Democrat Jonathan Kreiss-Tomkins Wins Alaska Governor’s Race, Ending 28 Years of Republican Rule

Alaska voters have elected a Democrat as governor for the first time in 28 years, choosing former state lawmaker Jonathan Kreiss-Tomkins to lead a state that has not put a Democrat in the governor’s office since 1998, according to the Associated Press, which called the race on Friday evening, ten days after the polls closed.

Kreiss-Tomkins, 37, won 50.8 per cent of first-choice votes, according to the Associated Press count, defeating three Republicans including Bernadette Wilson, the business owner endorsed by President Donald Trump, who finished second with 28.1 per cent. The result makes him the youngest governor in Alaska’s history, and it gives Democrats control of 30 of the country’s 50 governorships, a majority they have not held since 2010.

“Voters wanted change and a government that works across party lines to move Alaska forward,” Kreiss-Tomkins said in a statement after the call, adding: “Our administration will not waste a single day getting to work to solve problems for Alaska.” He will be sworn in at noon on 7 December, succeeding Republican Governor Mike Dunleavy, who has held the office since 2018 and was barred by term limits from seeking a third consecutive term. His lieutenant governor will be Zac Johnson, an independent.

The call ended one of the last unresolved contests of the 2026 midterm elections, and it completed a Democratic sweep of six Republican-held governorships. Before Alaska, Democrats had already flipped the governor’s offices in Georgia, Iowa, Nevada, Ohio and Texas, and they lost none of their own seats, according to USA Today. The party held 24 governorships going into the 3 November elections; it will hold 30 when the new governors take office next year.

A result decided on first choices

The Associated Press called the race for Kreiss-Tomkins on Friday evening local time, with 96 per cent of the vote counted. At that point he held 139,293 votes, or 50.8 per cent, against 77,110 votes, or 28.1 per cent, for Wilson, according to the Associated Press count. Dave Bronson, the former mayor of Anchorage, stood at 13.6 per cent, and Treg Taylor, a former state attorney general under Dunleavy, at 7.2 per cent. The margin between the winner and the runner-up was 22.7 points.

The results remain unofficial until the Alaska Division of Elections certifies them on 25 November, and the final tallies may move slightly as the last ballots are counted. But the outcome is no longer in doubt, because Kreiss-Tomkins cleared the 50 per cent threshold outright. Under Alaska’s ranked-choice voting system, a candidate who wins more than half of first-choice votes wins without any further rounds of counting.

That detail matters, because the ranked-choice tabulation that had been expected the following week will not now be needed in the governor’s race. Alaska uses an open primary in which the top four vote-getters, regardless of party, advance to a general election conducted under ranked-choice voting. Voters also faced a ballot question on repealing that system. The proposal failed, according to reporting on the results, so the system adopted by voters in 2020 stays in place.

Kreiss-Tomkins finished first in the August open primary, followed by a second Democrat, Tom Begich, who then withdrew from the race. Begich’s campaign said at the time that it had concluded the “strongest path to victory is to bring Democratic voters, donors and resources together behind one candidate.” Wilson finished third in the primary. The withdrawal left Kreiss-Tomkins as the only Democrat on the ballot, facing a Republican vote split three ways.

The endorsement that crossed party lines

The most consequential endorsement of the race came a week before the election, when Republican Senator Lisa Murkowski backed Kreiss-Tomkins. Murkowski, who has at times broken with her party and with the president, said Kreiss-Tomkins “understands that governing requires listening to people with different perspectives and finding common ground to solve the problems all of us face,” according to the Associated Press.

Three former governors also endorsed him: Democrat Tony Knowles, the last Democrat to win the office, independent Bill Walker, who served from 2014 to 2018, and Republican Frank Murkowski, the senator’s father. The breadth of that support became the centrepiece of Kreiss-Tomkins’s campaign, which presented him as a candidate for voters of all parties rather than as a standard-bearer for one.

He leaned into that message in public. At a candidate forum last month, he said he wanted a cabinet drawn from Republicans, Democrats and independents alike. “If they’re competent, if they’re service-minded, if they’re entrepreneurial, if they’re problem-solvers, you’re on the team. Game on,” he said. “Let’s go, and let’s get Alaska back on track.”

He described compromise as “a virtue, not a dirty word,” and said he saw the mission of the new governor as working with lawmakers to resolve longstanding problems in the state. His campaign said it had more than 10,000 donors, according to the Associated Press.

A campaign built on the cost of living

Kreiss-Tomkins, widely known in Alaska by his initials JKT, travelled throughout the state to build his coalition, and he campaigned above all on affordability. He promised to reduce the cost of living, to fund public schools fully, and to require all oil and gas producers to pay corporate income tax, according to the Associated Press.

He also sought a moratorium on new data centres until state lawmakers pass regulations for their development, a position that set him apart in a state where energy-hungry computing projects have become a live political question. And he made the state ferry system a recurring theme, saying Alaska had become “broken” under eight years of Dunleavy and needed a change.

The ferry is not a minor issue in Alaska. It is a key mode of transport for south-east Alaska communities that are not connected by roads, some of which also have limited air service. Kreiss-Tomkins said the system had been left in shambles, with routes to many communities cut drastically. For voters in those towns, the ferry is the road, and its decline became a shorthand for a government that had stopped reaching them.

His opponent Wilson, an Anchorage business owner, carried the president’s endorsement. Trump also criticised the other Republican candidates for staying in the race, arguing that they were splitting the vote. Many Republicans had seen ranking as the party’s best shot at retaining the seat, a message that conflicted with Trump’s own complaints about Alaska’s voting method, which he raised repeatedly, including during a rally in Alaska in October.

In the end, the split mattered less than the arithmetic. Kreiss-Tomkins won an outright majority, so no ranked-choice redistribution was required to decide the race, and the Republican field’s division never became the deciding factor it might have been in a closer contest.

A comeback three years in the making

Kreiss-Tomkins served as a state representative from Sitka from 2013 to 2023, and his victory completes a political comeback three years after he left the state House, according to the Associated Press. He was 37 when the race was called, and he will become the youngest governor in the state’s history when he takes office.

The last Democratic governor, Tony Knowles, left office in 2002 after serving back-to-back terms. Since then, the office has been held by Republicans and by Walker, the independent. Alaska has reliably backed Republican presidential candidates, and a Democrat had not won the governorship since Knowles won re-election in 1998.

That history is what makes the result striking. Alaska is a state where Democrats make up a small share of the electorate, and where the party had not seriously contested the governor’s office in a generation. Kreiss-Tomkins won not by turning out a large Democratic base, but by assembling a coalition that included Republicans and independents, and by winning the argument that the state’s government had stopped working for ordinary Alaskans.

The wave that carried him

The Alaska result is the final piece of a midterm election that reshaped state government across the country. Democrats flipped five governorships on election night, in Georgia, Iowa, Nevada, Ohio and Texas, and Alaska makes six, according to USA Today. The party will govern 30 states, home to about 75 per cent of the American population, according to Meghan Meehan-Draper, executive director of the Democratic Governors Association, quoted by USA Today.

The gains extended well beyond governors’ offices. Democrats flipped 12 state legislative chambers and broke Republican supermajorities in another 12, according to the Democratic Legislative Campaign Committee, and flipped more than 500 legislative seats, USA Today reported. The party took full control of the three main parts of state government in Michigan, Minnesota, Nevada, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, and ended full Republican control in Georgia, Iowa, New Hampshire, Ohio and Texas.

In Texas, Gina Hinojosa became the first Democrat elected governor in 35 years, and the state’s first Hispanic governor. In the Senate, Democrats flipped eight seats, according to reporting on the results, and picked up more than two dozen seats in the House. The scale of the shift is the reason the Alaska result is being read nationally as something larger than a single state’s choice.

One race remains uncalled. In Alaska’s Senate contest, former Congresswoman Mary Peltola led incumbent Republican Dan Sullivan, with 49.8 per cent of the vote against 46.1 per cent, with 95 per cent counted, according to reporting on the results. The Senate as a whole stood at 55 seats for Democrats, including independents who caucus with them, and 44 for Republicans, with Alaska alone uncalled, according to a Washington briefing published on Saturday. If Peltola holds her lead, the Democratic total rises further.

What he inherits

Kreiss-Tomkins takes office in a state whose finances depend heavily on oil, whose communities are scattered across vast distances, and whose government has been run by Republicans for eight years. The ferry system he campaigned on is only one of the services Alaskans say has deteriorated. Public schools, which he promised to fund fully, have been a persistent point of friction between the legislature and the outgoing governor.

His proposal to require all oil and gas producers to pay corporate income tax will be one of the first tests of his relationship with the legislature, where the politics of oil revenue have divided Alaskans for decades. His proposed moratorium on new data centres will test the same relationship from a different direction, pitting the promise of investment and jobs against the strain such projects place on energy and water supplies.

His promise of a bipartisan cabinet will be tested sooner than either of those policies. He has said he will appoint on competence rather than party, and his first appointments will show whether that pledge survives contact with the politics of governing. The endorsement of Murkowski and three former governors gives him cover to make those appointments, but it also raises expectations that his administration will look different from a conventional partisan one.

The certification of the results on 25 November is the next formal step. After that comes the swearing-in on 7 December, and then the first legislative session of his governorship, where the promises of the campaign become bills, budgets and votes.

Analysis: Why It Matters

A majority on first choices is the whole story

The most important number in this race is not 28 years. It is 50.8 per cent. Kreiss-Tomkins did not win Alaska because ranked-choice voting redistributed ballots in his favour, or because a divided Republican field handed him a plurality. He won an outright majority of first-choice votes, in a state where his own party is a small minority of the electorate. That is a different kind of victory from the ones Democrats won in Georgia, Iowa, Ohio and Texas, where the margins were narrower and the partisan arithmetic more conventional.

A majority on first choices means he persuaded voters who do not normally vote Democratic to choose him first, not as a second preference or a lesser evil. It means the coalition he built was real, not an artefact of the voting system. And it means the result cannot be explained away as a quirk of Alaska’s unusual election rules, however much the president has complained about those rules. The system was designed to reward candidates with broad appeal, and in this race it did exactly that.

