Party conventions aren’t all about funny hats and nominating presidents. Alaska delegates to the Republican National Convention in Cleveland are using the gathering as an opportunity to spread their Alaska-specific agenda to a national audience.
When you’re a small state, it helps to have allies. As luck would have it, the Alaska delegates are staying in the same suburban Cleveland hotel as the Wyoming delegates, and they’ve been networking.
At a Wyoming-Alaska breakfast reception Monday morning, Alaska Sen. Dan Sullivan appeared with Wyoming Sen. John Barrasso. Sullivan says that on key issues, there’s no daylight between Alaska and Wyoming
“Energy, use of public lands.. These are things that when John and I are working in the Senate, literally I can almost finish his sentences.”
That common purpose helped add a public lands statement to the party platform. It calls for the government to convey some federal lands to the states.
“Basically we want the Congress and everyone to actually …do something about giving the
federal lands back to the states in the West that belong to them. Basically. It’s a little longer than that, but that’s what it says,” explains Judy Eledge. She’s an Alaska delegate who helped draft the plank. (“Plank” is convention-speak for a position statement that becomes part of the party platform.) She worked with Wyoming delegates to get it through the convention’s Platform Committee last week. She says they aren’t trying to diminish national parks or monuments, but she believes federal control of other, undesignated lands is bad for Alaska.
“It shuts us down. There’s things we can’t do,” Eledge says. “You know, that’s how our economy is based, on our lands, most certainly out in the West where there’s oil and there’s gas.”
This is, of course, controversial. Lots of people don’t think the government should give away land. One member of the Montana delegation, Congressman Ryan Zinke, even left the whole convention over it.
But, as with other Republican principles, getting it in the party platform is no guarantee the party’s presumptive nominee for president, Donald Trump, will support it
In fact, when asked by the magazine Field & Stream in January, Trump was against divesting federal lands to the states.
“I don’t like the idea because I want to keep the lands great,” Trump said. “And you don’t know what the states are going to do with them. Are they going to sell as soon as they get in a little bit of a trouble? I don’t think it’s something that should be sold.”
Eledge, the Alaska delegate, says she thinks Trump was speaking from an East Coast perspective. She thinks he might change his mind as he learns more. Regardless, Eledge, a diehard Ted Cruz supporter, says she now accepts Trump as the people’s choice.
There’s also a different effort to raise Alaska concerns at the convention, specifically: trying
to inform Republicans about the importance of resource extraction to Alaska. Drue Pearce, a former state Senate president, helped coordinate a letter, signed by Congressman Don Young and both senators, that serves as a primer on Alaska oil and gas matters.The original copy was mailed to Trump, but Pearce says they’re taking every opportunity at the convention to get the letter into the right hands.
“We’re making sure that anybody who has access within the Trump organization, or now to the Pence organization, we shove them the letter,” she said.
Visually, the Alaska delegates stand out at the convention in matching blue kuspuks. A diagram on the back shows the map of Alaska imposed over the Lower 48. That’s another message they want to convey: The state has few people, but it’s huge like no other.
Liz Ruskin is the Washington, D.C., correspondent at Alaska Public Media. Reach her atlruskin@alaskapublic.org. Read more about Lizhere.
