Alaska's Lesson for the Left | The Nation

“The kind of campaign I ran was so personal, the party label didn’t make that much of a difference,” he says. “Alaska politics aren’t highly partisan relative to other states. There is a strong sense of community across the state. You know the candidate as a person, not necessarily as a Democrat or a Republican.” Kreiss-Tomkins adds that he could have run and won as an independent.

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So let’s say you want nothing to do with the corrupt two-party system. In many states, getting on the ballot for the state legislature as an independent requires very few signatures. Richard Winger of Ballot Access News says that in the majority of states, it takes signatures from less than 1 percent of a district’s registered voters for an independent to get on the ballot—not a heavy lift.

True, running as an independent is easier in some states. More than a dozen states, for example, have straight-ticket voting. This allows voters to select the party’s entire ticket without bothering to look at down-ballot races that might include independents. In some states, a large proportion of voters choose the straight party ticket and leave without even seeing the candidates’ names. (Activists in Rhode Island think they have a good chance to get rid of straight-ticket voting in their state this year. According to MasterLever.org, a petition-gathering website that opposes straight-ticket mechanisms on voting machines, “The best academic evidence indicates that when voters use the master lever their true preferences for candidates and parties are not realized.”)

Winger says that in 2012, there were 5,984 regularly scheduled state Senate and House races. About 2,000 of those were in districts where the candidates ran unopposed.

Let’s say your district has 17,000 registered voters. And let’s say that 6,000 people come out to vote. That means you need 3,001 votes to win it. If you register 500 people to vote, many of them will vote for you—because you brought them into the political system. Let’s say 300 of those newly registered voters vote for you. And then let’s say you get another 500 out of the 11,000 who are already registered but wouldn’t have voted to vote for you. You’re at 800. Now you need to get 2,201 out of the 6,000 who will vote. Even in right-wing districts, 2,201 votes is a manageable goal. Especially if you’re running as an independent.

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This is not to say that if you run, you will win, or even that you’ll get close. Kreiss-Tomkins was a special person in a special district. He was well known in Sitka, as was his mom, Connie Kreiss, a doctor with the Indian Health Service. And Kreiss-Tomkins put a lot of time and energy into meeting people and understanding their needs.

But Cohen, Winger and Kreiss-Tomkins himself all believe that his efforts (and success) can be replicated throughout the country. Clearly, just repeating the words “Citizens United” and “corporate power” and “money in politics” over and over again is not going to get us where we need to be. We have to challenge for power. That means, as Kreiss-Tomkins puts it, “spending time in communities, knocking on doors, building relationships, listening and learning.” Face to face, person to person, showing voters you care.