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Tag: alaska elections 2014
Alaska Senate Race Becomes Most Expensive Campaign In State’s History

Alaska Senate Race Becomes Most Expensive Campaign In State’s History

By Maria L. La Ganga, Los Angeles Times (MCT)

ANCHORAGE, Alaska — The local official introducing the candidate eventually got around to the point — Sen. Mark Begich, standing up for Alaskans, get out the vote — but first he lit into the Koch brothers and what he described as money’s power to warp politics.

“They’re literally spending hundreds of millions of dollars to defeat Sen. Begich,” fumed Bill Wielechowski, a state senator who represents a swath of Alaska’s biggest city. “Why do these billionaires want to defeat Sen. Begich? They want to fundamentally change our government. … Don’t be mistaken. The fate of the U.S. Senate is in your hands.”

When Begich took the microphone, he could only shake his head and smile. “That was my speech you just did,” said the Democrat, who is trying to keep his job in a tight and closely watched race against Republican Dan Sullivan.

Wielechowski only got it partly right about what has emerged as the most expensive political campaign in Alaska history. Tens of millions of dollars in outside money from across the country have flowed into the Last Frontier to unseat Begich. But even more has been spent to help the Democrat fend off his opponent.

As of early Thursday morning, $22.5 million in outside money — from groups or individuals not affiliated with the official campaign — has been spent on Begich’s behalf, while $16.7 million has been spent to help get Sullivan elected, according to the nonpartisan Center for Responsive Politics. The totals rise from hour to hour.

In pure dollars of outside spending, that makes the Alaska Senate race the fourth most expensive in the country, after North Carolina, Colorado and Iowa. But the $39 million has been used to sway a mere 500,000 or so voters, making the battle between Begich and Sullivan the priciest per capita this election season.

Money from “super PACs,” such as Karl Rove’s American Crossroads and Harry Reid’s Senate Majority PAC, has a double taint in America’s vast and sparsely populated 49th state.

It is outside money in the traditional sense, which is railed against by Begich and Sullivan alike. In addition, it is largely Outside money with a capital “O” — Alaskans’ favorite term of derision for all things Lower 48.

“It’s like these people aren’t from this state,” rued Jerry Barth, who isn’t from this state either but has lived here for 50 of his 67 years and occupied a folding chair at the Begich town hall meeting.

“What’s going to happen to our democracy in this country, the way that big money runs it already?” asked Barth, who drives a water truck on Alaska’s oil-rich North Slope. “I think it’s a sad part that we have to have an election run this way, other people controlling the destiny of our state because they have the money and don’t even live here.”

Super PAC money has been such an issue here that at different times in their long campaigns Sullivan and Begich each challenged the other to sign a pledge to get rid of the outside largesse. Each disparaged the other’s effort as little more than a political stunt. Each, in recent interviews, said his opponent quickly refused to sign on.

How quickly?

“In one hour, bam!” Begich said of Sullivan.

“Within two hours!” Sullivan said of Begich.

Not surprisingly, each effort failed.

And the money keeps flowing. In a 24-hour period, from 5:45 a.m. Wednesday to 5:45 a.m. Thursday, outside groups spent about $850,000 on the Begich-Sullivan race, according to opensecrets.org, the Center for Responsive Politics’ campaign money website.

Spending by Charles and David Koch — who are worth $42 billion each and tie for No. 6 on the Forbes list of wealthiest people in the world — is hard to track, because much of it is so-called dark money, meaning that donations and donors do not have to be disclosed.

Americans for Prosperity is financed in part by the Kochs, who back a host of conservative causes. It has spent about $192,000 fighting Begich and set up an office in downtown Anchorage.

The Kochs are the focus of ire in Alaska, and rampant rhetoric in the Begich-Sullivan race, because Koch Industries owns a company called Flint Hills Resources, which announced in February that it was closing its North Pole refinery. The move cost the state 80 jobs.

