Alaska Democrat Leads Governor's Race as Trump's Approval Craters 22 Points

The Number That Should Terrify Republicans

Trump's net approval rating in Alaska has swung 21 to 22 points against him since he carried the state in 2024. That is, according to The Guardian, among the steepest drops in any reliably Republican state he won. In a state he took by 13 points, that kind of collapse doesn't leave much cushion.

And the outgoing Republican governor, Mike Dunleavy, an early Trump supporter, is leaving office deeply unpopular on his own terms. He promised Alaskans more oil-dividend money. He did not deliver. This year, the annual Permanent Fund Dividend check came in at $1,000, plus a $200 energy relief payment. Alaskans noticed the gap between the promise and the paycheck. They tend to do that.

Who Is Jonathan Kreiss-Tomkins

Kreiss-Tomkins grew up in Sitka, a fishing town of 8,500 people accessible only by water or air, wedged between the Tongass National Forest and the North Pacific. He won his first statehouse seat at 22, in 2012, defeating a Republican incumbent by 32 votes. He is, as The Guardian notes, a Yale dropout who left one credit short of graduating in 2011. His Republican opponent Bernadette Wilson has already tried to make that a liability.

This July, Kreiss-Tomkins spent four days traveling 450 miles down the Yukon River in a flat-bottomed aluminum skiff, passing through 11 Indigenous villages, many with fewer than 300 residents, most of whom could not remember the last time a gubernatorial candidate had bothered to show up. He has also been traveling by snowmachine, floatplane, and whatever else it takes to reach voters in a state larger than Texas, California, and Montana combined.

"Alaskans are hungry for change," he told The Guardian. "We've been running the same campaign since we launched in February, and I don't take anyone's vote for granted." That is a very disciplined thing to say when you are leading the race. It is also, in the current environment, probably just good strategy.

Alaska's Weird and Wonderful Electoral System

Here is where this gets interesting. Alaska uses ranked-choice voting, adopted by voters in 2020, which means the top four candidates from an open nonpartisan primary advance to the general election. Voters rank their preferences, and votes transfer as lower-finishing candidates are eliminated. Kreiss-Tomkins finished first in August's primary. His three Republican opponents, Wilson, former Anchorage mayor Dave Bronson, and former state attorney general Treg Taylor, will all appear on the November ballot.

Three Republicans on one ballot splitting the same base is a beautiful thing if you are the Democrat. The bipartisan AARP poll The Guardian cites has Kreiss-Tomkins at 40% of first-choice preferences against a combined 41% spread across Wilson, Bronson, and Taylor. Do the math on how vote transfers work in that scenario, and you start to understand why Alaska political observers are taking this seriously.

Taylor's path to the ballot has been genuinely chaotic. The former state attorney general only got on after a candidate named Tom Begich withdrew and endorsed Kreiss-Tomkins, then was disqualified days later. Alaska politics: always a production.

The Republican Field Is, Frankly, a Mess

Wilson, who finished third in August's primary, is an Anchorage garbage-hauling entrepreneur, former competitive figure skater, and great-niece of the late Republican Governor Wally Hickel. She has collected endorsements from Sarah Huckabee Sanders and Florida Congressman Byron Donalds, which tells you roughly what lane she is driving in. Her pitch is that Kreiss-Tomkins is too much of a career politician, which is a reasonable argument undermined somewhat by the fact that she chaired Dave Bronson's 2020 mayoral campaign.

Bronson, for his part, won that 2020 Anchorage mayor's race as a political newcomer and spent his single term in a running fight with the city assembly over homelessness, at one point proposing one-way plane tickets to the lower 48 for people living on the street. He then lost re-election in 2024 to an independent. He is now asking Alaskans to promote him to governor. Voters have a long memory about the plane ticket thing.

Larry Persily, who has watched Alaska politics since the 1970s, told The Guardian that Kreiss-Tomkins is leading "not because of anything Trump did, but because he's running a good campaign." He also called Wilson, Bronson, and Taylor "a sorry lot" and "a bunch of political losers." Persily is a former newspaper owner and editorial page editor. He is not mincing words.

What November Actually Looks Like

The central question The Guardian raises is a fair one: how much of this is Kreiss-Tomkins specifically, and how much is a national anti-Trump wave that would carry almost any Democrat with a pulse? The honest answer is probably both, and in an election, both is enough.

Alaska has always had an independent streak even while voting Republican at the presidential level. The ranked-choice system was itself adopted by voters over the objection of the state Republican Party. A Democrat won a U.S. Senate seat there as recently as 2008. The state is not as locked up as the presidential margins suggest, and right now the presidential margins are moving anyway.

The November ballot will have Kreiss-Tomkins against three Republicans who cannot agree on a single candidate, in a state where the incumbent Republican governor is unpopular, the president is 22 points less popular than he was two years ago, and the Democrat has been showing up in villages no candidate has visited in years. That is not a guaranteed win. But it is a real race.