Even before the election, Alaska lawmakers are positioning for control of the House and Senate

For a handful of Alaska House members, Election Day isn't when their campaigns will end — but when they'll really get started.

At least three Republicans want to be the next House speaker, a job held for the last eight years by Mike Chenault, R-Nikiski. Chenault is up for re-election to his Kenai Peninsula seat but isn't seeking the gavel again as the House's presiding officer and its top political leader.

GOP Reps. Charisse Millett and Lance Pruitt of Anchorage and Steve Thompson of Fairbanks all say they want to succeed Chenault, Alaska's longest-serving House speaker. His Republican-led majority caucus has already reserved conference-room space at the Sheraton hotel in downtown Anchorage two days after the election, where members could end up selecting new leadership and slate of committee chairs.

But some urban Democrats say Republicans shouldn't assume they'll have the numbers they'll need to pick their own speaker — and are holding out hope that they'll be included in the next majority too, after being relegated to a largely powerless minority under Chenault's leadership.

One area of agreement between the two parties is that things will remain uncertain until Election Day.

"Anybody who starts thinking that they have a clear answer on how all these elections turn out, they've got another thing coming," said Rep. Bryce Edgmon of Dillingham, one of the rural Democrats who joined the Chenault-led Republican majority. He added: "It's the season of speculation, no question about it."

Lawmakers don't wait until after the election to start talking about who will lead the House and Senate during the upcoming session — those discussions have been going on for months, legislators said.

"People have been talking about it since the day after the last election," said Rep. David Guttenberg, D-Fairbanks.

Once the election is over, the decisions about leadership can happen quickly — so quickly that Jennifer Johnston, the former Anchorage Assemblywoman who's running for a South Anchorage House seat, gathered a half-dozen Republican candidates at her home last month for a lesson on how the caucuses organize and how to navigate Juneau.

Former GOP lawmakers Gail Phillips and Ralph Samuels, now an executive with cruise company Holland America Line, led the session. Johnston, though not yet in office and facing Democrat Shirley Cote, said the meeting was designed to make sure "we can hit the ground running."

She said Samuels' corporate agenda wasn't a part of the discussion and she argued that the meeting — which came weeks before the election — wasn't presumptuous.

"It would be if I thought there was time after we were elected," Johnston said. "But I looked at the calendar and I thought, 'Geez — we don't know who's going to get elected, but whoever does needs to be prepared.' "

House speaker and Senate president candidates are typically senior lawmakers, and their campaigns for leadership run alongside their re-election bids. Millett, who's now the House majority leader, said her speaker campaign has mostly entailed fundraising on behalf of her colleagues in the current Republican-led majority caucus, or candidates seeking to join it.

"Those are things that are important when you elect a speaker. Who's going to be standing behind you, lifting you up?" Millett said.

The leadership of the House and Senate majorities and their committees can have an enormous impact on a chamber's agenda, and it will almost certainly determine how lawmakers set about tackling the state's massive budget deficit when they convene next year.

Groups with a vested interest in the outcome, like political parties and businesses, are watching closely, said Ashley Reed, a lobbyist with 20 clients in health care, oil and gas, banking and other industries.

"People are very much wondering who's going to be in leadership," he said. "I don't think anybody has a clear picture, at this point, who the speaker of the House is going to be."

Like the House, the Senate will reorganize too, but its process is less complex because the chamber has only 20 seats — half as many as in the House and the fewest of any legislative body in the nation. Just 10 of those seats are up for re-election this year.

Democratic minority members are also hoping to flip control of the Senate away from Republicans, with a shakeup likely depending on the outcome of a pair of key races, said Anchorage Democratic Sen. Bill Wielechowski.

The Senate's current majority-minority split is 16-4 — more lopsided than the House's 26-member majority — but those numbers could change quickly with GOP losses and the defection of moderate Republicans into a caucus with urban Democrats, Wielechowski said.

"I think a lot of people are waiting to see what happens on Election Day," he said. "If you have one or two seats change, there'll be a big scramble to try to have a different organization."

In the House, where all 40 seats are up for re-election, members and candidates say the two likely outcomes are a new majority like the current one, with Republicans and rural Democrats, or a coalition that includes some Republicans, the rural Democrats and the urban Democrats who currently make up the minority.

Urban Democrats say they don't expect Millett, Pruitt or Thompson to join them in a House coalition, and Thompson said in a phone interview that he has already turned down a Democratic request.

Pruitt, meanwhile, sent a text message to a reporter confirming his interest in being House speaker but didn't return calls seeking clarification about whom he'd want to work with.

Urban Democrats wouldn't identify any alternative speaker candidates.

"There really isn't one," said Rep. Les Gara, D-Anchorage, whose been running radio commercials calling for a change in House leadership. Gara added: "It's not like there's this hidden, new majority that everybody knows about. It's all dependent on the elections."

Even if potential coalition leaders haven't been identified, lawmakers and candidates appear to be positioning to set one up. Gary Knopp, a Republican running for the Kenai Peninsula House seat held by retiring GOP Rep. Kurt Olson, said he'd been offered a "pretty good position" in a coalition, though he wouldn't say by whom.

Knopp, in a phone interview, said he'd prefer to join a caucus led by members of his own party, even if the offer of the spot in the coalition was "enticing."

He said he'll decide once he finds out how committee chairmanships and leadership roles are distributed. But Knopp, facing a Democrat, a member of the Constitution Party and an independent, was also surprised, he said, by how few discussions have taken place about who will be the next House speaker.

"I thought that we would have candidates for that particular position knocking on our doors," he said. "In all honestly, we haven't heard from any of them."

While some lawmakers want to lead, the job of guiding the House or Senate may not actually be very desirable during the next two-year legislative session, since Gov. Bill Walker is expected to ask lawmakers to reduce Permanent Fund dividends and raise taxes to close the state's massive budget gap.

Wielechowski, the Democratic senator, said some lawmakers might actually prefer to be in the minority, where they'll be able to avoid the blowback heading into the 2018 elections. The legislative leaders chosen this year, he added, will have to make some "very tough" decisions.

"It's the gorilla in the room," he said. "So there are probably some people out there who don't want to be in power for the next two years."