Must Read Alaska newsletter readers participating in a reader survey said they want business owner Bernadette Wilson to run for governor of Alaska.
Must Read Alaska ran three polls over three weeks. In the first survey, several leading names were posed as possible candidates for governor, including four Republicans and Mary Peltola as the Democrat. That survey showed Bernadette Wilson with an overwhelming lead over others, such as Commissioner Adam Crum, Attorney General Treg Taylor, and Lt. Gov. Nancy Dahlstrom.
The second survey posed for different Republicans and Mary Peltola as the Democrat. In this survey, Shelley Hughes, senator for Palmer and some of the Mat-Su Valley, smoked the competition, which included Peter Micciche, Natasha Von Imhof, and Edna DeVries.
For the third survey, we took the top four Republicans from the first two weeks and kept Peltola as the Democrat. In this one, it tightened between the leaders, with Wilson edging out Hughes by a couple of points.
The emergence of two conservative women may show that super-voting conservatives in Alaska want a governor who represents their values. With Wilson as the top vote-getter, we may be seeing an electorate is hungry for business leaders like Congressman Nick Begich and President Donald Trump.
Hughes and Wilson are friends, and neither has announced their intention to run for governor, although they have both been considering it. So have the other names offered in the two preliminary polls.
Not included in either poll were names like Click Bishop or Forrest Dunbar, both of whom have been mentioned as possible candidates. It’s unclear whether Sen. Lisa Murkowski will try for it, as her father did before her.
The poll is not scientific. The newsletter goes out to 33,000 Alaskans, and in the final poll, more than 800 of them took the survey. The readers of the newsletter are typically conservative and are super-voters and political activists. There are a reliable number of Democrat operatives who also read the newsletter, as they graze for political intelligence.
Must Read Alaska publishes a newsletter three times a week and runs the “Question of the Week” every Monday and Wednesday, with results published every Friday. Subscribe at this link.
