Most incumbents lead in early Anchorage election results

After a high-stakes race that attracted record campaign spending, three Assembly incumbents and two school board incumbents are leading their conservative challengers in the Anchorage city election, according to preliminary election results posted Tuesday night.

Another Assembly incumbent, John Weddleton, is locked in a tight competition for his South Anchorage seat. His challenger, Randy Sulte, a first-time candidate running from his right, holds a razor-thin lead.

While Tuesday night’s results are preliminary, they indicate the Assembly majority will likely retain enough moderates and more liberal members to override Anchorage Mayor Dave Bronson’s vetoes.

However, thousands of ballots at Anchorage’s election center remain uncounted and more will arrive by mail in the coming days.

Four Assembly incumbents are facing challenges from a group of conservative candidates who have coordinated efforts to unseat the Assembly members with the mayor’s support.

Assembly incumbents Kameron Perez-Verdia (West Anchorage) and Forrest Dunbar (East Anchorage), had wide leads over their strongest challengers, Liz Vazquez and Stephanie Taylor. Assembly incumbent Meg Zaletel was also ahead of her challenger, Kathy Henslee, in Midtown with 54% of the vote.

In the tightest Assembly race, South Anchorage incumbent Weddleton was slightly behind Sulte in Tuesday night’s results. Sulte had 50% of the vote to Weddleton’s 48%, and the two were separated by 153 votes.

Sulte said he felt “cautiously optimistic” after seeing Tuesday night’s results, but said that it is still too close to call.

Weddleton said, “I expected it to be close – I think everyone did.” He noted that when he ran in 2016 for the seat he was initially behind by a few hundred votes in early results and later won.

“It’s early and it’s too soon to tell and I remain hopeful,” Taylor said in a text message. “I am proud of the campaign we’ve run regardless of the outcome.”

“It’s still very early and we’re hopeful things will turn around for us,” Henslee said in a text message. “We live in a fantastic city and we are grateful for all the amazing support.”

Incumbents and their supporters said Tuesday that the results show Anchorage voters are largely rejecting the campaign messaging of the conservative challengers.

“The mayor made this race about him. He coordinated with all these candidates. He attacked the Assembly, raised a bunch of money, and the people of Anchorage clearly rejected that,” Dunbar said. “And I think, I hope it’s a message to the mayor to drop the extreme politics that he’s been putting forward the last year, to moderate and to work with the Assembly.”

A fifth Assembly race in the city’s Chugiak/Eagle River district, an area that votes largely conservative, will replace outgoing member Crystal Kennedy. Candidate Kevin Cross had a wide lead over his competition Tuesday night.

The preliminary results also show two school board incumbents, Kelly Lessens and Margo Bellamy, are so far comfortably ahead of Mark Anthony Cox and Rachel Ries, two Bronson-backed conservative candidates making bids for their seats.

Anchorage voters also were so far narrowly approving the school district’s $111 million bond by just over 50%, but that could change as more ballots are counted. Four of the city’s five bond packages totaling $45.6 million were passing with stronger margins, but approval of the city’s areawide facilities capital improvements bond package was also narrow with just over 50% of the vote.

Results to determine the dynamic of city politics

The Assembly race saw unprecedented amounts of money raised by both the incumbents and their challengers. Ten candidates competing for the five Assembly seats have raised more than $1.28 million in direct donations, while tens of thousands more has been spent by political action committees.

Observers say the unusually high flow of money in the race points to the high political stakes at play and increasing public awareness of the impact of city elections, and the results of the Assembly election will determine the dynamic between the Assembly and the Bronson administration.

Assembly races are technically nonpartisan. But the group of four Bronson-friendly candidates — Sulte, Henslee, Taylor and Vazquez — aimed to unseat the four moderate-to-liberal-leaning incumbents and shift the balance of political power in the mayor’s favor.

“Is it going to stay or go more progressive or is it going to return more to a middle approach, conservative approach?” said Craig Campbell, vice chair of the Alaska Republican Party, said in a recent interview. “The mayor and the Assembly, obviously – we’ve all seen – have different philosophies of what government should be like. So I think both sides are trying to mobilize their position to determine which direction Anchorage is going to go.”

