Dunleavy's public meltdown: Fear and Loathing of the coming vote-by-mail election

Gov. Mike Dunleavy’s rude attempt to belittle an Anchorage Daily News reporter Tuesday shows just how scared he is of being blamed for the vote-by-mail primary election set for June 11 to begin the process of replacing Rep. Don Young.

As his latest state-managed press event, Dunleavy shifted into angry junior-high-principal mode, trying to ridicule James Brooks, the Juneau reporter of the Anchorage Daily News. Brooks was online.

“James, do you know who runs the elections in the state of Alaska?” said Dunleavy.

Brooks and every reporter who has been in Alaska for 15 minutes knows that the lieutenant governor and the Division of Elections run elections in the state of Alaska.

I’m guessing that Brooks didn’t say “yes” only because he was surprised and the first thing that popped into his head was “Please tell me.”

With this, Dunleavy stepped in it.

“You don’t know? If you don’t know you really shouldn’t be reporting on this. Do you know?” Dunleavy said.

“I know. Do you?” Brooks responded. Given that he was being set up, this somewhat flippant response was justified.

For people of my age, the response immediately triggered the memory of the famous question that President Richard Nixon should never have asked of Dan Rather of CBS in 1974.

“Are you running for something?” an irritated Nixon asked at a press conference.

“No sir Mr President, are you?” Rather responded.

The irritated Dunleavy made matters worse for himself because he didn’t listen to Brooks when the reporter answered correctly about who runs elections.

Dunleavy didn’t want to listen. He wanted to insult.

“You don’t know,” said Dunleavy, feigning disbelief at such ignorance.

“OK, who does?” he asked the assembled crowd at his state publicity show.

Someone gave the obvious answer and Dunleavy said, “Lieutenant governor. Thank you. Thank you.”

Dunleavy was angry because of a short-lived tweet from Brooks the preceding day that I’ve been told said something along the lines of the governor’s office deciding that there would be a vote-by-mail election for the primary to replace Young. I didn’t see the tweet, but it was deleted pretty quickly and it certainly was not prominent enough to create political trouble for Dunleavy.

The interesting thing about Dunleavy’s denunciation of Brooks is that it shows just how much the governor fears being blamed for the coming vote-by-mail election, which many Dunleavy supporters will denounce. The governor doesn’t want anyone to say it’s his fault.

The special primary election will be June 11, while the special general election will be Aug. 16. The winner of the special general election will hold the U.S. House seat temporarily.

The special general election will be on the same day as the regular 2022 primary, at which four candidates will qualify to proceed to the regular general election in November for the 2023-24 term.

What Dunleavy did not say at his staged press event was that he secretly tried to get the Legislature to do away with the special primary election—the vote-by-mail affair—by passing an emergency bill to amend the election ballot measure approved in 2020. This was the story that Brooks had been trying to piece together.

“Dunleavy and members of his administration considered other options,” Brooks and Nat Herz wrote in the Daily News. “On Sunday, the governor asked legislative leaders by teleconference whether it would be possible to pass a law by Friday canceling the special primary in favor of a single election in August.”

“Lawmakers declined. Though theoretically possible, agreeing to Dunleavy’s request would require revising the language of Ballot Measure 2, the citizens initiative overhauling Alaska’s election system that a narrow majority of participating voters approved in 2020.”

Matt Buxton of the Midnight Sun blog also has a good piece on Dunleavy’s celebration of Blame the Messenger Day.

“There was no attempt to override Ballot Measure 2,” Dunleavy said of his secret attempt to change the election law. “The discussion just went to the idea do we need to have two elections for this? And if we didn’t, then the Legislature would be the vehicle by which that changed. That was the nature of the conversation.”

Having a single special general election is a terrible idea. And the Legislature is not about to override a key part of the ballot measure and allow the political parties to decide who appears on the ballot.

Rather than admit to the public that he wanted to amend the election initiative, Dunleavy tired to change the subject and throw a tantrum about a tweet.