The endorsement that broke the partisan frame

Elections in Alaska are rarely won on party labels alone, but this one was unusual even by Alaskan standards. A sitting Republican senator endorsed the Democrat. Three former governors, one from each of the state’s three political traditions, endorsed him too. That is not a normal coalition, and it is worth asking what it was for.

Part of the answer is personal. Murkowski has built her career on independence from her party, and her endorsement carried weight precisely because she has paid a price for that independence before. But part of the answer is structural. In a state where the governor’s office has been held by one party for a generation, the argument that the government had stopped working was available to anyone willing to make it, and the endorsements gave Kreiss-Tomkins permission to make it to voters who would never have listened to a Democrat making the same case alone. The lesson for both parties is that in Alaska, credibility is borrowed as much as it is earned, and the lenders matter.

Trump’s Alaska problem is the system, not the candidate

The president endorsed Wilson, attacked the other Republicans for staying in the race, and used an October rally in Alaska to complain about ranked-choice voting. None of it worked. That failure deserves attention, because it tells us something about the limits of a presidential endorsement in a state election.

Trump’s argument was that the system was the problem, and that a divided field would hand the seat to a Democrat. The argument was not wrong in the abstract: three Republicans did split the vote, and Wilson’s 28.1 per cent was barely more than half of her opponent’s total. But the argument failed because it asked Republican voters to do something they were unwilling to do, which was to abandon candidates they preferred in order to serve a strategy imposed from outside. Wilson finished third in the primary and second in the general election, and no amount of presidential pressure closed the gap. In Alaska, the voters who mattered were the ones who had already decided that the government was broken, and they were not waiting for permission from Washington to say so.

A mandate for competence, not for ideology

It would be a mistake to read this result as Alaska turning Democratic. The state has not turned Democratic; it has elected a Democrat who promised to govern as something other than a Democrat. Kreiss-Tomkins campaigned on the cost of living, on schools, on ferries, on data centres and on oil taxes, and he promised a cabinet chosen for competence rather than party. None of that is a left-wing programme. It is a programme for a government that works, and it is the programme of a candidate who understood that in Alaska, the most powerful political argument is the one that sounds least like a party platform.

That creates a risk for him. A mandate for competence is harder to keep than a mandate for ideology, because it is judged against results rather than intentions. If the ferries still do not run, if the schools are still underfunded, if the cost of living keeps rising, the voters who lent him their support will take it back, and they will not wait 28 years to do it. The same coalition that carried him into office can carry someone else out of it, and the same voters who crossed party lines once will cross them again.

The wave is real, and it has a ceiling in Alaska

Nationally, the 2026 midterms were a rout for Democrats: six governorships flipped, a majority of governorships for the first time since 2010, legislative chambers and supermajorities overturned, and a Senate that changed hands. Alaska is the last and most surprising piece of that story, and it is tempting to treat it as proof that no state is out of reach.

That temptation should be resisted. Alaska’s result was the product of a particular candidate, a particular set of endorsements, a particular set of local grievances, and a voting system that rewards breadth of appeal. None of those conditions is easily transferable. The wave was real, and it reached further than anyone expected, but it reached Alaska because Alaska’s politics made room for it, not because the national tide swept everything before it. The next test of that distinction will come in the Senate race still being counted, and in the first legislative session of the new governor’s term, where the promises of the campaign meet the arithmetic of governing.

What to Watch Next

1. Certification on 25 November: The Alaska Division of Elections will certify the results, making the outcome official and closing the book on the 2026 governor’s race.
2. Swearing-in on 7 December: Kreiss-Tomkins takes office at noon, becoming the youngest governor in Alaska’s history, with independent Zac Johnson as lieutenant governor.
3. The cabinet: His promise of a bipartisan administration chosen for competence will be tested by his first appointments, and by whether Republicans and independents accept the jobs he offers them.
4. The Senate race: Mary Peltola’s lead over Dan Sullivan remains uncalled, and its outcome will decide whether Democrats extend their gains to Alaska’s Senate seat as well.
5. The ferry system: The first budget of the new administration will show whether the promise to repair the ferries survives contact with the state’s finances.
6. Data centres and oil taxes: His proposed moratorium on new data centres and his plan to require all oil and gas producers to pay corporate income tax will both face their first legislative test in the new session.
7. Ranked-choice voting: With the repeal measure rejected and the governor’s race decided without a tabulation, the system survives, but the ranked-choice count scheduled for 18 November will still matter for the races that did not produce a first-round majority.

Sources

• Reuters — Alaska elects first Democratic governor since 1998, US media project
• Associated Press — Kreiss-Tomkins becomes first Democrat since 1998 elected governor in Alaska
• USA Today — Democrats grab sweeping power in governor’s offices, state houses
• Associated Press via TMJ4 — Democratic gains expand as Alaska elects first Democratic governor in decades
• The Apex Wire — Kreiss-Tomkins wins Alaska governor race: first Democrat since 1998
• Political.org — Democrat Jonathan Kreiss-Tomkins flips Alaska governor’s office after Trump-backed Bernadette Wilson falls short in split GOP field