Biggest winners in the 2014 election cycle: The TV stations. With over $60 million being spent in the U.S. Senate race alone, Alaska’s TV stations had record revenues, charging super-PACs and independent expenditure committees huge sums for their 30 second TV ads.
Most promising new legislator: Adam Wool, from Fairbanks, because an intelligent pro-business Democrat is a valuable and rare breed.
New legislator most likely to hit the ground running: Mat-Su/Chugiak’s Cathy Tilton. As a legislative staffer in both the Senate and the House, she has a good understanding how the Legislature works. The past two years, she helped her boss, Rep. Mark Neuman, write two of the more complicated operating budgets for both the Department of Health and Social Services and the Department of Transportation.
Biggest underrated political force in Alaska: Bob Gillam, the force behind the Bristol Bay Forever Initiative, which created a nearly impossible permitting process for the development of Pebble Mine and which passed by about 65 percent of Alaskans at the ballot box. It should be noted that when Gillam started his fight against the Pebble Mine in 2006, more than 70 percent of Alaskans supported it. Through pure will, and lots of money, Gillam went to work to fight the biggest mining companies in the world. He fought them at political conventions, with end-user jewelry companies, in the courts, before the state Legislature, at corporate shareholder meetings, at the federal regulatory level, before APOC and at the ballot box.
Best shoes: Nobody yet has managed to kick out Sen. Lesil McGuire in the footwear department.
See All of Alaska’s Political Best and Worst at AmandaCoyne.com
