Your Future Depends on Alaska, Here’s How

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Tim Rice (2:08)

Hello, I'm Tim Rice. Welcome to another edition of Behind the Story. With midterms just a couple of weeks away, and both parties scrambling to keep states that they currently hold, and flip states that they don't, we thought it would be a good idea to get everybody on our team doing as much midterm coverage as possible. So that means even folks who don't usually cover political campaigns are covering political campaigns. And so when our White House correspondent, Mary Margaret Olohan, was invited to travel with Vice President JD Vance to Alaska, in addition to the already Herculean task of covering a vice presidential visit halfway around the world, we also asked her to do some campaign reporting, and to do some campaign reporting, she did. You can now read her piece inside the Republican fight to hold Alaska on the Daily Wire.

And you can also hear from her about it now, because she joins me today to take us behind the story. Mary Margaret, it's so great to have you back on the show.

Mary Margaret Olohan (3:07)

Hey, Tim, it's so great to be here.

Tim Rice (3:09)

So this is a tantalizingly overbroad headline, and I love it because, I mean, it's actually not overbroad. It's exactly what the piece is. Your piece takes us inside the Republican fight to hold Alaska. Usually, I would tell people that they have to read the piece to get all the juicy details, but we love our behind the story listeners. So why don't we give them a little bit of a peek behind the curtain? Take us inside the Republican fight to hold Alaska.

Mary Margaret Olohan (3:34)

Absolutely. So Alaska is an interesting place, because not only is it geographically far from the rest of the country, but their politics can't really be measured by the usual political standards. And that's something that the locals and strategists that I talk to explain to me over and over and over again. Their politics are kind of shaped by the demographics and the geography up there, the fact that they have ranked choice voting, and Alaskan priorities, which are not always the same as their fellow Americans below the Canadian border. For example, nearly 380,000 or 60% of Alaska's voters are registered as nonpartisan or undeclared. That doesn't mean that they're independent minded or they're necessarily left-leaning. In fact, what I was told is a lot of these people lean Republican, but they're fickle.

If things are not going the way that they might expect, they're going to be frustrated.

Just because a president won the state, that doesn't mean that he secured it for the next election. Part of the reason that we went up there with JD Vance is because his trip offered a window into that fight for Republicans to hold Alaska, and their plan to really mobilize voters who had helped secure Trump's victory in 2024 by tying the Democrat candidates up there to radical Democrat extremism, making the case that Alaskans really need politicians like Dan Sullivan in Washington to continue delivering the real results for the state that that state needs.