Alaska's Lesson for the Left
Kreiss-Tomkins was the clear underdog. But one thing he had going in his favor was energy. He is a mountain climber and a long-distance runner. And on his campaign website, he wrote that he deeply believes “in the value of a tenacious work ethic.” And so off he went.
Of the 17,875 residents in the district, about half are in Kreiss-Tomkins’s native Sitka, another 2,500 are in Haines, and the remainder are in the eleven or so villages spread throughout the district. The idea was to meet most of the voters in the district face to face. Door to door.
Don’t run around telling people what you think. Ask them what they think. Tell them that you want to be their servant in Juneau. Here’s my card. Here’s my cellphone number. Call me. If you have to leave a message, I’ll call you back within twenty-four hours.
First stop, Angoon, which is overwhelmingly Tlingit. “I had never been to Angoon in my life,” Kreiss-Tomkins says. “I get off the float plane and sit down on the dock, take some Ritz crackers and peanut butter out of my backpack. I didn’t know a soul in Angoon. I didn’t have a place to stay. I had some clothes in my backpack. I had a little bit of cash and a bunch of business cards. I walked into the village and starting knocking on doors.”
There are two businesses in Angoon, the gas station and the trading post, Kreiss-Tomkins says. Gas is $6 a gallon (compared with $4.50 a gallon in Sitka) and milk is $9 a gallon (versus $5.29 in Sitka).
“I cared about the issues the people of Angoon faced,” Kreiss-Tomkins says. “It’s a community struggling with its own survival—cost of energy, cost of groceries, social ills.”
“Showing that you care is important,” he adds. “Even though I’m white and 23 years old, it didn’t matter. Showing that you care is a transcendent quality.”
And that’s the way the campaign went. Spend three or four days in each village. Knock on every door. Crash on people’s couches—mostly people you don’t know. Then you do. Never stay in a hotel. Never eat in a restaurant. And don’t worry about the food.
The quality of the food improved dramatically from the Ritz crackers and peanut butter, yogurt and bananas on those first days in Angoon. The residents of District 34 made sure Kreiss-Tomkins got his fill of halibut and salmon.
“I ate more quality king salmon during this campaign than most restaurant critics in New York eat in their lifetimes,” Kreiss-Tomkins says.
From village to village—from Hoonah to Hydaburg to Metlakatla—he went. In Hydaburg, the elders said to him, “We haven’t had a candidate here in twenty-two years.” Even though the majority of voters in the district lived in Sitka and Haines, Kreiss-Tomkins knew that if he ignored the villages, he didn’t have a chance. So he hit every door in almost every village. He doubled back and covered many villages again. In Sitka and Haines, he knocked on most doors—ignoring those voters he knew he had no chance with.
He also did what most campaigns do. He organized volunteers. He put up a Facebook page and a website. He raised and spent money. Kreiss-Tomkins spent $73,019 on the campaign—compared with Thomas’s $117,579.
“Our campaign had more donors than any other state House campaign in Alaska,” he says. “We had north of 500 contributors. And per capita, we had one of the lowest averages per donation—something like $85 per donation.”
He sent out letters to the voters in his district.
“To represent, I believe you need to know who you’re representing,” he wrote in one. “That means spending time in communities, knocking on doors, building relationships, listening and learning. There aren’t any shortcuts to spending time in the place that you represent.”
And he pounded his opponent for voting for that $2 billion tax break for the oil industry—a hot-button issue in oil-rich Alaska. The tax break was killed last year in the state Senate, but a smaller tax cut for the industry is expected to pass this spring.
“There was the process. The process was: I put in the time, I showed I care,” Kreiss-Tomkins says. “That was important. But we also ran our campaign on an issue endemic to Alaska—oil taxes. State government is entirely dependent on oil royalties. And the question is: What percentage of the money that comes from that oil patch is retained by the state, and what percentage goes to BP, Exxon and ConocoPhillips? Our governor, and most but not all of the Republicans in the Legislature, supported a tax cut that would shift $2 billion from the state to BP, Exxon and ConocoPhillips.”
But it wasn’t the issues that hurt Thomas so much as it was the perception that Kreiss-Tomkins cared more. In what many believe to be one of the biggest upsets in Alaskan legislative history, Kreiss-Tomkins defeated Thomas by thirty-two votes, 4,130 to 4,098. And though he ran as a Democrat, Kreiss-Tomkins doesn’t believe that party affiliation was a determining factor.
