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  • David TottenSkylarkDuquesne@mas.to
    Oct 23, 2026, 10:55 PM

    (fine, I'll make a thread...)

    (1/4)
    Dan J Sullivan was with the Alaskan Independence Party (AIP) until it dissolved last year. He'd have been running anyway.

    There is a lot about the AIP that "outsiders" are absolutely going to get wrong, so here's a refresher.

    #election #alaska #uspol

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Replies

  • David TottenSkylarkDuquesne@mas.to
    Oct 23, 2026, 11:05 PM

    (2/4) The key word in their name is "Independence." Note that this does NOT say "independent." These are not, and never were, moderates or independents in any way. They were extremists.

    They advocated for decades for Alaska to retreat from statehood. They were pretty much the Alberta separatists, only without the foreign sponsorship. Weirdly, it's debatable how core the separatism was to them. It was never formally adopted in their party platform--although they consistently called for a referendum. when they finally had some power, their governor refused to support the referendum. On the other hand, some of their leaders and founders were not shy about calling for violent overthrow of the USA!

    By the time I encountered them in the 1990s, they were a right-wing/libertarian extremist party with all the platform planks one would expect.

    #election #uspol #alaska

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  • David TottenSkylarkDuquesne@mas.to
    Oct 23, 2026, 11:11 PM

    (3/4)
    At their height of power, the AIP managed to capture Alaska's Governor's Mansion, but that's really overstating it. Wally Hickel was always a fairly vanilla Republican--more moderate than some, more of a jerk than many--and it always seemed to me that he had co-opted the AIP to facilitate a right-flank attack on the party and, running for re-election in 1994, he switched back to the GOP.*

    I saw lots of examples of this when I was a journalist. Sour-grapes candidates who were behind in a primary switching to AIP to unfurl their RW flag. None of them talked about secession.

    *I met Wally a couple of times.

    #election #alaska #uspol

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  • David TottenSkylarkDuquesne@mas.to
    Oct 23, 2026, 11:23 PM

    (4/4)
    So, in that sense, Dan J is not doing anything out of character for an AIP'er. Acting as a spoiler for the orthodox GOP has been the AIP's role as long as I've known them! I think a few Democratic governors can thank AIP candidates for their wins, but that's absolutely on the fringies, not the Ds!*

    Today's articles suggest that Alaska's fairly recent adoption of ranked-choice voting** is what's changed, but they are undervaluing the other big change: MAGA.

    There's no need for a right flank party in Alaska since MAGA captured the GOP. What I think is funny here is that Dan J's big sin isn't that he isn't RW enough, it's that Dan S is Trump loyal!

    Help yourself to looking into some of the characters in the AIP history--ranging from colorful to terrifying.

    (/end)

    *please take note of this lesson on the consequences of purity tests.

    **I'm not a fan.

    #uspol #election #alaska

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