In the battle to retain her District 15 (JBER-Muldoon) seat, Rep. Gabrielle LeDoux fell short in her 30-day fundraising report. Far short.
She raised just $15,000, and has had to loan her campaign $10,000 from her personal funds. The woman who is known as a fundraising Goliath has never had to do that before.
That personal loan gives her a cash advantage over Jake Sloan, who is running an unusual write-in campaign against the powerful House Rules Committee chair who has been identified as running a corrupt Primary campaign.
A State investigation is underway and one of LeDoux’s lead campaign operatives from California died of a stroke as soon as the veil came off of the voter fraud that was associated with LeDoux’s primary win. That death has complicated the investigation.
[Read: Criminal investigation now underway]
Write-In Jake Sloan raised nearly $19,000, which is 22 percent more than LeDoux raised since the primary. But has a hill to climb in that he is running a write-in campaign against a well-known incumbent and because LeDoux has spent $103,000 overall to get re-elected.
However, LeDoux spent most of it in the primary, which she lost on Election Day and which she won with the help of questionable absentee ballots. Her funds are somewhat depleted, which is why she needed to loan her campaign running money.
Sloan has to build name recognition, buy signs, and educate voters to write in his name and fill in the bubble. And he has less than a month to educate those voters.
But Sloan is encouraged by the fact that during the primary election, Rep. LeDoux lost with regular voters to Aaron Weaver, who never ran an actual campaign. LeDoux only won because of the enormous absentee ballot effort she ran with the help of the now-deceased Charlie Chang.
[Read Charlie Chang is dead, LeDoux says. But he voted.]
Many of those LeDoux votes turned out to be fraudulent, and others who voted for LeDoux may now regret their vote after learning about the possibly criminal capers involved to stack the ballot box for LeDoux. One of those fraudulent votes was from Mr. Chang, who was a resident of Fresno, Calif.
LeDoux has also lost her key campaign supporters and is now relying on the help of a former Alaska House legislative aide who has moved to Georgia but who her campaign flew back to Anchorage to manage LeDoux’s campaign. One hopes he has good life insurance — Thomas Brown. He used to work on her staff when she served as chair of the House Judiciary Committee. He’s now on her campaign payroll.
Sloan, on the other hand, is relying on his wife Leigh, and an ever-expanding list of volunteers who are going door-to-door with him.
Several legislators have walked the neighborhoods with Sloan, including Rep. Tammie Wilson of North Pole, who drove down for the occasion. Purple Heart recipient Passert Lee of the Hmong community, has also helped Sloan get introduced to the Hmong community, many of whom were victimized by the LeDoux campaign in the Primary.
On NextDoor.com, which is a neighborhood social media network that is widely used across Anchorage, a flurry of complaints has arisen over somebody putting LeDoux signs in people’s yards — signs that are clearly unwelcome, according to the multiple reports that have been posted.
