How Alaska Helps Explain the Complicated 2024 Election

Donald Trump won big and Republicans flipped a House seat, but in state politics Alaska pushed left.

By Nicole Bardasz, More Perfect Union

Alaskans voted by more than 13 points to elect former President Donald Trump on Election Day, helping him to win a second term in the White House. Trump’s margin of victory was wider than in 2020, continuing Alaska’s nearly six-decade streak of voting for the Republican presidential nominee.

Downballot results, however, were not as decisive for the GOP. Trump-endorsed Republican Nick Begich eked out a narrow win over Democratic Rep. Mary Peltola in Alaska’s at-large House race, receiving 24,000 fewer votes than Trump. In the legislature, a bipartisan coalition of Democrats, Independents, and two moderate Republicans claimed a majority, flipping control of the House from Republican leadership.

At the same time, Alaskans voted by 58 percent for an amendment raising the minimum wage to $15 an hour, guaranteeing paid sick leave for workers, and banning captive audience meetings used in union-busting campaigns — an issue the Biden-Harris administration had prioritized in labor enforcement. And a measure to repeal the state’s new ranked-choice voting (RCV) system failed — dealing a blow to a right-wing campaign that sought to abolish RCV after Peltola first won the state’s lone House seat two years ago.

The sum of these results indicates that Alaska is not necessarily a solidly red state, despite often voting for Republican presidential nominees.

As progressive activist Erin Jackson-Hill told More Perfect Union, the parties in Alaska “have no power.” 60 percent of Alaskans don’t identify with either political party. This would help explain why ranked choice voting has gained a foothold here.

Alaska is, however, an organized labor state, and boasts the sixth-highest union density in the country (nearly 15 percent). In the golden era of labor in the 1970s and ‘80s, Alaska’s union membership was twice what it is now; the discovery of oil in Prudhoe Bay resulted in an explosion in construction and drilling jobs, organized with the Teamsters.

Alaskan teachers were also some of the highest-paid in the country for decades. Additionally, Alaska’s legislature established the “Alaska premium” in 1959, setting the state minimum wage $0.50 above the federal minimum wage. Alaska had the highest minimum wage in the nation for decades after statehood, and it is one of just seven states where tipped employees receive the full minimum wage.

Though most states with high union density lean Democrat, in Alaska, that’s not a given. Alaskans who talked to us about voting for Trump said that was because the party had strayed from its roots. “Used to be that the Democrats were considered the working man's party, and they were on the side of the poor people,” Warren Foster, a Republican from Wasilla, told More Perfect Union. “They don't even try to pretend anymore. They're the party of elites as far as I'm concerned.”

The distance between the policies and candidates Alaskans support is not new. In 2014, during a much bigger, nationwide Republican wave, nearly 70 percent of Alaskans voted to increase the minimum wage while electing Republican Dan Sullivan to the Senate over then-incumbent Mark Begich.

This reflects a broader pattern across the country of pro-working class policies succeeding more than the candidates running on those policies. Missouri voted for Trump in a landslide this year, while ballot measures to raise the minimum wage and codify abortion rights both won. Missouri, along with Idaho, Oklahoma, South Dakota, and Utah, have also passed Medicaid expansions at the ballot box in recent years while simultaneously electing Republicans.

Democrats in Alaska and beyond will have to unpack what these varied results mean for their electoral strategy after Republicans secured their second trifecta in four elections.

“When you get down to issues of personal rights and workers' rights and individual rights, Alaskans are very progressive,” Jackson-Hill said. “We do not like people telling us what to do. We don't like people in our homes. Our independent streak is a mile wide.”