By the numbers: Anchorage drifts bluer, while Mat-Su and Kenai trend redder

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In the March 3 purge of the voter rolls by the Division of Elections, Alaska has ended up with 585,525 voters.

Year over year, 13,609 more voters are registered in Alaska than at this time in 2020, defying the population trends that are showing seven years of outmigration from the state. In 2015, for example, the state hit a high of over 740,600 residents, but after the March 6, 2015 voter roll purge, there were just 500,882 voters.

The March voter roll purge is part of the annual maintenance by the state list to remove those who haven’t voted in several years, nor responded to queries from the Division of Elections, presumably because they moved away or died. The process of cleaning up the voter rolls is required by the National Voter Registration Act.

Some areas of the state are getting more Democrat registrants, while others are growing redder with Republicans.

Republicans gained in Anchorage district 19, where Rep. Geran Tarr has served for several years. Although they added 100 voters there, the district is still solidly Democrat.

Democrats lost 173 voters in District 24, and Republicans added about 93 voters. That’s Rep. Tom McKay’s constituency. He won over former Rep. Chuck Kopp in an Anchorage district that continues to get more conservative, with 4,007 Republicans and 2,054 Democrats.

Republicans also outpaced Democrat registration in Anchorage District 28, year over year, where Rep. James Kaufman beat former Rep. Jennifer Johnston in November. Democrats shedded 155 voters, and Republicans picked up 121. There are 4,840 Republicans in District 28 to 2,390 Democrats.

Across the rest of Anchorage, Democrats outpaced Republicans in registrations over the past year in many of the districts. Even in red districts, Democrats made slight gains.

State data from the Department of Labor shows that Anchorage has lost 3,517 residents, year over year, although not all of those would be registered voters.

Anchorage may have lost residents, but it gained 4,871 voters since last March’s voter roll purge (we are counting Districts 13-28 only, as 12 is halfway in the Mat-Su). There are 230,116 voters registered in Anchorage out of the population of 288,970.

This would mean 80 percent of the entire population of Anchorage is registered to vote. And the data indicates there are close to 58,854 children 17 and younger living in Districts 13-28.

In Southeast Alaska, Democrats outpaced Republican registrations in Juneau, but Republicans outpaced Democrats in Sitka and Ketchikan, even though Sitka is still a blue town.

Juneau Districts 33 and 34 grew a lot more blue since last year, picking up an additional 520 Democrats and losing 89 Republicans. The Department of Labor estimates Juneau’s population at 31,773.

In Fairbanks North Star Borough, Republicans outperformed Democrat registrations in four of six districts, but overall the increase in the Interior was about split.

But in the Mat-Su and Kenai, Republicanism got stronger. Mat-Su Republican registrations outperformed Democrat registrations by a four-to-one margin and on Kenai, the ratio was three to one, Republican over Democrat.

There was little change in rural Alaska.

Statewide, Republicans gained 5,213 voters year over year, to the 4,446 Democrat registrations added to the state voter file in the same time period. This represents a greater percentage gain for Democrats, who have 79,136 registered voters, compared to Republicans, with their 138,749 registered voters.

The winner statewide for registrations is in the undeclared category; that grew from 248,772 voters last March to 252,440 voters last week. Those voters are largely being added through automatic registration that occurs when people apply for their Permanent Fund dividend.

19 COMMENTS

  1. When Anchorage is allowed to illegally mail out ballots and establish unsupervised drop-boxes in violation of Alaska law in this coming April election, we will know just how seriously our Lt. Gov., AG, and the State legislature consider election integrity as they once again fail to uphold Alaska election laws.

    Eliminate the systemic government election fraud in Anchorage and you will miraculously eliminate this “blue surge” in Anchorage. But I’m not holding my breath.

  2. Weird. Follow the math, screw the “science ” (which is theory and computer models) anybody else tired of this crap? To bad we have a dysfunctional government. More to come. Our right to vote is no longer important. All of the work of Senator Showers will be for nothing. Shall we just assume the position?

  3. Pretty obvious to me. When ‘city dwellers’ in the leftist/liberal/democrat controlled cities in the contiguous U.S. decide it is time to ‘get out of Dodge’, due to leftist radical policies and results of those policies (unchecked rioting, openly criminal behavior of every kind, all with little or no consequences, and all white people being accused of ‘white supremacism’), Alaska is an attractive place to ‘escape’ to. City dwellers being city dwellers though, they generally don’t ‘escape’ to rural areas. They move to other, smaller cities to escape the ‘radical’ conditions that have threatened every facet of their lives in their former homes. The biggest problem (see Anchorage) is that they bring the radical policies they ‘escaped from’ with them and immediately start trying to transform their new home into the identical social and political nightmare they ‘escaped’ from. The city people generally won’t move to a rural or semi-rural area and the rural people are more likely to stay home, where their lives are established to a large degree, with less turmoil. Mostly, the ‘movers’ are city people and they want to stay that way in their ‘escape’, by moving to a different city in a not so radical political and social area. Therein lies the problem. The ‘escapees’ immediately (after their minimum residency for office) seek to transform that friendly, non-radical place they moved to into a copy of what they escaped from. They won’t move to a rural area like greater Wasilla and surrounds or the peninsula. They are city people and they don’t know how or care to learn the rural life. Anchorage is a prime example. Fairbanks not far off. Juneau heads the list. Most city people couldn’t survive in a rural setting in Alaska, nor would they want to. The Anchorage citizens that have lived there, some for generations, recognize what is happening to their city and the most obvious and easiest thing to do is move to the valley or the peninsula. That results in the political demographic changes in Alaskan cities vs. rural areas.