Bronson campaigned on promises to dramatically change course on city policies, attacking the Assembly majority, including the four incumbents, over issues like COVID-19 restrictions, homelessness policies and city spending.

The relationship between the mayor and Assembly majority has often been fraught as they clashed over several high-profile issues since Bronson took office last year after narrowly winning the mayoral election over Dunbar.

One of the campaign points from the conservative challengers was that their presence would make the chamber friendlier to Bronson, particularly when it came to swatting down vetoes from the mayor’s office, which takes eight of the 11 members to override.

If Tuesday’s preliminary results hold, the Assembly will retain enough of its majority to override vetoes.

That threshold will get lower in June when a 12th seat is added representing the downtown district, which consistently elects the most liberal Assembly members. Even with the expanded size, the chamber will still be able to reject mayoral vetoes with eight votes.

With such wide leads for the incumbents in the East Anchorage and West Anchorage races, it’s unlikely those results will change significantly, said Ira Slomski-Pritz, a partner at Ship Creek Group, which is managing the reelection campaigns of Assembly members Dunbar, Perez-Verdia and Weddleton and school board member Lessens.

“These are not close margins. It would take something truly, truly strange for the outcomes to change in those races at this point,” he said.

Turnout on par with mayoral election

Elections officials had counted 41,316 ballots by Tuesday night, about 17.5% of registered voters.

More than 54,600 ballots had been returned to the election center by Tuesday afternoon. That leaves at least 13,000 still uncounted that have already arrived, and more are coming in. At the 8 p.m. close of election day, workers were still gathering ballots cast last-minute in secure drop boxes around the city and those cast in-person at Anchorage’s three vote centers.

Ballots for the election were mailed in mid-March. Those postmarked on or before election day can arrive up until the start of the Public Session of Canvass on April 18. Military and overseas ballots must arrive by noon on April 26, the day the Assembly will certify vote results.

Voters can expect more preliminary election results posted by 5 p.m. Wednesday, Thursday and Friday as election workers continue to process ballots.

Wednesday’s results will include ballots cast Tuesday in-person and in drop boxes, said the acting deputy elections clerk, Jamie Heinz.

The number of ballots returned to the elections center by Tuesday was nearing the number returned by election day last year, during the regular mayoral election.

“Mayoral years often pull out the most voters, so to be on par with a mayoral year is a great turnout for us,” Heinz said.

Assembly

District 2 - Seat A - Eagle River/Chugiak

Kevin Cross - 59.43%, 3,510 votes; Gretchen Wehmhoff - 35.51%, 2,097 votes; Vanessa Stephens - 5.06%, 299 votes

District 3 - Seat D - West Anchorage

Kameron Perez-Verdia (incumbent) - 54.49%, 4,040 votes; Liz Vazquez - 40.34%, 2,991 votes; Nial Sherwood Williams 5.17%, 383 votes

District 4 - Seat F - Midtown

Meg Zaletel (incumbent) 53.67%, 3,464 votes; Kathy Henslee 46.33%, 2,990 votes

District 5 - Seat H - East Anchorage

Forrest Dunbar (incumbent) - 56.64%, 4,235 votes; Stephanie Taylor - 40.67%, 3,041 votes; Christopher Hall - 2.69%, 201 votes

District 6 - Seat J - South Anchorage

Randy Sulte - 49.85%, 5,357 votes; John Weddleton (incumbent) - 48.42%, 5,204 votes; Darin Colbry - 1.73%, 186 votes

School Board

Seat A

Margo Bellamy (incumbent) - 50.42%, 19,307 votes; Mark Anthony Cox - 37.79%, 14,469 votes; Dan Loring - 3.30%, 1,263 votes

(Cliff Murray - 8.49%, 3,251 votes; Murray announced his withdrawal from the race but was included on the ballot.)

Seat B

Kelly Lessens (incumbent) - 51.01%, 19,575 votes; Rachel Ries - 40.43%, 15,515 votes; Dustin Darden - 4.89%, 1,877 votes

(Benjamin Baldwin - 3.68%, 1,411 votes; Baldwin announced his withdrawal from the race but was included on the ballot.)

Correction: An earlier version of this article included incorrect numbers for the number of total ballots counted and the percentage of registered voters who cast ballots so far.