Analysis of April 2022 Muni Elections

Suppression of conservative turnout by democrats is a successful strategy used for years to flip close elections.  Generally, the tactic is some version of an attempt to make the case to conservatives that things are so bad, that they are so few in numbers, so far out of the mainstream, that it would be a waste of time to show up and vote.  The media did this the night of the 2000 National Election by calling Florida for algore before polls in the panhandle closed.  This successfully kept tens of thousands of Republican voters home and almost flipped the state and in turn the entire election to algore.  Thankfully, it didn’t.

Occasionally, the tactic is to paint the upcoming vote as a victory so huge, so massive that a single vote won’t make any difference either way.  There are some warning signs that November’s election might be one of these.

We conservatives are generally not real disciplined with elections.  We stay home.  We refuse to vote.  The Other Side knows this and exploits it as often as they can.  Sadly, it works more times than it should. 

With this in mind, what do we make of the 29% turnout in the Municipal election April 5?  As of this writing, the results are not all that bad, with two term incumbent John Weddleton going down to a narrow defeat, the ASD and Muni capital improvement bond packages going down to narrow defeats. 

The problem comes with the other races.  Three other Assembly incumbents are on their way to winning their races 52 – 55%.  The races did not get appreciably closer as more votes were counted.  School Board incumbents won with 49 – 50% victories.  Third and fourth candidates in the two races siphoned off 8 – 10% of the total votes.  There were around 8% undervotes in both School Board races.

I wrote a year ago about lack of conservative voting discipline in the down-ballot races.  While there was an undervote in both School Board races, it was smaller than what we saw last year.  More surprisingly, there was very little undervote (just over 1%) in both rejected bond packages.  Appears our discipline is getting better, at least during Muni elections.  This is a positive sign.    

What could have been a Very Good Night becomes a Meh, which is unfortunate, as Republicans have been doing pretty well in state and local elections nationwide for months. 

What happened during this election?  Internal polling for Assembly must have been pretty bad, as all of the incumbents ran public campaigns tying themselves as closely to the goals of Mayor Bronson as possible.  There was a lot of happy, happy, joy, joy talk about marching arm in arm with him into the future.  This lasted until the last week or so when we got the standard round of “(s)he’s being mean to me” ads.

For the School Board, ASD and the Board have been adept in hiding the hideously destructive CRT instruction and the grooming effort aimed at the youngest students.  Both of these have been aided and abetted by active censorship of online comments by the ADN.  This will not last.  There will be a reckoning, likely sooner rather than later.  

From here, it appears that the political left (including their backers in the unions) spent most of their time and effort simply turning out their side to vote.  And it seemed to work.

What did we do on the right?  We spent an inordinate amount of time bellyaching about mail-in voting, usually with some variation on the corruption riff.  We heard it from the mayor, online conservatives, talk radio, most of the opinion makers for an entire month.  We are hearing it after the election too. 

Given what we have seen about conservatives staying home, it occurs to me that all this negativity about mail-in voting is unintentionally suppressing the vote on the conservative side.  How big is this effect?  On the macro, it didn’t seem to hurt overall turnout, which is only down a few percent from previous years.  On the individual race level, it probably turned what should have been excruciatingly tight races into comfortable wins for three Assembly incumbents. 

Now, I in no way am defending by-mail elections.  I don’t like them.  I don’t want them.  And I would remove them as soon as I can.  They were put into place by the liberals to make it easier to elect liberals.  And from that perspective, it has worked pretty well.  Still, we do win races that we shouldn’t win from time to time, three of them this election. 

But mail-in elections are what we have here in Anchorage today.  And it is the system we need to master and win with.  Think of it as the functional equivalent of a bad call in a basketball or football game.  The game goes on.  While we are whining, complaining, and throwing a tantrum about a terrible call, democrats and unions are roaring down the field for another bucket, touchdown, and election win.

Why give them a free path?

The reality of Anchorage elections WILL NOT CHANGE until we win sufficient Assembly and Mayoral elections to overturn the bloody thing.  The longer we complain, the longer it will take to get rid of it.

We have another opportunity to win mail-in elections this summer with Don Young’s replacement.  We will have another round of Assembly and School Board seats up in 12 months here in the Muni.  Perhaps we conservatives should change our focus to winning, and more importantly, turning out Our Side rather than giving them reasons to stay home.

For future campaigns, I would suggest the following:

• Spend most of your resources turning out your voters. 
• Spend a lot of time getting the best candidates for each race. 
• Stop bellyaching about mail-in and learn to use it to win.  Conservatives in California are starting to figure this out.  We should also. 

Final thought is about election fraud.  I tend to believe that elections here in Anchorage are pretty clean.  While I am convinced that democrats love mail-in elections because it makes it easier to cheat, the last charges of election fraud I recall were filed against Gabby LeDoux and associates in 2020 – 2021 for irregularities during the 2014 and 2018 state elections. 

Bottom line here is when you actively undermine confidence in the election process, you by definition are actively suppressing turnout of the very voters you need to win elections.  Stop it.  Now. 

Alex Gimarc lives in Anchorage since retiring from the military in 1997. His interests include science and technology, environment, energy, economics, military affairs, fishing and disabilities policies. His weekly column “Interesting Items” is a summary of news stories with substantive Alaska-themed topics. He was a small business owner and Information Technology professional.