The Scoreboard Doesn't Lie

Republican Fratricide is our problem.

The Scoreboard Doesn’t Lie

In 2010 Republicans had a supermajority in the Alaska House and a supermajority in the Alaska Senate. We had the votes. We could govern. No excuses, no coalitions, no shared gavels.

Then we started blowing it.

First the Senate supermajority went. Then the House supermajority. Then we handed the Senate to a bipartisan coalition. Then we lost the House when the MuskOx coalition locked conservatives out of the room where decisions actually get made. Committee chairs, bill movement, priorities, all of it gone.

And it did not stop there. We lost Anchorage. Mayor, Assembly, School Board. We lost Fairbanks. Mayor, City Council, borough mayor.

That is not because Democrats suddenly got smart, disciplined, and effective. They did not outwork us. They did not out-raise us. They did not out-organize us. Our state is not just drifting blue. We are driving it there with the gusto of a teenager with a new car.

We did this to ourselves, and we keep doing it.

For more than a decade the same crowd has been running the same play. Find a Republican who steps out of line on one vote. Light them up. Call them a traitor. Publicly excoriate them, then excommunicate them. Crank the outrage machine. Threaten a primary. Cash the checks. Boost the podcast numbers. Move on to the next target.

Meanwhile, we keep losing seats.

I have served in that building. I know what the job is. A member from District 30 goes to Juneau to fight for Port MacKenzie, the rail extension, road access, energy costs in the Mat-Su, and getting troopers where they are actually needed. A member from downtown Anchorage has a different set of priorities, homeless, sidewalks, snowplowing, because their voters sent them there to do a different job.

That is not weakness, it is the basic tenets of a representative republic, and it is exactly how the system is supposed to work.

But the activist class does not care about that. One vote out of hundreds, and they hang you on the gantry of public opinion. Not based on principle, not based on the whole record, not based on a long term strategy, but based on whether you matched the loudest voice on social media that day.

Here is the math some folks refuse to do. The Alaska House has forty members. You need twenty-one to organize. You burn three Republicans over one vote, and congratulations, you just handed control to the other side for two years.

That one vote you were so mad about, now it costs you everything else.

Everything else.

Energy policy, public safety, resource development, the budget, all of it. You did not win anything. You traded one disagreement for two years of losing across the board.

That’s not strategy. Tantrums have consequences. We are losing Alaska.

This is not about personalities. It is structural. A small group of loud voices driving a constant outrage cycle. A primary threat economy that feeds on anger. Clicks turning into more anger, more pressure, more bad decisions. Legislators learning the safest move is not what helps their district, but what keeps them out of the crosshairs online. Good people looking at that circus and deciding it is not worth it.

And then folks have the nerve to call that accountability.

Look at the scoreboard.

Alaska Senate supermajority, gone. Alaska House supermajority, gone. Alaska Senate, gone. Alaska House, gone. Anchorage mayor, gone. Anchorage Assembly, gone. Anchorage School Board, gone. Fairbanks mayor, gone. Fairbanks City Council, gone. Fairbanks borough mayor, gone.

If this so-called strategy works, then where are the wins?​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​