Democratic incumbent, Jonathan Kreiss-Tomkins won the re-election for House District 35 beating out his Republican challenger, Steven Samuelson by a large margin.
The first time Sitka Democrat Jonathan Kreiss-Tomkins ran for State House, in 2012 at the tender age of 23, he squeaked through, beating Haines Republican Bill Thomas by just 32 votes. The result wasn’t known for weeks.
Not this time. On Tuesday night, Kreiss-Tomkins, now 25, won convincingly.
He beat 37-year-old Republican Steven Samuelson, of Petersburg, 60-percent to 40-percent, according to unofficial results from the state Division of Elections. And that means Alaska’s youngest lawmaker will be returning to Juneau.
Kreiss-Tomkins spoke to supporters on Tuesday night.
“I think it’s safe to say, at least for myself, that these margins are a lot bigger than we were anticipating,” Kreiss-Tomkins said. “Like, we were hoping to win. We were aspiring to win. But this is a, a pretty far margin, that hopefully will, sort of allow us to stabilize a little bit into the future. . .”
“Mandate” someone said behind him.
Kreiss-Tomkins will be taking that mandate into negotiations over what position he’ll hold in the legislature in his second term.
“You know, here we are celebrating a really exciting and rewarding outcome, and I get on the 6 AM flight to Anchorage tomorrow, and that begins two or three days of power jockeying to see who’s gonna be on what committee, what the caucuses are going to look like, if there’s going to be a coalition. And, it’s going to be very, very intense the next two days, trying to figure out what the legislative landscape is going to look like,” Kreiss-Tomkins said.
A landscape complicated by what might be a new governor, if Independent Bill Walker holds onto his lead.
Kreiss-Tomkins said he thinks it will be a more moderate legislature than the last one — and, for him, as a member of the Democratic minority, “a more hospitable climate.”
“My inner dork, my inner nerd, is really excited about the possibility of being able to try to make some of these ideas that we’re excited about reality in Alaska – make them law,” Kreiss-Tomkins said.
Steven Samuelson couldn’t be reached on Tuesday night. This was Samuelson’s third run for state House. He lost twice before to Peggy Wilson of Wrangell, in primaries.
The Division of Elections had not yet released official turnout numbers on Tuesday night, but about ten minutes before polls closed, Sitka’s two precincts reported that nearly 2,900 votes had been cast. That’s a much higher turnout than in the last midterm election, in 2010, when about 1800 voters turned out in Sitka. Turnout rivaled the 2012 presidential election, when about 3200 voters cast ballots.
Midterm elections usually see significantly lower turnout than when the president is on the ballot.
