By GARLAND KENNEDY
Sentinel Staff Writer
The state’s newly approved legislative redistricting map is unlikely to shift the political landscape around Southeast, Sen. Bert Stedman and Rep. Jonathan Kreiss-Tomkins agree.
Stedman, a Republican, and Kreiss-Tomkins, a Democrat, represent Sitka, and different combinations of other communities, in the Legislature.
“On the House side, I think the map is very fair, which I was excited about,” said Kreiss-Tomkins. “The choices were a very fair map or a gerrymandered map that favored Republicans, and we ended up with the fair map. I think it’s really good for democracy just to have a fair map that doesn’t tilt the scale in one direction or another.”
Geographically, Sitka’s House district has grown considerably, but much of the added area is sparsely populated. In the previous map, adopted after a state Supreme Court decision in 2013, House district 35-R included Sitka, Petersburg, Kake, Angoon, Hoonah and the northern half of Prince of Wales Island.
In the new map, Yakutat and Hydaburg have been added to the House district now referred to as 2-A. Whale Pass and Coffman Cove – small communities on the northeast edge of Prince of Wales Island – have been moved to House district, 1-A, where Ketchikan is the major community.
Unlike Kreiss-Tomkins’ House district, which centers on Sitka, Stedman’s Senate District A covers a wide swath of southern Southeast, including Sitka and Ketchikan. This will continue under the new electoral map, with the addition of Yakutat in future elections.
Like Kreiss-Tomkins, Stedman doesn’t expect the new map to alter elections too much in coastal Alaska. The biggest change coming up is the ranked choice system, that will start with the next election, he said.
As for his expanded Senate district, he said, “We picked up Yakutat, 660 people roughly... so that’s not a significant change at all, very, very minor, and Yakutat, being a Tlingit community, mainly fits into our Senate district very well. In fact, it fits in with us because we’re part of Southeast.”
In fact, he said, the coastal region from Southeast “all the way through Kodiak and out on the Chain” will have “no significant changes at all” from redistricting.
“There are some changes in the Mat-Su and Eagle River and Fairbanks, but they don’t affect us directly,” Stedman said. “And then the other big change is the ranked choice voting.”
He predicted that the new voting system – in which Alaskans will rank their top four candidates for each office on the ballot – could shift the state’s politics toward the center.
“Our district’s political complexion doesn’t change much at all, so the impact mostly will be up in the railbelt, and my guesstimate is that it will lean a little more toward the center of the political spectrum than to the extremes of the left or the right,” the senator said.
Stedman hoped that a shift toward the center could make political negotiations more doable.
“You get more done in a political environment working and negotiating with people in and around the center than you do in the far extremes, because you can’t do it by yourself,” Stedman said. “You have to compromise and it’s far easier to get compromise in and around the center.”
Kreiss-Tomkins thinks the geographical changes to his House district will not have a major impact, but on the state level control teeters between the parties.
He said his district overall “is very 50-50” between Democrats and Republicans.
“Both Whale Pass and Coffman Cove are very Republican communities, and Hydaburg especially so,” he said. “But Yakutat somewhat leans Democratic, so as a result the district will get a slight blue flavor, I guess you could say... It’s not a massive shift, because the total numbers we’re talking about are relatively small, but it’s not an insignificant thing.”
Kreiss-Tomkins won re-election by a 17-point margin in the 2020 election, with 5,682 votes against Republican Kenny Skaflestad’s 3,972. On the state Senate side, Stedman won re-election with 73 percent of the vote in Senate District R.
Stedman said today that he plans to run again in 2022. A Senate term is usually four years, but with the changes in his district he will have to run again after only two years, he noted.
Kreiss-Tomkins said that while the new map for House districts strikes him as fair, the map for Senate districts lacks the same balance.
“On the Senate side – as has been written about – quite a bit the Senate districts have been drawn in such a way in Eagle River and east Anchorage that is patently, obviously to help Republicans and when you look at the lines it’s pretty obvious what it’s doing,” he said.
The maps, formed using data from the 2020 Census, were adopted by the Alaska Redistricting Board on Nov. 10. Before approving their final proposal the board held public hearings throughout the state, emphasizing their constitutional mandate “to draw districts consisting of contiguous and compact territory containing as nearly as practicable relatively integrated socio-economic areas and a population as near as practicable to 18,335,” which represents the population of Alaska in the 2020 census divided by the number of House districts.
At least one member of the redistricting board, Nicole Borromeo, was not happy with the realignment of Senate districts in Eagle River and Anchorage, the Anchorage Daily News reported recently.
“It’s preposterous,” Borromeo told the Daily News. “(The) reach into south Muldoon was such an egregious minority vote dilution that the field of litigants is endless.”
Kreiss-Tomkins said some of the Senate districts in Southcentral could have been “more compact and more fair.”
“That will be litigated. It’s disappointing the Redistricting Board went that direction but I’m hoping it will be remedied,” he said.
He noted that given the geography and population of Southeast, gerrymandering would be a challenge.
“Southeast Alaska, given the distribution of population, it would have been really difficult to nefariously slice and dice the region in a way for political advantage,” he said. “So I’m not surprised we ended up with a fair map, but it’s nice to have it all said and done.”
It’s not uncommon for lawsuits to follow decisions by the Redistricting Board, and the Matanuska-Susitna Borough has already filed suit, claiming that it is under-represented in the new redistricting map.
