Kreiss-Tomkins clinches Alaska governor election while Republican opponents concede

This article has been updated. Jonathan Kreiss-Tomkins is projected to win election as Alaska’s 13th governor, becoming the first Democrat to win the office since Tony Knowles was re-elected in 1998. In results posted Friday night by the Alaska Division of Elections, Kreiss-Tomkins had 50.8% of the first-choice votes for governor in this year’s election, putting him above the threshold for a ranked choice runoff and giving him a mathematically insurmountable lead. CNN declared him the winner against three Republican challengers on Thursday night. The Associated Press followed suit Friday night. T he Alaska Division of Elections is not scheduled to certify the result until Nov. 25. Preliminary final results are expected Nov. 18. “It was a team effort every step of the way, and we always believed we could (win),” Kreiss-Tomkins said on Friday . “So it’s really really gratifying to have that official race call, or whatever CNN calls it, to kind of put some punctuation on the sentence.” Kreiss-Tomkins was the lone Democrat in a field of four candidates seeking to replace Republican Gov. Mike Dunleavy, who is term-limited and was unable to run for re-election this year. Dunleavy could run again in four years. How Alaska elections work In Alaska, all candidates for an office run together in an August primary election, and voters pick their favorite candidate. The top four vote-getters advance to the November general election. If there are four or fewer candidates, all advance to November. In November, voters rank the four candidates in order of preference. If one candidate has more than 50% of the first-choice votes, they win. If none have 50%, the person with the fewest first-choice votes is eliminated, and their votes are redistributed to their voters’ second choices. Eliminations and redistributions continue until two candidates are left. The person with the most votes wins. Even before Thursday, preliminary results indicated Kreiss-Tomkins would win the race if it went to a ranked choice runoff. Now, with more than 50% of the first-choice votes, no runoff is needed. Kreiss-Tomkins’ closest opponent in the election was Republican Bernadette Wilson, who had 28.1% of the 279,127 first-choice votes counted by the end of the day Friday. Republican candidate Dave Bronson was third, with 13.6%, and Republican candidate Treg Taylor was fourth with 7.2%. “Congratulations to Governor-elect Kreiss-Tomkins on winning the Alaska governor’s race with a majority of the vote,” Bronson said in a statement posted on his campaign Facebook page Friday . “Alaskans have made their choice, and I respect their decision. It was a pleasure campaigning against him. I wish him all the success.” By phone on Friday morning, Wilson said that while she was disappointed in the result and hoped for a different outcome as more ballots were counted, the trajectory since Election Day wasn’t a surprise. “JKT was on top on election night, on top in the first round. He’s gonna be your governor,” she said. Wilson and Kreiss-Tomkins were both born in Alaska, and Wilson said that while they disagree on policy, she is happy that someone from the state will be leading it. “I know that he genuinely cares about the state. We disagree very strongly on what (caring for the state) looks like and how we get there, but I don’t look at him and think, ‘Oh my gosh, you’re some outsider guy who just moved here 10 years ago and now thinks you should be the governor.’ And so he’ll be just the third governor that was born here,” Wilson said. Kreiss-Tomkins, 37, also will be the youngest governor in state history and the first…

Originally published by News From The States.
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