How Alaska wound up with no limits on campaign donations — and how some hope to restore them

Back in 2006, Alaska voters passed a ballot initiative in a landslide. In most cases, it allowed campaign donations of no more than $500 per candidate per year. But those days are long gone, said former attorney general Bruce Botelho. 

“There are no limits at the moment,” Botelho said in an interview.

Alaska used to have some of the strictest campaign spending laws in the country. And Botelho is part of an effort trying to reimpose caps on how much Alaska state candidates can raise as they run for governor, state House or state Senate. But since 2021, thanks to a court decision, Alaska has been one of only about a dozen states with no limits on individual donations, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures.

The case that led to no limits

In 2015, a group of Republican donors and a local party group challenged the limits, saying $500 was far too low. Attorneys said the low cap gave an unfair advantage to both incumbents and candidates who were themselves independently wealthy. They said the laws violated the First Amendment.

A district judge initially upheld the $500 cap. Then, two years later, the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals weighed in. It threw out a law restricting out-of-state donors to no more than $3,000 in campaign donations, but it left the rest of the limits in place.

The case reached the U.S. Supreme Court in 2019. The justices told the Ninth Circuit to, essentially, try again — but that this time, the circuit judges should consider that the high court had thrown out similarly low limits in Vermont in 2006, and that the lowest limits the court had allowed were about 60% higher than Alaska’s after accounting for inflation. In light of the prior precedent, the Ninth Circuit struck down Alaska’s campaign limits in 2021.

That “meant that in 2022, that election cycle, and again this year, there are no limits on how much an individual can contribute to any race,” Botelho said.

The Dunleavy administration declined to appeal the 2-1 Ninth Circuit decision. A Department of Law spokesperson said it wasn’t worth the money or the risk.

A push to cap donations

Ever since, Alaska’s no-limits system has allowed deep-pocketed donors can exercise outsize influence, said Marina Pino with the Brennan Center for Justice, which defended the state’s campaign finance restrictions in court.

“There’s a growing disconnect between the average citizen and elected officials, and that’s fueled by a system that really stacks the deck in favor of a small number of deep-pocketed donors,” she said.

That’s a position Botelho shares, he said. He’s cosponsoring a ballot initiative campaign called Citizens Against Money in Politics. 

The limits would be higher — $2,000 per candidate per election cycle, with higher limits for group donations and donations to a gubernatorial ticket, plus periodic adjustments for inflation — and that would make them more likely to survive court scrutiny, Botelho said.

“Our effort here is basically to even the playing field — to make clear that people of modest means should have the same voice as someone who can write a check for $250,000,” Botelho said.

In the meantime, though, some donors and candidates are making use of Alaska’s no-limits system.

Deep-pocketed donors give big

By the end of July, at least five state candidates for state House and Senate had reported contributions of $10,000 or more from a single donor, according to data aggregator OpenSecrets. That’s two independents, two Republicans and one Democrat, according to a candidate list from the Division of Elections.

Anchorage attorney Robin Brena donated a total of more than $30,000 to two candidates hoping to represent neighboring districts in Anchorage, including independent Nick Moe and Democrat Denny Wells. Wells said in a text message that he had signed the ballot initiative petition and would support reimposing campaign donation caps if elected to the Legislature.

For his part, Moe said in a phone interview that he supports restoring campaign limits and had also signed the ballot initiative petition — but for now, he said, he’d “use the tools at his disposal.”

“It’s incredibly challenging to have our voice heard as Alaskans when we deal with a political system that literally has hundreds of millions of dollars spent by outside of Alaska corporations to influence our political process,” Moe said.

Moe said he wouldn’t take a big donation from out of state and that most of his donations come from small-dollar donors, but said he was proud to have “an Alaskan like Brena supporting my campaign.”

Anchorage independent Rep. Alyse Galvin, who received a $30,000 contribution from a California man whom she said had served as a “surrogate parent” since her middle school years, said in a phone interview that she agreed with the push to limit campaign contributions. She said she’s gathering signatures for the ballot initiative.

“I’m very vocal about this, because I think that it’s an area that is going to level the playing field, if you will, to make sure that everybody feels like they can run for office,” she said.

Robert Yundt, who reported a $10,000 contribution from the owner of a Mat-Su construction company toward his effort to unseat fellow Wasilla Republican David Wilson in the state Senate, did not return a request for comment.

Some say limits won’t help

But some are skeptical that setting limits on campaign contributions would, in fact, level the playing field.

After all, no state ballot initiative can invalidate the 2010 U.S. Supreme Court decision known as Citizens United, which allows independent groups like super PACs to raise and spend unlimited amounts of cash on campaigns as a matter of free speech. 

That’s the view of Jared Goecker, who’s mounting a conservative challenge to Republican incumbent Kelly Merrick for a chance to represent Eagle River in the Alaska Senate. His campaign banked a $28,000 contribution from his brother, a real estate agent. (Goecker said a second $28,000 contribution from Jamin Goecker’s LLC, which is listed in campaign finance reports, was a clerical error he had cleared with regulators.)

The fact that Citizens United remains the law of the land means that no state limit on campaign spending would truly get money out of politics, Goecker said.

“You’re going to have local candidates trying to make a run if they see an issue in their local community, trying to make a difference, and then they’ll get completely steamrolled by the dark money pouring in through the PAC,” he said by phone.

And there’s some evidence that the current lack of campaign caps means candidates, rather than outside groups, are able to raise more money for their cause. For instance, in 2018, while Alaska’s campaign limits were still in place, Gov. Mike Dunleavy’s brother and a sport fishing advocate put more than $700,000 into an independent expenditure group seeking to elect Dunleavy that was barred from coordinating with the candidate. But in 2022, when the limits were eliminated, Dunleavy and other candidates for governor themselves raked in hundreds of thousands of dollars, including from some of the same donors. Dunleavy has said he supports the no-limits system as long as candidates disclose their donors.

Botelho, the former AG who wants to reimpose limits, acknowledged that the ballot initiative wouldn’t be able to limit spending by independent expenditure groups, but he said they’re only a factor in a small number of races. 

“To the extent they play in state and local politics, it’s usually at the gubernatorial level, or, in the case of Anchorage, in particular, the mayoral races,” Botelho said.

For now, organizers with the ballot initiative campaign say they’re racing to meet a mid-September deadline to submit enough signatures to get the initiative on the primary ballot in 2026. A volunteer coordinator with the initiative campaign, Jus Tavcar, said by text message that as of early August, the campaign had met about 60% of its goal.

And if the initiative does make the ballot, Botelho said he’s optimistic that just as they did two decades earlier, Alaskans would vote to support it.