Kohring denies withdrawal was coordinated

MAT-SU — The Valley’s only party-affiliated candidate for U.S. Senate dropped out of the running Tuesday, throwing his support behind the Republican in the race.

Meanwhile, the results of the Aug. 19 primary election have been declared official.

Starting with the U.S. Senate candidate — you’ll be forgiven if you thought the Valley had not contributed candidates to this race which now seems to be mostly a contest between Democrat Mark Begich and Republican Dan Sullivan.

But there is an unaffiliated candidate — local gadfly Sidney Hill, who can be found on street corners around the Valley with his sign calling for the impeachment of President Barack Obama. The Valley did sport one candidate with a party’s nomination: Wasillan Vic Kohring took the Alaska Independence Party primary. Kohring pulled in 2,557 votes in the primary for 58 percent of the AIP votes cast. He bested his AIP challenger, Zachary Kile, who racked up 1,869 votes, or 42 percent of the AIP votes cast.

In terms of total of 181,430 votes cast in that primary, Kohring took just 1 percent of them. Only 2 percent of voters chose to vote in that primary. By contrast, 62 percent of voters chose to cast a ballot in the three-way Republican primary for that seat.

Still, though, Kohring’s move to drop out didn’t go unnoticed.

“Alaska Independent Party Senate candidate Vic Kohring’s simultaneous withdrawal from the Senate race and endorsement of Dan Sullivan reeks of a orchestrated attempt to deliver Alaska’s U.S. Senate seat for Dan Sullivan. After months of declining all opportunities to appear at public events during his ‘campaign,’ Kohring’s endorsement reads as if it’s written by Dan Sullivan himself,” reads a quote from Alaskans for Begich campaign manager Susanne Fleek-Green in a campaign press release.

Kohring denied the allegation.

“I ran for office on my own volition. I ran for office for my own personal reasons and there was no coordination with the Sullivan people. I’ve never even met Dan Sullivan. I’ve never even spoken to him,” Kohring said when reached by cellphone gassing up his van at Wasilla Tesoro station. “I saw him one time and that was in passing at the Anchorage Baptist Temple at the meet the candidate event they had.”

Nor, Kohring said, was his run — coordination or no — an attempt to deliver AIP votes to Sullivan and block an AIP candidate from running.

“I could have waited until 5 o’clock so I could block a candidate from running,” he said. “It was like 2:30 in the afternoon or so.”

As for why he dropped out, Kohring said that he thinks the race is going to be tight and he wants to see a conservative win.

“I’d really hate to have played a direct role in November of siphoning off just enough votes to tip the scales to Mark,” he said.

As for why he ran, Kohring said he wanted to bring attention to the way the country was running, to kick Senate Democrats like Harry Reid out of the majority, and to bring to light his own personal legal issues.

If his name is familiar it’s because Kohring, after representing Wasilla in the state Legislature for years, was arrested and eventually pleaded guilty to receiving a bribe from oilfield services company CEO Bill Allen in a Juneau hotel room. His prosecution was part of a larger investigation that ensnared numerous state lawmakers, eventually growing to include Sen. Ted Stevens who whose conviction just before the election is widely seen as the reason Begich was elected to the U.S. Senate. Though he pleaded guilty and received a sentence, Kohring maintains he was railroaded.

His press release announcing his withdrawal noted that he is working on a book called “The Fibbin’ FBI” that he believes exposes agents that framed him. In the phone interview, he said he likes to put quotation marks around the word “justice” when mentioning the U.S. Department of Justice.

As for the official election results — there were no big surprises in Mat-Su after all the absentee and questioned ballots were in. Bill Stoltze’s final tally was 71 percent of the vote in the Senate Seat E race to DeLena Johnson’s 29 percent. Mat-Su Borough Assemblyman Ron Arvin trailed local businesswoman and legislative aide Cathy Tilton. The final result there was 64 percent for Tilton and 36 percent for Arvin.

But, in the Sutton/Chickaloon/Valdez/Delta Junction race, the numbers did shift slightly in a pretty interesting (if inconsequential) way: Eric Feige, the incumbent, no longer lost to two candidates. Now it appears he lost to one and tied with the other.

The vote totals, according to the state, are 1,391 for the winner, Mat-Su Borough Assemblyman Jim Colver, and the exact same number — 1,064 — for both Feige and Sutton Community Council member George Rauscher. Percentage-wise that’s 40 percent for Colver and 30 percent each for Feige and Rauscher.

Contact Andrew Wellner at 352-2270 or andrew.wellner@frontiersman.com.