Easier to track is spending by Crossroads GPS, a nonprofit founded by Republican operative Rove, and American Crossroads, its related SuperPAC. As of Thursday, the groups have spent nearly $7.2 million to unseat Begich, making the Alaska Senate race their No. 2 target after the Senate race in Colorado.

On the other side is the Senate Majority PAC, which is closely allied with Senate Majority Leader Reid, the Democrat from Nevada. It has spent $8.8 million on the race, giving it to Put Alaska First PAC, a single-candidate super PAC in support of Begich. The Begich-Sullivan contest is Senate Majority PAC’s No. 2 target, after the Senate race in North Carolina.

The big bucks spent to sway Alaska’s small population show that “neither campaign has been perfect” when it comes to benefiting from outside money, said Jessie Peterson, director of the Alaska Public Interest Research Group. “They’ve both taken a lot of money.”

“It’s the voices of the individuals who lose out,” Peterson said. “When you donate $1 versus someone donating $1 million, it can’t help. The whole system needs to be re-examined.”

Photo: SenateDemocrats via Flickr

Midterm Roundup: Democrats Pull Out Of Kentucky

Midterm Roundup: Democrats Pull Out Of Kentucky

Here are some interesting stories on the midterm campaigns that you may have missed on Tuesday, October 14:

• In a major blow to Democrat Alison Lundergan Grimes’ Senate campaign, the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee has stopped running TV ads in Kentucky. The move strongly suggests that the committee has given up hope that Grimes can unseat Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell. Grimes — whose campaign will continue to air ads, and receive on-air support from outside groups — trails McConnell by 3 percent in the Real Clear Politicspoll average.

• According to a new CNN/ORC poll, Republican incumbent Rick Scott and Democrat Charlie Crist are tied at 44 percent in Florida’s contentious gubernatorial race. That marks the fourth consecutive poll to show the race within 2 percentage points; Crist leads by less than 1 percent in the poll average.

• Another poll of Alaska’s Senate race has found incumbent Democrat Mark Begich trailing Republican challenger Mark Sullivan. The survey, from Rasmussen Reports, has Sullivan up 3 percent, and he leads by 4.4 percent in the poll average. But that might underestimate Begich’s chances, due to his robust get-out-the-vote operation and the notorious unreliability of Alaska polling.

• Democrat Mike Michaud has opened a 6-point lead in Maine’s three-way gubernatorial race, according to a new Bangor Daily News/Ipsos poll. Michaud has the support of 42 percent of likely voters, followed by incumbent Republican Paul LePage at 36 percent, and Independent Eliot Cutler at 16 percent. The poll pushes Michaud into a narrow lead in the poll average. Were LePage to win, he would likely become the first governor in U.S. history to win back-to-back elections with less than 40 percent of the vote.

• And in North Carolina’s Senate race, Republican candidate Thom Tillis is facing some tough questions over his past declaration that the government had provided “de facto reparations” for slavery by having “redistributed trillions of dollars of wealth over the years.” Incumbent Democrat Kay Hagan holds a small but consistent lead in the poll average.

Photo: UFCW International Union via Flickr

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On The Last Frontier, A Democrat Fights A Rising GOP Tide

On The Last Frontier, A Democrat Fights A Rising GOP Tide

By Sean Cockerham, McClatchy Washington Bureau

ANCHORAGE, Alaska — Control of the U.S. Senate might be decided by a race in which the campaigns fight over snowmobiling skills and where an endorsement from the nominee of a secessionist party who went to federal prison for corruption could help to sway the outcome.

Sen. Mark Begich (D-AK) is battling for his political life in a state that votes Republican and hasn’t elected another Democrat to statewide office in 16 years, a state where Mitt Romney trounced President Barack Obama two years ago.

Republicans need to pick up six seats to take control of the Senate, and with GOP candidates looking strong in states such as Montana, South Dakota, West Virginia, Arkansas and Louisiana, Alaska could make the difference.

While the race has long been considered a tossup, the latest polling suggests that Republican challenger Dan Sullivan, who entered Alaska public life when then-Gov. Sarah Palin named him attorney general in 2009, has seized a narrow lead with a relentless effort to tie Begich to Obama.

