The man who could become Alaska’s first Democratic governor in a generation — and the youngest in the young state’s history — is a moderate who does nothing in moderation.
Stories of Jonathan Kreiss-Tomkins’s intensity are already political legend in Alaska. At 13, he became a state organizer for Howard Dean’s presidential campaign, his age concealed by the internet. A mountaineer, cellist and extreme runner, he dropped out of Yale to win a state legislative seat at age 23, and then spent a decade building bipartisan coalitions, conducting legislative business on his phone as he trained for ultramarathons on Juneau’s hills. That phase ended with a freak paragliding accident that broke two bones in his right leg and slowed him down ever so slightly.
Now the bald, bearded, baby-faced Eagle Scout, known in Alaska by almost everyone as J.K.T., is about to be introduced to a national audience at 37. His once-underdog campaign is testing whether Democrats can win in Republican states by building coalitions across party lines without embracing the socialist left.
To understand how, friends say, you have to know Sitka, an Alaskan island town of about 8,000 people tucked between the Baranof Mountains and the North Pacific. Rainy, remote and insular, with no malls or McDonald’s, Sitka is shaped by Indigenous Tlingit people, generations of American fishermen and the legacy of Russian colonizers, whose onion-domed Orthodox cathedral still stands in the middle of Lincoln Street, the main downtown thoroughfare.
“We have 14 miles of road in this town,” said Alana Peterson, a Sitka tribal leader who has known Mr. Kreiss-Tomkins since they were children. “You might never talk to someone, but you hear their name, and you know exactly who they are.”
Mr. Kreiss-Tomkins’s three Republican rivals on the November ranked-choice ballot don’t buy the mythmaking. His chief Republican opponent, Bernadette Wilson, has called him a closet socialist, suggested his initials should stand for “just keep taxing” and labeled him “ChatJKT,” accusing him of being beholden to California tech interests like the six Anthropic employees who contributed $372,000 to his campaign. Of the $4.3 million he has raised, 70 percent came from outside Alaska, though he says that he has set a state record by collecting donations from 3,500 individual Alaskans.
“He’s a radical,” Ms. Wilson said at a recent debate. “Alaska cannot afford that.”
Infighting is hurting the Republican cause. Ms. Wilson, the best-funded Republican, has pleaded for her two Republican rivals on the November ballot to withdraw, as has President Trump. They’ve refused — and one attacked her. Meantime, Democrats are in array; Tom Begich, the scion of a Democratic dynasty in Alaska, finished second in the summer’s nonpartisan, top-four primary, and then dropped out and endorsed Mr. Kreiss-Tomkins.
Mr. Kreiss-Tomkins describes his childhood as “feral,” and his mother, a tribal health doctor, and father, a commercial fisherman, as “anti-helicopter parents.” He sprinted through the woods behind his house to school; traveled by ferry and bush plane to sleep on strangers’ couches for track meets, cello concerts and debate competitions; and “spelunked the storm-water drainage system” with friends for fun, said Roger Schmidt, his childhood music teacher.
At Yale, Mr. Kreiss-Tomkins became obsessed with finding the highest point on Ojos del Salado, the world’s tallest active volcano, which has two summits straddling Argentina and Chile. He assembled scientists and climbing partners, found a company willing to loan him $30,000 in global positioning satellite equipment and set off. When a climber’s death closed the mountain, he returned six months later, missing the start of spring classes. His measurements showed the Argentine side was taller by 12 inches.
After he and a friend, Chandler Kemp, found an abandoned camera on Ojos del Salado, Mr. Kreiss-Tomkins spent months tracking down its owner, said Mr. Kemp, an assistant professor at the University of Alaska Fairbanks.
During his decade in the Alaska House, Mr. Kreiss-Tomkins helped assemble bipartisan governing coalitions that brought Republicans, Democrats and independents together to run the chamber, often in opposition to the very conservative governor, Mike Dunleavy. He championed legislation recognizing Alaska’s 20 Indigenous languages as official state languages. He pushed to add protections for the Permanent Fund — the state’s oil-wealth savings account, which helps finance government and pays annual dividends to residents — from overspending. He expanded voting by mail and eased the hiring of Indigenous language teachers.
Before Mr. Kreiss-Tomkins entered the governor’s race in February, he used a Google Doc to list all the activities he would have to give up, such as serving on nonprofit boards, consulting and his full, regular workout routine. He got his car serviced and did his taxes three months early.
“He doesn’t do anything casually,” Bud Carpeneti, a former Alaska Supreme Court chief justice, said at a recent campaign event. He also described Mr. Kreiss-Tomkins as the “most strategic person I’ve ever known.”
Mr. Kreiss-Tomkins is working with consultants who helped elect Zohran Mamdani mayor of New York, which has opened him up to criticism from the right, and he’s running a similarly relentless campaign over a far more vast terrain.
His message is Alaska-focused: stronger public schools; Alaska fisheries for Alaska fishermen; stable state finances; and cheaper energy through oil, gas and renewable power. He has promised a politically balanced cabinet and bristles at the suggestion he’s building a national résumé, à la Sarah Palin, who 20 years ago became Alaska’s youngest governor at 42.
“I really dislike the whole ladder-climber thing,” he said in Juneau this month over late-night pelmeni, a Russian dumpling dish. “People ask, like, ‘Oh, what’s your 10-year plan?’ or “Do you want to run for Senate?’ or whatever, and it misses the whole point.”
His ability to down prodigious amounts of the dumplings, doused in sour cream, vinegar, curry powder and Sriracha, is also the stuff of legend among friends.
Independents make up more than 60 percent of the electorate in Alaska, yet the state supported Mr. Trump three times and last elected a Democratic governor in 1998. Mr. Kreiss-Tomkins, whose legislative district voted for Mr. Trump, finished first in the 17-person August primary with 22.5 percent of the vote.
Republicans may be easing his path, a dynamic not lost on Mr. Trump when he pleaded this week on social media: “Now is the time for all Republicans to unite behind Bernadette.”
The other Republicans — Dave Bronson, a former mayor of Anchorage, and Treg Taylor, a former state attorney general — aren’t cooperating.
“There’s three folks up here on this podium that have experience,” Mr. Bronson said at one debate, signaling toward Mr. Kreiss-Tomkins and Mr. Taylor. “There is one that brags that she does not,” he said, looking at Ms. Wilson.
Mr. Kreiss-Tomkins is promoting endorsements from Alaska Native leaders, commercial fishermen, police unions and Republicans.
“I am a small-business, individual-freedom, mind-your-own-business Republican,” said Rick Halford, a former Alaska Senate president who endorsed the Democrat. “I don’t agree with him on everything, but he listens and he learns.”
After eight years of gridlock between bipartisan legislative leadership and Mr. Dunleavy, who is barred from seeking a third term, Alaska faces chronic budget shortfalls, shuttered schools, a shrinking population, soaring rural energy costs, the risk of rolling blackouts this winter in the Anchorage area, and an economy that rises and falls wildly with global oil prices. Mr. Kreiss-Tomkins compares the moment and the decisions facing state leaders to early statehood or the construction of the Trans-Alaska Pipeline.
“I want to get back to the Alaska that I grew up with and loved,” he told supporters at a Juneau fund-raiser earlier this month. “We had agency, we solved problems, and we had a sense of optimism that the future was going to be better than the past.”
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