The Green Party of Alaska is not going along with the national Green Party in its nomination of the party’s standard-bearer Howie Hawkins for president.

Instead, the Alaska Green Party has voted for Jesse “The Body” Ventura for president and Cynthia McKinney for Vice President. Their names will appear on the Nov. 3 General Election ballot.

In a highly unusual but calculated move, Ventura is actually being drafted by the Alaska Green Party. The former governor of Minnesota. who lives half of the year on the beach in Mexico in a house that is “off the grid,” has not thrown his name in the hat for consideration.

McKinney is a Green Party member from Georgia who served in Congress from 1993-2003 as a Democrat, and who was at the heart of several political controversies.

Robert Shields, who chairs the Green Party of Alaska, said part of the thinking was to give Alaska Republicans someone other than President Donald Trump to vote for. He thinks that Ventura’s name will shake things up this political season.

“[Ventura] was an easy choice for independent Alaskans and he is clearly the most competent candidate. Drafting is a proven way to make radical changes to the system.”

Shields said that President Eisenhower was drafted for Republicans in the 1950s and the Green Party of Alaska is using that model.

Richard Idriss, who is in leadership at the People for Jesse campaign, said, “The People for Jesse largely moved on from the Green Party after their national convention to work toward an independent write-in campaign for Governor Ventura, but we had always recognized an internal schism within the state Green parties as a possible outcome of their primary. Tension around presidential nominee selection has led to these sorts of issues within both the Green and Libertarian parties before.”

Shields said he thinks Ventura will drain votes from Trump but not so much from Joe Biden.

“It gives Republicans an out, a quiet way to say they can’t be part of this anymore,” he said.

In 2016, the Green Party ticket led by Jill Stein received over 4,000 votes in Alaska.

Ventura was a professional wrestler before running for governor of Minnesota as a “Reform Party” candidate in 1998.

According to the Freedom From Religion Foundation, he strongly backed gay rights, abortion rights, funding for higher education, mass transit, property tax reform, and opening trade relations with Cuba. He was flamboyant and unpredictable.

He was the recipient in 1999 of Freedom from Religion Foundation’s Emperor Has No Clothes Award for his “plain speaking” against religion and for refusing to proclaim a state “Day of Prayer.” He vetoed a bill that would have required students to recite the Pledge of Allegiance in public schools.

McKinney ran for president under the Green Party in 2008. When she was in the U.S. House as a Democrat, she filed articles of impeachment against President George W. Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney. In 2006, she scuffled with Capitol Hill Police officer after they asked her to show her identification.

The Alaska Green Party polled its members and Ventura won 50 percent of the vote among several choices, which included Donald Trump and the national Green Party’s nominee Howie Hawkins:

Democrats persuaded primary winner Anita Thorne of Anchorage to drop out of her race for Senate Seat M, where Republican Sen. Josh Revak is running for reelection.

Thorne was strong enough to take on Revak, while a pretend independent candidate might have a shot in that moderate district.

Andy Holleman, of the Anchorage School Board, is that pseudo-nonpartisan who skipped the primary and went directly to the General Election ballot to give Revak a workout this fall. Appointed to the seat to fill in for the late Sen. Chris Birch, Revak must now convince his district to keep him.

In House District 28, South Anchorage Assembly member Suzanne LaFrance was subbed in for Democratic Primary winner Adam Lees, who was forced out. Although LaFrance never messed with the Primary, she’ll face James Kaufman in the General Election. Kaufman won the Republican primary against incumbent Jennifer Johnston. LaFrance is a member of the radical left majority running Anchorage.

District 14 Democrat primary winner Bruce Batten also quit today so that a pseudo-independent, Mike Risinger, has a chance to beat Republican Rep. Kelly Merrick.

Sen. Shelley Hughes in the Mat-Su District F seat won’t face Stephany Jeffers, who won the primary for the Democrats. Jeffers was swapped out by the party with Jim Cooper, the former mayor of Palmer. Hughes will be flanked on the right by Libertarian Gavin Christiansen.

 L is for leftovers in the District L race, where Jeff Landfield pulled out so that Democrat Roselynn Cacy can take on Sen. Natasha von Imhof. Although Von Imhof has money and incumbency on her side, Cacy is an experienced candidate who ran for this seat in 2016.

Republicans did not sub in candidates as the Democrats and their camouflage “independents” did. It’s a technique used by the Left in Alaska to try to gain advantage in a state that typically votes with Republicans, but is also proudly independent.

After taking heavy criticism from some of the more well-connected people in the Anchorage community, Mayor Ethan Berkowitz has backed down on the Ben Boeke Arena.

Athletes, from hockey teams to figure skaters, will get their ice back from the mayor’s intended use of the arena for housing vagrants. The Sullivan Arena is still being used for temporary shelter, as it has been for several months per the mayor’s orders, and the ice skating community is down two rinks out of nine for the more than 4,000 kids who play hockey or figure skate in Anchorage.

