A YouTube ad by the leftist RepresentUs group stars Sen. Cathy Giessel, who was elected because of ranked-choice voting, and Sen. Matt Claman, both extolling the benefits of the new system that went into action in Alaska elections in 2022, turning the U.S. House seat Democrat, and handing Democrat control over in the State Senate.
Giessel says in the ad how she very much expected bipartisan leadership of the Senate after ranked-choice voting was passed by voters in 2020. The measure, Ballot Measure 2, was paid for by dark money groups outside the state that use Alaska as a petrie dish or experiments to drive liberal public policy. The Arabella Fund, New Venture Fund, Tides Foundation, and others are some of these dark-money groups that have an oversized influence on public policy in Alaska. They are groups few have ever heard of — just like the RepresentUs group, which gets funding from the Tides Foundation.
In the Alaska Senate, the Republican majority gave over control to minority Democrats after the 2022 election, awarding them powerful committee chairmanships, moving their priority bills, and blocking legislation Democrats opposed.
Only three members of the Senate were excluded from that majority — Robb Myers of North Pole, Shelley Hughes of Mat-Su, and Mike Shower of Wasilla. Their minority is so small it doesn’t even qualify as a minority in technical terms. They are completely shut out of the process by the 85% majority, the largest in the country, according to Claman.
That’s something Giessel supports. She said when Claman was in the House and she was in the Senate, “there was a lot of cross-pollination,” and “there were bills that we worked together on.”
Giessel said people are so committed to this caucus “for the first time in a number of years.”
The last time there was a “bipartisan working group,” as it was called in the Senate, was in 2010, when all 10 Democrats and six Republicans created the caucus, led by Sen. Gary Stevens, Sen. Bert Stedman, Sen. Lyman Hoffman and the late Sen. Johnny Ellis.
Hoffman that year lauded the Bipartisan Working Group, saying it would pay back everything that had been borrowed out of the Constitutional Budget Reserve.
“This year, we hope to do something that would have seemed impossible ten years ago,” said, who was co-chairman of the Senate Finance Committee, as he is in 2024. “After twenty years of borrowing from it, we think we can fully repay the state’s constitutional savings account. Saving, not borrowing – this is a very tangible sign of our fiscal responsibility.”
Back then the balance of the fund was $9 billion. Today, the balance is $2.79 billion. The bipartisan promise was not exactly kept.
This year, Senators Stevens, Stedman, and Hoffman are part of the new bipartisan majority caucus, and Giessel, thrown out by her constituents for being too liberal in 2020, but returned to the Senate after ranked-choice voting came into play in 2022, quickly joined in what is a nine-Democrat, eight-Republican leadership group that is raiding Alaskans’ Permanent Fund dividends in order to balance the budget.
Giessel calls this a “balanced budget that actually had a surplus.”
According to InfluenceWatch.org, the RepresentUs group gets funding from the Atlantic Foundation, the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, Park Foundation, Tides Foundation, and Bohemian Foundation.
To get a sense of how RepresentUs aligns with leftist values, funder Atlantic Foundation also has made grants to the media group most associated with the leftist The Nation publication. The Park Foundation works to destroy natural gas as an energy source, and has made grants to Greenpeace and the pirate environmental group Sea Shepherd Conservation Society. Tides Foundation is best described as fake nonprofit that launders away the paper trail between its grants and the original donor.
RepresentUs has targeted Alaska, Colorado, New Jersey, Nevada, Oregon, Georgia, Minnesota, and Utah to expand and protect ranked-choice voting. It is also actively working to dismantle the Electoral College and replace it with a national popular vote, which would strip the lightly populated states like Alaska of their representation.
In Seattle, RepresentUs worked to advance and protect the use of “democracy vouchers,” which requires the city’s taxpayers to pay for political campaigns against their will. Since the new law passed in 2015, taxpayers in Seattle now must pay for the campaigns of people with whom they do not necessarily align. In 2023, taxpayers paid $2.4 million to 30 campaigns for city council.
Once a reliable vote for conservatives, Giessel now works to raise taxes on oil and gas companies, put unaffordable pension plans into place for public employees, and allow counselors in schools to refer children to “identity clinics” where they can get gender transition help, without telling their parents. She even is voting against strengthening the laws that protect the unborn.
