr. Taylor and Mr. Bronson drop out and attacked ranked-choice voting, which he has called crooked.
But it’s too late to take their names off the ballot. And Mr. Trump’s complaints about ranked-choice voting could help Mr. Kreiss-Tomkins if it inspires some Republicans to rank only Ms. Wilson.
Under Alaska’s system, candidates with the fewest votes are eliminated in successive rounds, with their supporters’ ballots transferred to the next-ranked choices.
Ballots that list no backup candidate are “exhausted” when their first choice is eliminated. So if enough Republicans rank only Ms. Wilson and she is eliminated before another Republican, those votes would be lost to the remaining candidates — potentially depriving a Republican opponent of the support needed to overcome Mr. Kreiss-Tomkins and the base he spent months traveling the state to build.
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