The debut in Alaska of nonpartisan1 open primaries and ranked choice general elections in 2022 promised to reduce polarization in government by rewarding lawmakers who prioritize solving problems over partisan gamesmanship. The system likely did not change the outcome in a majority of races, but did appear to make a difference in a few. A handful of moderate Republican state legislators who most likely would have lost in the previous semi-closed primary system defeated more conservative candidates. The moderates appealed to a broader base of voters in their districts while the conservatives targeted a more partisan subset.
In 2022, 59 of 60 legislators won in the system of open primaries and ranked choice general elections.2 Two legislative sessions have passed since then. Has Juneau shown any signs of increased pragmatism? Are legislators more disposed to govern in ways that accurately reflect the views of Alaska’s moderate Republican electorate? These questions are timely given that several states, including Colorado, Idaho, Montana, Oregon, and Washington, DC, are considering similar changes to their voting systems.
Interviews with more than a dozen state legislators, political reporters, and longtime political watchers yielded little agreement on how exactly the election system affected lawmaking in Juneau. There was near consensus, however, on the following:
- The bipartisan majority in the Senate was larger than it otherwise would have been.
- A larger number of Republican lawmakers were willing to override the conservative governor’s widely unpopular veto of education funding in March.
- Polarizing politicians on the right still won in the handful of districts where voters support them but were unable to effectively open the gates to a full-blown culture war.
Now for the caveats:
- We don’t have much data to go on. Alaska has had only one election using open primaries and ranked choice general elections.
- Lawmakers respond to a world of stakeholders, fiscal realities, events, and other factors unrelated to whatever election system is in play.
- The counterfactual (how legislators would have behaved had they been elected under Alaska’s previous election system) is also unknowable.
- The new election system wasn’t the only big change in 2022. The decennial redrawing of Alaska’s legislative districts changed the voter constituencies of sitting legislators and brought a large class of freshman lawmakers to the state capitol. These less-experienced lawmakers may not have legislated according to the bipartisan incentives introduced by the election system.
A quick explainer of Alaska’s election system
In the 2022 midterms, Alaskans chose their lawmakers using a combination of open primaries and ranked choice general elections. Two years prior, Alaska voters had jettisoned the previous system of semi-closed primaries and plurality general elections, which allow candidates to win with less than a majority of votes.
In the primaries, voters choose one favorite from a list of all the candidates. The top four candidates in each race, regardless of party affiliation, advance to the ranked choice general election. Party registration information for each candidate appears on both the primary and general election ballots. And the new system does not prevent parties or other groups from endorsing candidates.
In general election races with three or more candidates, voters rank the contenders from most to least favorite. Once the polls close, election officials count everyone’s first-choice vote. Candidates who receive a majority of the first-choice votes (50 percent plus 1) win in the first round. If no candidate achieves a majority with first-choice votes alone, then the candidate with the fewest first-choice votes is eliminated. The voters who prefer the eliminated candidate have their vote count for their next preference on their ballot. This process continues until a candidate receives a majority of remaining votes.
Alaska’s current system applies to the races for US House, US Senate, governor, and state legislature. The presidential election is a little different. Alaska’s Republican and Democratic parties still control the presidential primaries, but Alaska uses ranked choice voting in the general election to determine which candidate receives the state’s three electoral votes.
The open primary sent a few more moderate Republicans to Juneau
Alaska is a moderate Republican state with a strong independent streak. Most voters aren’t registered with either major party, but parties still wield significant influence. Though the ranks of independent lawmakers have grown, most legislators are registered as either Democrat or Republican.
Post-2022 election, the legislature overall continued to reflect the right-of-center political character of Alaska. But the politics in the state House and the Senate flip-flopped. Before 2022, Republicans definitively controlled Alaska’s Senate and a multipartisan majority governed in the state House. Back then, the state House was the less partisan chamber. After the 2022 election, the political dynamics flipped. A highly collegial bipartisan majority controlled the Alaska Senate and Republicans led a contentious multiparty House coalition.
Our analysis of the 40 House and 19 Senate races found that the election system likely impacted just a handful of legislative races in 2022. In a few cases, it handed victories to centrist Senate Republicans who had the majority support of their districts. Under the old system, these candidates would most likely have lost in the Republican primary to candidates further to the right.3 These moderate Republicans strengthened the bipartisan Senate majority and could legislate knowing they couldn’t be punished in the primary for working with Democrats.
