Hundreds gathered in the rain at Anchorage’s Delaney Park Strip as part of a national rally for May Day on Thursday night.
The main theme of the event was to support workers, with a focus on health care, education and other union laborers, but many took the opportunity to criticize the Trump administration.
Retired high school teacher Brad Fleener said he’d never been to a political rally before, but he was concerned that members of Congress weren’t standing up to the president. He said he voted for Republicans in the past, but stood with a sign that read “Eggs are expensive because all the chickens are in Congress.” Senator Dan Sullivan and Congressman Nick Begich’s faces were also on the poster.
“It’s going to be a political nightmare for a number of states, including Alaska, that really depend on Medicaid,” Fleener said. “And these two gentlemen have voted not to support it. And that is very, very wrong.”
Anne Jensen works with the Regulatory Commission of Alaska. She said she came to the rally because she’s concerned about how federal cuts to agencies will impact weather forecasting and aviation safety, two hot Alaska topics. She worries that those programs will be privatized.
“The more we understand that we’ve already paid for a lot of those services that Trump’s trying to privatize, we’ll have to pay for it again and more,” Jensen said. “And his buddies are all gonna profit from it.”
Similar rallies were held across the state, from road system communities like Soldotna and Fairbanks to more rural areas like Petersburg, Kodiak and Sitka.