The latest average of recent polls on the website Real Clear Politics shows Sullivan ahead by just under 5 percentage points.

“You’ve got the Sullivan campaign saying with every breath that Begich votes with Obama 97 percent of the time,” said Ivan Moore, a pollster and political consultant in Anchorage. “And you’ve got Begich asserting his independence from Obama with every breath.”

The race, and potentially control of the Senate, will be decided by voters such as Wendy Loya and Eland Conway. On a golden fall day in Alaska’s stunning Chugach Mountains, with a bite in the air promising the long subarctic winter to come, they hiked a trail accompanied by a husky and a malamute.

Loya, an ecologist, is voting for Begich, even though she thinks he veers too far to the right. Conway is going for Sullivan. Like many other Alaska voters McClatchy interviewed, he said his support for the Republican was less about Sullivan himself than tossing out the Democrat.

“It’s not necessarily what I like about Sullivan, it’s what I don’t like about Begich,” said Conway, operations officer at the Ted Stevens Anchorage International Airport.

Republicans have been eyeing Begich for defeat since 2008, when he unseated Stevens, the airport’s namesake and a legendary figure in Alaska who spent 40 years in the Senate. Stevens had been convicted of corruption a week before the election — a conviction tossed out a year later — but Begich still beat him by only about 1 percent of the vote.

Since that election, Begich has broken with the president on some big issues, including helping to stop a proposal that would have required background checks for anyone who buys a firearm at a gun show or over the Internet. But his vote in favor of the Affordable Care Act is a sore point with Alaskans such as Lidiya Zyatitsky. She backed Begich in his last election, but said she’d now support the Republican.

Steve Rollins, who plans to vote for Begich, said he’d expected the senator to be drawing more support and was getting worried.

“He has to distance himself away from Obama’s track record,” said Rollins, the dean of the library for the University of Alaska Anchorage and Alaska Pacific University.

Begich is trying to do exactly that. One of his TV ads shows him snowmobiling — in Alaska it’s called snow machining — at 21 degrees below zero on the icebound Arctic Ocean. “I’m Mark Begich. I fought for five years to get the permits so we could drill under this ice, and we won,” he says to the camera.

Sullivan fired back with an ad featuring X Games medalist Cory Davis of Soldotna, Alaska, accusing Begich of “pretending to ride” a snow machine. “I’m tired of the phony politicians and Mark Begich’s laaaame tricks,” Davis says. Begich says he was really riding, and that he in fact got frostbite.

The race also includes the figure of Victor Kohring, a former Republican legislator and notorious moocher — known for begging hamburgers from a corrupt oilman at McDonald’s — who in 2011 pleaded guilty in a bribery case. In August he won the U.S. Senate nomination of the Alaskan Independence Party, which advocates a vote on the state seceding and becoming an independent nation.

Kohring then abruptly dropped out — leaving the independence party without a candidate — and endorsed Sullivan.

Kohring had just a few percentage points of support at the most, but in such a close race it could make a difference if those votes swing to Sullivan. Begich’s campaign manager, Susanne Fleek-Green, said it “reeks of an orchestrated attempt to deliver Alaska’s U.S. Senate seat for Dan Sullivan.”

While his campaign downplays the importance and accuracy of polling in Alaska, Begich is well aware of the challenge he faces.

“One thing that people know about me, I will campaign like a mad dog,” Begich said in an interview. “I will be everywhere, talk to everybody.”

As the darkness of Alaska’s winter approaches, with moose hunting season over and Alaskans shopping for big screen TVs or planning Hawaii trips with the $1,884 oil dividend checks they all get from the state, Begich rose on a recent fall Saturday and went to meet Korean-American voters.

From there he shuttled across town to speak with students eating pizza at the University of Alaska Anchorage. He then did a radio interview, crashed a wedding and ended up at an Asian and Pacific Islander get-out-the-vote rally. “Tongans for Begich” campaign bracelets were passed out.