For example, two Republican senators, Cathy Giessel (Anchorage) and Jesse Bjorkman (Kenai Peninsula), worked across the aisle more readily than the Republicans who could have defeated them in a Republican primary. But voters in overwhelmingly conservative districts still freely elected the candidates they preferred. Republican senators Mike Shower of Wasilla and Shelley Hughes of Palmer were examples of very conservative candidates who won in the open primaries and ranked choice general election system. Showers and Hughes, however, did not join the bipartisan Senate majority and received no committee assignments.
In the House, Rep. Jesse Sumner (Wasilla) believes he most likely would not have made it through the old semi-closed primary. Sumner supports former president Donald Trump but operates as a relatively moderate Republican member of the state House. In 2022, he came in second in the House District 28 primary, trailing fellow Republican Steve Menard by less than one percent. Sumner went on to beat Menard in the general election in the third round of ranked choice voting. Menard then worked as a legislative staffer for Sumner. In 2024 Sumner dropped out of the running after winning the primary, leaving Menard in a good position to win.4
The election system hardly caused a dramatic change. Most lawmakers said they would have run for office and sought to legislate in the same way under either system. Democratic Sen. Matt Claman would have won his West Anchorage Senate seat regardless of how voters sent him to Juneau, though he prefers the current one.
“In an open primary and ranked choice general election environment, my campaign literature and the work that I do in the legislature do well,” Claman said. As a former member of a majority coalition in the state House, Claman is accustomed to working with Republicans. He and Giessel campaigned together in 2022 and recently teamed up to publish an op-ed in the Seattle Times on how the rest of the country should learn from Alaska’s election system. The system gives all voters, not just those who lean left, the opportunity to weigh in on Claman.
Many Republicans vote to override the governor on education funding
Open primaries and ranked choice general elections didn’t change the outcome of most races or affect the overall political character of the state legislature, but they did appear to reinforce Alaska’s existing political culture of working pragmatically with members of a different party. Members no longer need to worry about being primaried in the future for working across the aisle. This means they are free to take votes their constituents support, even if it means going against their own political party.
A big test of this theory came in the battle over the education budget. Governor Mike Dunleavy, a conservative who won a second term under the new system, opposed a widely popular increase to what’s known as the “base student allocation” (BSA), the per-capita amount budgeted to every public school student. The BSA became a rallying cry for parents, teachers, students, and other education proponents who pointed out that it had not been meaningfully increased since 2017.
In February the legislature approved a $680 per-student increase to the BSA. The bill passed with overwhelming multipartisan support (18–1 in the Senate and 38–2 in the House). But Dunleavy nixed the increase, setting up a vote in the legislature to override his veto.
The veto override decision was remarkably close, failing by just a single vote (39–20). Under the old semi-closed primary system, the seven Republican senators and five Republican House members who voted to override would have put themselves at greater risk of being primaried for opposing a governor from their own party. Instead, under the new system, they were free to support what most of their constituents wanted. And Dunleavy eventually let the BSA funding survive as a one-time boost in the budget rather than a permanent increase.
Republican Rep. Justin Ruffridge (Kenai/Soldotna), who faced a single Republican opponent in his 2022 primary and general election races, voted to override the governor’s education funding veto. He told The Associated Press in March that he “did not run for office to represent one person or party or special interest group” and was voting as his constituents would want him to.
In more than one case, Republican legislators who sided with the governor may have made a political miscalculation. Instead of taking advantage of the protection afforded them by the open primary and voting to reinstate education funding, they may have lost themselves reelection. The 2024 election will serve as a litmus test to see if legislators’ positions on education translate to wins in their districts.
“You know to have a vote like that fail by one vote. One vote. What that means is everybody that voted against it was the failing vote,” said Rep. Louise Stutes, a Kodiak Republican who voted to override the governor. “If I were running for any one of those offices, that’s what I’d be running on.”
At least one legislator is feeling the heat from his constituents for not overriding the governor’s education funding veto: Rep. Thomas Baker of Kotzebue, a Republican the governor had appointed to replace an independent House member who left to become mayor of the North Slope Borough. Baker, who is running against two Democrats, has since changed his party affiliation to independent. But it didn’t help. He received 265 votes (about 30 percent of the total) in the August 20 primary to come in last in the field of three.
In the past, one of the Democrats would have had to run unaffiliated or under another party label and still run the risk of splitting the vote. But in 2022, their involvement in the race provided voters with more choice. As long as they campaigned in a unified way, rather than attacking each other, neither candidate would spoil the chances of the other.
