The purpose of Tuesday’s primary election is to narrow each field to four candidates. But few races have more than four to start with.
One is the state Senate race in Eagle River, at the northern edge of Anchorage, where the incumbent, Republican Sen. Kelly Merrick is under attack for her willingness to work across the aisle.
Republican Jared Goecker, who’s running a well-funded campaign to challenge Merrick from the right, is hoping that plays to his advantage in a community where Donald Trump won roughly 60% of the vote in 2020.
“When you’re voting 90% of the time with (Democratic Anchorage Sen.) Forrest Dunbar, and you’re saying you’re a conservative, that’s not conservative,” Goecker said while canvassing supporters ahead of the primary in a get-out-the-vote push in Eagle River this week. “That’s not even, like, moderate Republican — that’s left of center at that point.”
For the last two years, Merrick has been part of the bipartisan Senate majority, which includes 17 of the state’s 20 senators: eight Republicans and nine Democrats. The caucus has governed with a focus on down-the-middle policies, and it’s often been at odds with the conservative-led state House and Republican Gov. Mike Dunleavy.
Goecker was an appointee in former Anchorage Mayor Dave Bronson’s human resources department, and before that, he negotiated contracts with labor unions on behalf of the Dunleavy administration. He pitches himself as much more aligned with the governor.
Take the Permanent Fund dividend — Goecker said he prefers a 50-50 split of the state’s annual 5% draw from the Permanent Fund to go directly to Alaskans, just as Dunleavy has supported. Also like Dunleavy, he opposes a return to a defined benefit, pension-style retirement system for state employees, which he called “unaffordable and unsustainable.”
Or consider the fight over education funding: This year, the House and Senate passed a bill that would have boosted the base student allocation, the biggest part of the state’s funding formula for public schools, by wide margins. But they failed by a single vote to override a veto from Dunleavy.
Goecker wouldn’t say how he would have voted if he’d been in the Senate at the time, but he said it never would have come to that.
“We would have had a Republican Senate that’s working with the governor, actually negotiating with the governor to figure out what those priorities are, instead of passing something without knowing if the governor is going to sign it or not,” he said.
A spokesperson for Dunleavy declined to say whether the governor had a preferred candidate in the race, citing state ethics rules.
Goecker, whose brother Josiah was shot and killed last year, said he was also interested in tightening bail requirements and speeding up court proceedings.
“There’s such a terrible bottleneck in our criminal justice system that’s really making it hard for us to put bad guys away and keep bad guys away,” he said.
Merrick defends her work across the aisle
In an interview at her home, Merrick defended her work with colleagues from both parties.
Before her election to the Alaska Senate, Merrick spent four years in the state House. Merrick spent her first two years in the minority, and she “was not able to get a lot done” in that position, she said. That influenced her decision to join the emerging bipartisan majority caucus after her November 2022 election to the Senate, she said.
“You have to be in the majority if you’re going to deliver,” she said.
Merrick has taken some positions contrary to Dunleavy’s. She voted for the education bill twice. She supports a defined benefit retirement plan, citing a fiscal analysis of the bill that found it would save the state money and improve employee retention. (Competing fiscal analyses of the bill have come to mixed conclusions on the cost of returning to a pension-style plan.) Merrick also supported using 25%, rather than 50% of the annual drawdown on the Permanent Fund for dividends while on the Senate Finance Committee.
But Merrick said there were plenty of ways she did work closely with the Dunleavy administration. She points out that she was with the governor on legislation addressing the state’s natural gas crunch and a wide-ranging crime bill.
“When I’ve talked to people that said, ‘Oh, you work with Democrats,’ I ask, ‘What policy did I support that you disagree with?’” she said.
While she often voted alongside Democrats in the Senate, Merrick said she worked with her colleagues to lend her conservative point of view to legislative debates before they reached a final vote. Most of her constituents, she said, want basic government services, not partisan hits.
“I think that there might be sort of a fringe group of folks that want a legislator that’s going to go down to Juneau and throw bombs and, you know, keep things from happening,” she said. “But I think the majority of people want results.”
Merrick said she hopes that’s a message that appeals to voters more than the call for adherence to Republican unity.
Other Republican candidates oppose bipartisan majority caucus
Of the three Republicans challenging Merrick, Goecker has a sizable lead in fundraising. But he’s not alone in making Merrick’s willingness to work across the aisle a key issue.
Former state Rep. Sharon Jackson, who served two years in the House after Dunleavy appointed her to fill a vacancy, said she’d only join a majority led by conservatives similar to what exists in the state House.
“I will be loyal to the Republicans,” she said in an interview at a Chugiak coffee shop and bakery. “I will not turn my back on them, no matter what.”
Jackson said her focus is on improving Alaska’s economy, including by making the state into a destination for those seeking treatment through regenerative medicine, which she said includes unconventional therapies like platelet-rich plasma infusions and sessions in high-pressure hyperbaric chambers.
“That would really be a major boost,” she said.
Former Rep. Ken McCarty, who succeeded Jackson in the House, said he, too, would only join a coalition if it were led by Republicans.
“Being able to look at moderate issues, but conservative-led, yes,” he said in an interview at a bustling cafe in Eagle River.
Like Jackson, McCarty said he would seek to use his time in the Legislature to improve the state’s economy. The state’s infrastructure needs an upgrade, he said, from a western extension of the Alaska Railroad in the Interior to port development in Point MacKenzie and Seward.
“There’s places in the world that want to buy our resources, and if we can’t move it out of the state, then we’re failing ourselves,” he said.
Lone Democrat in race faces questions over legitimacy
Newly registered Democrat Lee Hammermeister is the only candidate aside from Merrick who said he would join a bipartisan coalition similar to what currently exists in the Senate. He cast himself as a moderate.
“Ideally, I’d like for everyone to be able to work on common ground legislation, and be able to find legislation that can meet all of our needs, and be able to make the sacrifices necessary for that to happen,” he said in an interview at an Eagle River real estate office.
But his campaign has had trouble getting off the ground, struggled to fundraise, and is facing questions over its legitimacy. The Alaska Beacon reported that Hammermeister co-hosted a fundraiser for conservative Eagle River Republican Rep. Jamie Allard in 2023, and that the president of a progressive group had accused him of being a “fake Democrat” seeking to siphon votes from Merrick.
Hammermeister said he was frustrated by the accusation and by the Alaska Democratic Party’s decision not to support his candidacy. He said he’s been reaching out to local Democrats and “trying to establish contact with the party for weeks and weeks,” to no avail.
“If the Alaska Democrat Party has abandoned the Democrat voters of this district, that means that I’m the last thing standing in the way of four Republicans getting into that seat,” Hammermeister said.
Eric Stone covers state government, tracking the Alaska Legislature, state policy and its impact on all Alaskans. Reach him at estone@alaskapublic.org.