The next morning found Begich at an African-American church, where some 30 hands shot up when the pastor asked how many had met him — compared with just a few for the governor. Next was a speech to a commercial fishing group, then a candidate forum and finally a Hispanic rally at a Mexican restaurant.

Sullivan, a former official in the Bush administration, had no public events that weekend and refused requests for an interview about his campaign. But he has the backing of voters such as Bev Rhymer, a stay-at-home mom and rental manager who said, “Just about everything Obama tries to do I feel is really detrimental to our country” and that she appreciated Sullivan’s background as a Marine officer who was now in the Reserve.

Begich might also be suffering from what even supporters said was a bad decision to run a television ad that tried to attack Sullivan’s record as state attorney general by linking him to a horrific crime in which an older couple was killed and their toddler grandchild sexually assaulted. The fact-checking website PolitiFact gave the ad a “Pants on Fire” rating, and Begich pulled it from the air after the lawyer for the victims’ family demanded he do so.

Begich benefits, though, from an unprecedented ground operation in the Last Frontier. He has 16 field offices across the vast state, from the panhandle forests to the Bering Sea coast, dwarfing the Sullivan operation. One, in the fishing town of Dillingham, population 2,400, is in a laundromat.

Campaign phone calls to voters are being made in the indigenous Yup’ik Eskimo language. Begich has put together a squadron of rural staffers, local people, going door to door to get their neighbors registered, spreading the campaign slogan of “True Alaska” from the mountains to the tundra. Whether it’s enough to beat Sullivan’s advantage in places such as the Mat-Su, the home of the Palin clan, and the Kenai Peninsula remains to be seen.

“What’s going to be key is who gets their supporters to turn out,” said Alaska pollster Moore. “Even in elections as momentous as this, only a fraction of people show up to vote.”

Photo: SenateDemocrats via Flickr

Midterm Roundup: A New Frontrunner In Florida?

Midterm Roundup: A New Frontrunner In Florida?

Here are some interesting stories on the midterm campaigns that you may have missed on Thursday, October 9:

• Another survey of Florida’s gubernatorial race suggests that Democrat Charlie Crist is close to reclaiming his old job. The University of North Florida poll, released Thursday, shows Crist with a 5-point lead over incumbent Republican Rick Scott. Crist only leads by 1.4 percent in the Real Clear Politics poll average, but Tampa Bay Times political editor Adam C. Smith has seen enough to declare that “Crist may have become the clear frontrunner.”

• Senator Jeanne Shaheen (D-NH) continues to lead Republican challenger Scott Brown in New Hampshire’s Senate race. A new WMUR Granite State Poll finds Shaheen up 47 to 41 percent. Democrats’ strategy of aggressively attacking Brown appears to be paying off; his net favorability rating has plummeted to a startling negative-19 percent, down from negative-2 percent in August. Shaheen now leads by 6.5 percent in the poll average, and Brown’s odds of a comeback appear increasingly long.

• A CNN/ORC poll released Thursday shows Republican Dan Sullivan leading Democratic senator Mark Begich, 50 to 44 percent, in Alaska’s Senate race. Sullivan is now up 4.8 percent in the poll average, although it must be noted that polling in Alaska is notoriously unreliable.

• Larry Pressler, whose surging Independent campaign has turned South Dakota’s Senate race upside down, won’t say which party he’d caucus with if he scores an upset victory. But he did tell The Hill that he’d be a “friend of Obama” if he wins, creating another headache for Republican nominee Mike Rounds.

• And Senator Mary Landrieu (D-LA) continues to dominate the tailgate scene in Louisiana. After helping a fan do a kegstand at LSU two weeks ago, video has now emerged of Landrieu doing the wobble at a Southern University tailgate. The campaign trail isn’t all fun for the Democratic incumbent, however; she trails Republican Bill Cassidy by 5.6 percent in the poll average, and on Thursday she replaced her campaign manager — a move that bodes poorly so late in the race.

Photo: Mike Cohen via Flickr

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