People vote their pocketbook, or so the old adage says. And certainly more so in this year of high inflation, painful gas prices at the pump and fears of a global recession. It’s understandable that Wrangell voters will think about their household finances when they select which candidates they support.
In Alaska, particularly in the past few years, that support has gone to the candidates that promote loudly, promise passionately and pledge sincerely that they will deliver the largest Permanent Fund dividend to voters.
OK, I get it. This year’s $3,200 state payout to individual Alaskans is welcome news for many, and no doubt was a factor when people cast ballots in last week’s primary election for governor.
I also understand that dividend politics is a bigger factor for many voters than the worrisome truth that dropping oil prices could leave the state budget short more than $1 billion in revenues for the next two years.
And probably the PFD overrules the reality that the state hasn’t raised its school funding formula in five years, while the Wrangell School District cut its budget, eliminated a couple of full-time positions and is counting on more community fundraising to help pay for student activities this year.
Still, I was surprised when I looked at returns from the Aug. 16 primary and saw that more than half of Wrangell voters filled in the circle to give Gov. Mike Dunleavy a second term. Wrangell was not alone in the House district that includes Ketchikan, Metlakatla and Prince of Wales Island. The governor was the leading vote-getter in every precinct in the district except for Saxman, which favored former Gov. Bill Walker.
Have Southern Southeast residents forgotten what Dunleavy did to the state ferry system in his first year in office? He cut one-third out of the Alaska Marine Highway System budget, a broadside that the ferries have never recovered from.
“Communities will have service gaps. There’s no doubt about that,” a Dunleavy-appointed Department of Transportation official said in 2019. Those gaps made it difficult for students to travel to events, people to send their vehicles out of town for repairs, families to take trips — no doubt about that.
Have voters forgotten the months the past two falls when there was no ferry service to Wrangell?
Cordova voters didn’t forget the almost eight months they went without ferry service in 2019-2020. Dunleavy placed third in the primary election in that community.
Have Wrangell residents forgotten that the governor vetoed funding in 2020 to restore a state Department of Fish and Game commercial fisheries position to the community?
Or that he vetoed funding in 2020 to restore a children’s services caseworker to town, even after the borough agreed to cover half the cost?
Yes, Dunleavy sort of delivered this year on his one overriding, enduring and repetitive campaign pledge of a larger dividend. Not because he did anything special — he just rode the coattails of record-high oil prices this year that added billions to the state treasury. Legislators appropriated more money for the PFD than anything else in the budget.
Yes, Walker, who could be the strongest challenger to Dunleavy’s reelection bid, is the governor who cut down the dividend to half-size in 2016, for which he is reviled across the state. But oil prices were pitifully low that year, and the year before, forcing the state to borrow almost $6 billion from savings to pay the bills. Unpopular as it was, reducing the dividend to $1,022 was a fiscally conservative move — living within our means.
It’s crucial in a democracy that people are free to vote however they want. I just wonder, do voters really want to reward a governor who decimated the ferry system, has done nothing to boost state funding for schools and vetoed key state jobs in Wrangell — until it was reelection time and then he supported everything.
Does the PFD rule the political world?
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