Taking care of business: Majority caucuses formed more swiftly
Establishing majority caucuses in both the House and Senate starts the wheels turning on legislative business. The majority consists of more than half the members of each body and typically includes lawmakers from the same party, or those with similar values or policy priorities. The majority then determines which legislators hold leadership positions and the makeup of committees.
In 2019 Alaska’s House set a record, but it was not one to be proud of: It took 31 days into session before a majority caucus formed, marking the longest deadlock since statehood. Then in 2021, caucus formation took 24 days. In both cases, the delays meant little got done in Juneau. Though multipartisan majorities ultimately formed in both cases, the simple existence of a mixed majority didn’t necessarily lead to a more functional approach to lawmaking.
In 2023 the House improved its track record of majority caucus formation. It was still late, but rather than taking weeks into the session to finally coalesce, the House formed a majority and chose a speaker two days into the legislative session. Unlike previous years, when Democrats led multipartisan majorities, Republicans took the helm as the dominant party in the House. House leadership was rooted in the conservative Mat-Su Valley, the governor’s home base. But the majority couldn’t have formed without the Bush Caucus, a group of four Alaska Democratic and independent lawmakers representing rural, predominantly Alaska Native districts.
In the case of the House, it’s certainly possible that open primaries and ranked choice voting helped with more timely caucus formation, but it seems like a stretch. Rather, it was the Bush Caucus taking the pragmatic approach of breaking the deadlock. Though the Bush legislators lean Democrat, the decision to caucus with Republicans wasn’t relevant to the election system. As Rep. Neal Foster, a Democrat from Nome, told Alaska Public Media in January 2023, the Bush Caucus has historically worked with majorities that lean to the right or left.
“The key difference between then and now is that Republicans used to hold a majority without the Bush Caucus. Now they hold a majority because of the Bush Caucus,” political reporter James Brooks wrote in the Alaska Beacon in January 2023.
Likewise, in the Senate, bipartisanism has historical precedent and attributing smooth and timely caucus formation to the election system may be a stretch. In the last ten legislatures, dating back to 2005, the Alaska Senate majority has almost always included members of both parties, largely due to Alaska’s rural Democratic legislators joining the majority in order to secure seats and leadership positions on committees important to their districts. In 2005–06, the majority was purely Republican and the minority purely Democrats. For the next six years, the Democrats led a bipartisan majority. Republicans, with a small number of Democrats, then dominated the majority for a decade until 2023.
What distinguished the Senate from the House and its own history, however, was its remarkably bipartisan nature in 2023–24, when no party dominated. Instead, the Senate quickly formed a supermajority caucus of eight Republicans and nine Democrats just a few weeks after the November 2022 election. Members vowed to be “moderate and consensus-focused,” and it showed in their leadership choices. Sen. Gary Stevens, a moderate Republican from Kodiak, became Senate president, and Sen. Cathy Giessel became majority leader. Giessel has shared the story of her shift from a politician who focused on her Republican constituents to one who campaigned and legislates as a GOP centrist.
Senate leadership created balance between the parties on committees. On the Senate Finance Committee, Republicans outnumbered Democrats 4–3, but two rural Alaska Democrats served as co-chairs. A Democrat also chaired the Rules Committee, balancing the membership of three Republicans and two Democrats. In the 2021–22 legislative session, the Finance ratio was the same, but Republicans dominated the Rules committee, 4–1.
Stevens set the tone from the start, telling the Alaska Beacon in November 2022 that “it’s a pleasure for me to announce that we have a very healthy majority and we’ve found a way to share responsibilities between all of us.”
Three Republican senators were not in the majority but lacked the numbers to be an official minority. The three had voted against the budget in 2021, and two of them had said “mean-spirited things” on talk radio about other senators, Stevens told the Beacon.
Did open primaries and ranked choice voting somehow enable the Senate majority to become more bipartisan and, as a result, “hit the ground running”? Possibly. But had the old election system remained in place in 2022, it’s possible a bipartisan majority would have formed anyway. However, the membership would have been smaller and there would likely have been a large enough number of polarizing individuals to form a minority whose members would have been able to serve on and influence committees.
Culture wars made headlines but didn’t derail lawmakers
Rep. David Eastman is a controversial figure. A lifetime member of the Oath Keepers, he has the dubious distinction of fostering bipartisan behavior in the Alaska State House because neither the majority nor the minority want him in their caucus. On paper, Eastman is a registered Republican, but in practice, he is a party of one.