Just last week, Assembly member Forrest Dunbar was putting the screws to the hockey community, inferring that they should actively back the controversial “Homeless Hotel” idea or they might not get their arena back for skating at all. The mayor has been holding it in reserve for use as an emergency shelter.

A protest at the Loussac Library one week ago brought out a hundred or so from the hockey community, and they made such a ruckus outside the locked building where the Anchorage Assembly was holding a semi-secret meeting that finally the Assembly had to take a 20-minute break. The horn-honking went on until long after dark.

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi has blown the cover off the “independent” label for Alyse Galvin, who is running for Congress against Rep. Don Young.

In a new ad on Twitter, Pelosi crows about Galvin, saying the candidate is now part of the House Speaker’s “Red to Blue” club.

Whether Pelosi had done any polling in Alaska to see if this was a wise move is a closely guarded campaign secret.

But most polling of the Pelosi name in Alaska has revealed she is among the least popular names in politics.

Galvin has presented herself as an independent but ran on the Democrat Primary ballot with the full support and endorsement of the Alaska Democratic Party.

Last time she ran, in 2018, Galvin purposefully distanced herself from Pelosi, telling reporters she “will not be supporting House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) for speaker and instead wants ‘new leadership.'”

RECOUNT LIKELY IN COGHILL-MYER RACE

Monday is like Boxing Day for the Democrats — the day after Christmas when they box up leftovers and send them home with the servants, the day they choose to replace several of their weaker House and Senate candidates with ones they think have a better chance of winning against Republicans.

The old bait-and-switch is now standard operating procedure after the Democrats go through a fake primary exercise. It was battle-tested in 2014, when the Democrats forced Byron Mallott out of the gubernatorial race, and replaced him with Bill Walker. They put Mallott in the lieutenant governor’s slot, even though voters who picked the Democrat ballot had chosen him as their preferred candidate for governor.

At this point, candidates are getting pressure from party bosses to drop.

Now that Robert Myers has beat Sen. John Coghill in Senate Seat B Fairbanks, we can expect a filler-inner. Already Evan Eads is getting pressured to drop. He is a non-party candidate who skipped the primary, as did Marna Sanford, the assembly member considered the stronger of the two. The Democrats want Eads out so Sanford has a clear shot at Myers.

Politicos predict there will be big money put in that race. But there will likely be a recount of that Coghill-Myers campaign, per the request of the Coghill campaign.

As if to vocalize opposition for Ballot Measure 2, which would put “ranked-choice voting in place,” Sanford said having two candidates is the way to go.

“A third candidate is never what you would want. We all agreed on that,” she told the Anchorage Daily News. “It’s also really hard to determine who he’ll pull votes from, so for a clean race, for a clean prediction of where you stand, we want a two-person race. It just makes it way, way easier to pick up our voters one by one.”

This new fake Democrat Primary process gets more confusing since some liberals now run in the Democratic Primary even though they are not registered Democrats, and some of the Indi-Democrats skip the Primary and go to the General Election as “petition” candidates.

In the Mat-Su Valley, the swap out will be to take out Stephany Jeffers and add former Palmer mayor Jim Cooper for the Seat F Democrats’ slot. Jeffers has withdrawn officially.

That race has another candidate who skipped the Primary and will appear on the General Election ballot: Libertarian Gavin Christiansen.

For Seat N, where Roger Holland beat Sen. Cathy Giessel, AFL-CIO Boss Vince Beltrami is thought to be the substitution of choice, forcing out Carl Johnson. Beltrami is an experienced candidate and campaigner, but that race has a third candidate, Carolyn Clift, who has gone directly to the General Election ballot as a petition candidate.

Frequent political bridesmaid Jeff Landfield told the Porcaro Show last week that he plans to drop on Monday so the Democrat, Roselynn Cacy, has a better chance of beating Sen. Natasha Von Imhof, Seat L.

Landfield is a no-party candidate who is on the General Election ballot by petition.

In Sen. Josh Revak’s race, the Democrats will probably force out Anita Thorne, who won the Democrat Primary. Her political life expectancy is probably no more than 4:59 pm on Monday, so that petition candidate Andy Holleman, former head of the teacher’s union, (Anchorage Education Association, and current school board member, can take on Revak. Holleman is an experienced and well-funded candidate.

There are still some petition candidates who have not yet submitted their signatures, which must have been mailed by Aug. 18 and received no later than Sept. 2. Without properly filed documents, these candidates would be eliminated:

• Matthew Wasdyke, non-party candidate for District 2.
• Billy Fikes Jr., non-party candidate for District 8.
• Patricia Faye-Brazel, District 10, has run as a Democrat before.