    • “……..Alaska is an attractive place to ‘escape’ to……….”
      Kill the PFD. Of all the liberal/leftist bait we have, that’s the worse. Kill it, and the population drops 10% within two years. That pittance is in no way worth the flies it attracts. Let them flee to Texas, Idaho, and Florida.

      • More like stop giving to the Non profits and attending their fundraisers. That’s the Democrats’ backdoor into state and city government jobs and then once they get on choice government jobs we are stuck with them.

      • You Sir, are a wise man.

        This issue with voter registration rising is tied directly to parasites applying for the PFD. Their primary interest is free stuff and their voting interests are directed toward more of it.

        Kill the automatic voter registration associated w/ the PFD… then kill all of the special interest programs that were funded during Alaska’s legacy years of prosperity, then kill the PFD.

        If all of that is done, the majority of Alaska”s parasitic population will disappear and on that day we can celebrate the dramatic reduction in bums, street drunks, the perennially needy, and our prison population as that same layer of societal detritus is a major component of our prison population. Let them enjoy the fruits of someone else’s labor in a warmer clime where dirtbags are welcomed with open arms.

        I’ll be the first to admit that Hammond was very well intentioned when he came up w/ the PFD concept and at the time it hadn’t occurred to me that it would essentially be a welfare program on steroids and would attract anything but the working population Alaska was at the time known for.

        • The PFD is not welfare. It is a small slice of the earnings derived from the Permanent Fund that is paid to every eligible Alaskan. The dividend reflects the people’s ownership interest in their saved mineral wealth — the oil that belongs to the citizens, not the bureaucrats.

  4. Haven’t you noticed most of them can’t write a coherent, grammatically correct sentence? How could they possibly hope to collect valid evidence of voter fraud when they can’t even spell it??

  5. Don’t run away when a place gets tough. Character is built going through the storms. We can use a lot more of that Brave American people.

    Districts can change when more of one kind of family moves into it.

    I think about the story of Mountain View. I am told it was a beautiful neighborhood. It can become a beautiful place again if more Republicans moved into the neighborhood buying property and renting and being involved on its neighborhood council taking charge and talking and convincing the neighbors who traditionally voted Democrat to vote Republican.

    Same thing with Midtown I hope I don’t see is people putting up their Geneva Woods homes for sale because Best Western was sold to the city, cause you know a liberal Democrat will buy your home increasing the Democrat vote in the Midtown district.

  6. The LT governor’s most important job is voter integrity. He seems to be doing little or nothing to fix the fraud! Kevin get to work if you want a political future because your lack of effort to fix the problem will be remembered!

  7. We have a lot of liberals here but things aren’t too bad yet in Juneau. However, we are very close to destruction. All it will take is a Liberal governor and a Liberal mayor here in Juneau. Our city council is mostly Liberal Democrats and we would have a complete take over. They want to eliminate fossil fuels here even though our power grid barely handles what we have now. They’re expanding homeless facilities and art complexes while ignoring our critical infrastructure. I see Juneau becoming another Seattle, Portland, or even worse, SF.

  8. That’s why I moved out years ago!
    Love my new home
    Yes you have to vote
    If you vote you can bitch but if you did not vote SHUT UP.
    Some times you win some times you loose. But being involved counts, talking to your neighbor be nice
    Love your fellow man agree to disagree.

  9. Anchorage is infested with the government dependant and liberal outsiders. The assembly keep the dependant needy to keep them unemployed and voting for the scraps they provide. ANC is no different than Portland except for the armed citizens.

  10. This has been a long time coming to be honest. When Anchorage was booming, it was a very friendly place to entrepreneurs and business. When it became more established, and yuppies began pouring in, it started getting more liberal and less friendly toward commerce. And it’s telling that the Mat-Su is still growing (both in population and its conservatism) while both Anchorage and Alaska as a whole are shrinking. And unfortunately for Anchorage and Alaska, it’s the wealthier, friendlier demographics that are fleeing. We as a state need to convince these people that Alaska is still a good place to live. It’s just getting harder when people like Berkowitz, Davidson, Dunbar and the city council think trans issues and buying hotels are more important than people’s livelihoods.

  11. Anchorage turning bluer isn’t a political shift. It’s just the business owners and their employees holding their breath, waiting to see if they will survive all the Covid rules.

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