Eastman arrived in the legislature in 2017. He made headlines that May for his anti-abortion comments, claiming that women from rural Alaska villages purposely got pregnant to secure themselves a free trip to Anchorage to terminate their pregnancies. His colleagues voted 25–14 to censure him—a decisive vote and a first for a member of Alaska’s state House. However, Eastman retained his committee assignments on Judiciary, Rules, and Health and Social Services.
Even before Alaska voters approved unified open primaries and ranked choice general elections in 2020, and before the revelation that Eastman had been at the US Capitol on January 6, 2021, the Wasilla legislator faced pushback from his fellow Republicans. His intransigence had cost them the majority in the 2019–20 legislature (though it had been good for bipartisanship, leading to the formation of a coalition majority). At least seven Republican legislators campaigned against Eastman in the 2020 Republican primary and threw their support behind his opponent, Jesse Sumner. But they were unsuccessful, as Eastman was reelected.
It’s one thing to campaign for one Republican over another Republican in a primary. But in 2022 the Republican-led House minority caucus removed Eastman from the caucus and committees. Rep. Cathy Tilton, then the minority leader, told reporters that Eastman had been “disruptive.” It was a bolder move than the probationary period minority Republicans had imposed on Eastman in 2020, when they removed him from legislative committees for one month but stopped short of booting him from the caucus.
In 2023 Eastman made yet another inflammatory statement, musing that child abuse deaths could help the state budget. “It can be argued, periodically, that it’s actually a cost savings because that child is not going to need any of those government services that they might otherwise be entitled to receive and need based on growing up in this type of environment,” he said. This time, the vote to censure was a more-than-decisive 35–1, with the one dissenting vote coming from Eastman himself. And that year, he was not invited to join the Republican-led majority.
In 2024 Eastman found himself stripped of his last committee assignment on the House Judiciary Committee. He was thoroughly alone. Still, he captured 62 percent of the vote in the August primary against his sole opponent (another Republican) and appears poised to return to Juneau for another term.
Did the switch to nonpartisan open primaries embolden Republicans to act more decisively against Eastman? Legislators seem to think so. Eastman had some power in the old party primary because a handful of districts where voters who support his far-right ideology constituted a majority or near majority of the primary electorate. That’s no longer the case. The unified open primary, with the whole electorate in each district able to vote, rather than a more extreme slice, does contribute to Eastman being sidelined to some extent.
“Eastman has built a network through social media,” one House member told Sightline. “Under the old Republican primary, he wielded more power. Now they have more protection to continue going after him and actually throw him out of the caucus.”
However, growing exasperation with his behavior is also a key factor, meaning Republicans may well have ostracized him anyway.
“There has been a steady erosion of patience with him with each additional term,” according to one legislative watcher. The political risk of taking him on, however, is lower than it would have been under the old system.
A modest change
Overall, the effects of open primaries and ranked choice voting did not lead to a multipartisan kumbaya moment across the Alaska legislature. Of course, Alaska has had only one election cycle using the system. The effects may become more obvious in the future.
What we do see are op-eds like Sen. Kelly Merrick’s, in which she argues that bipartisanship has produced results for her constituents. In a June op-ed in the Anchorage Daily News, Merrick called attention to what she considers “one of the most productive Alaska legislative sessions in years.” She mentioned passing legislation to “fight crime, encourage more domestic energy production, improve public education, address workforce challenges, and make our health care system more efficient.” Merrick’s legislating earned praise from Ann Brown, the most recent past chair of the Alaska Republican Party. In a September op-ed in the Anchorage Daily News, Brown and co-author Anna MacKinnon, a Republican and former Eagle River legislator, called Merrick a “pragmatic conservative.”
Giessel and Claman, Merrick’s fellow senators, agreed with her assessment of the Senate. In a joint Seattle Times op-ed, the Republican and Democratic senators touted multiple examples of recent bipartisan legislation. And they argued for what they view as the merits of nonpartisan open primaries and ranked choice general elections.
“The legislature came together to pass bipartisan legislation,” they wrote. “Examples this year include a crime bill that addressed concerns with fentanyl overdose trends and victims’ rights, a plan for improving energy transmission in Alaska, and insurance coverage for 12-month birth control prescriptions. These bipartisan actions have shown voters that our coalitions are working for the people of Alaska.”
Overall, though, the political character of the legislature remained true to the political makeup of the state its lawmakers represent. The longstanding precedent of multipartisan majorities continued. Lawmakers just had a little more breathing room to answer to the majority of their constituents.
