Why Alaska Can’t Have Nice Things

Dear Alaska - please stop trying to stand out in all the wrong ways

Some people can’t sit back and suffer under ordinary conditions. The grind of monotony to these people is another form of torture, and until this is understood, it can lead to some undesirable outcomes - like self-sabotage. Those are the most extreme cases. In other cases, sitting at an airport for 9 hours waiting to see if the weather will clear up enough to take your weekend trip is a no-go.

That’s what happened with me and Rachel in December 2024 when she wanted to see New York City for the first time. We landed in Chicago and were beelining it to our connecting gate, only to find out the flight was delayed. We exercised a little tactical patience, only to find out it was delayed again. We looked at the weather and immediately knew what to do.

We rented a car one-way and covered the 800 miles to New York City in about 18 hours, including sleep. As such, we saw everything we wanted to see. Turns out we would have gotten there by air before we pulled into Newark to drop the car off - but there would have been no adventure and no story if we’d have stuck it out in Chicago with the risk of never getting to the Big Apple.

All of these things are great when talking about interesting and quirky life decisions. They ensure dullness never takes hold of one’s life, and besides, how many of you have slept in Lock Haven, Pennsylvania, for five hours? Making on-the-fly crazy decisions is not great when you’re talking about the operation of a functioning, healthy state that appears to have a fixation on making itself different and unique just for fun.

Which brings me once again to Alaska - The Last Frontier. I once served a tour of duty there in 2012-13 as a Captain, and it is where I was stationed when I put in my papers to leave Active Duty. I have been back twice as a tourist and will most definitely take Rachel there as I did to New York City. I just have little confidence that when I go, I’ll be taking her to a reliably red state as we have known it.

Alaska is run by idiots, plain and simple. It is one of the few states in which the wear and tear should be blamed on Republicans instead of Democrats. Arizona, with its McCainite Uniparty, and Texas, with its Bushies who keep inviting techies to bloat the urban cores and foreigners to push everyone else out to the countryside, are in the same boat - but not at the scale of Alaska with its tiny population and very few populated areas.

Years ago, when these virtual pages were in their infancy and Captain K’s Corner was just another voice in the wilderness, I wrote a satirical column that 14 people liked in which I wrote about what it would be like if California took every political action possible to turn itself into a red state:

I eventually revealed that I was writing about red Alaska taking every measure possible to ensure it becomes first competitive, then blue:

The Last Frontier, Alaska, is operating as the fictitious California above, taking extreme measures to legally turn itself “blue,” likely within the next decade. Here is some of the idiocy legally instituted in Alaska’s impotent legislature:

1) Permanent Fund Dividend (PFD) automatic registration – On November 8, 2016, the same night Donald Trump was elected, Alaska’s voters approved Ballot Measure 1 (15PFVR), which automatically registers applicants for the PFD. The damage will be unveiled later in this article.

2) Ranked Choice Voting (RCV) – approved in 2020, and the first election using it will be run later in 2022 for the vacant U.S. House seat left behind by the deceased Don Young. Ranked Choice Voting allows a pathway for extreme candidates to supplant candidates who are most likely to be elected with strong pluralities, and practically entrenches incumbents in Democrat strongholds.

3) Experimentation with mail-in voting – as with RCV, mail-in voting will be the method for the U.S. House race coming later in 2022. With Alaska’s hostile climate and influence from west coast neighbors, it is only a matter of time until a full-on blitz begins to entrench mail-in voting.

This is not hyperbole. Alaska has many of the key ingredients in place to become another Colorado or Oregon. It has 80% of its population packed into the five most populated boroughs (county equivalents), a large Alaska Native population, no real adherence to standard Protestant Deep South style “conservatism” (although they love guns), and most importantly, new laws on the books that allow for stupid election outcomes like this one from 2022, when the Democrat Mary Peltola prevailed in a special election for U.S. House (which she sealed in the General Election months later):

You read that right. Republican candidates Nick Begich, the current Congressman from the Alaska At Large seat, and Sarah Palin took almost 3 of every 5 votes, but didn’t win because Alaska now has Ranked Choice Voting to redistribute votes and essentially elect Democrats. Can you think of any blue state in which this system of voting (operated municipally in places other than Alaska and Maine) accidentally elects Republicans instead of Democrats? Yeah, me neither:

Those who keep up with politics as a way of life realize Ranked Choice Voting was put into place to save Lisa Murkowski’s hide. I’m not sure it will save her the next time, but she also may be waiting, alongside Peltola, to see what happens this November in what has now become a must-watch Senate race thanks to the aforementioned GOP idiocy and the corruption of the state’s courts.

Enter Dan Sullivan. No, not the United States Senator. This Dan Sullivan: