Alaska’s senior senator has done it again. On Tuesday, Lisa Murkowski — a Republican who has built her political identity over more than two decades in the Senate around defying her own party when she thinks Alaska requires it — endorsed a Democrat, Jonathan Kreiss-Tomkins, for governor of Alaska, passing over three Republican candidates including the one President Donald Trump traveled to Wasilla to endorse earlier this month. Her father, former Senator and Governor Frank Murkowski, joined two other former governors from across the political spectrum in backing the same Democrat. In a state where roughly 63 percent of registered voters decline to identify with either major party, the Murkowski family’s wager is that Alaskans will reward the crossing of party lines rather than punish it.
‘A view and a perspective that Alaska needs’
Murkowski announced her decision in an interview with KTUU-TV in Anchorage, telling reporter Rebecca Palsha: “JKT is a young Alaskan with a view and a perspective that I think Alaska needs right now.” In the statement released by the Kreiss-Tomkins campaign, she went further: “Our future is too important to be hamstrung by partisan divisions. I encourage Alaskans of every political stripe, whether Republicans, independents, or Democrats, to take a close look at Jonathan and Zac. Alaska needs leaders who will put our state first, and I’m proud to support them.” She framed the endorsement around governing rather than ideology — “We need a governor who’s going to work with the Legislature. That has got to happen for the delegation to be successful back in Washington, D.C.” — and she paired the praise with criticism of the outgoing Republican administration of Governor Mike Dunleavy, whom Kreiss-Tomkins is running to succeed. “I have found fault with the Dunleavy administration,” Murkowski said. “I think that they have left federal money on the table. I think in certain areas, where we have worked hard to put opportunities from the federal side, here, into the state, the state has failed with it.”
Frank Murkowski, who served in the Senate before winning the governorship in 2002 — and who famously appointed his daughter to his Senate seat on his way to Juneau — announced his support in an opinion article in the Anchorage Daily News alongside former Democratic Governor Tony Knowles and former independent Governor Bill Walker. “We come from different political backgrounds, have different perspectives and have not always agreed on issues facing our state,” the three former governors wrote. “But we share a deep commitment to Alaska and its future. That is why we are coming together to support Jonathan Kreiss-Tomkins for governor.”
The race she is reshaping
Kreiss-Tomkins, universally known in Alaska politics as “JKT,” represented Sitka and surrounding communities in the state House for a decade and has campaigned on bipartisan cooperation, pledging to include Republicans and independents in his administration if elected. “I’m honored to have Senator Murkowski’s support,” he said in a statement. “Alaskans deserve a government that can work through disagreements and make progress on the issues that matter.” The polling suggests the Democrat was already the man to beat before the endorsements landed. A September survey placed Kreiss-Tomkins at about 40 percent support, well ahead of a Republican field divided three ways: Bernadette Wilson at 20 percent, former Anchorage Mayor Dave Bronson at 15 percent and former state Attorney General Treg Taylor at 11 percent. NBC News’ Decision Desk rates the contest as leaning Democratic, and Kreiss-Tomkins has raised more campaign money than any of the three Republicans.
The Republican split is the central fact of the race. Dunleavy is term-limited, and his would-be successors have divided the conservative vote among Wilson, Bronson and Taylor. Trump has tried to consolidate the field behind Wilson, endorsing her at an October 13 rally in Wasilla and urging the others to step aside; they have not. It was into this fragmentation that Murkowski stepped — three days after Trump, according to Alaska News Source, called her “a disgrace to Alaska and our country.”
The Republican responses
The three Republican candidates reacted in three different registers, a small study in how Alaska Republicans handle their senior senator. Wilson, Trump’s endorsed candidate, went directly at Murkowski, saying the senator “abandoned Alaska values a long time ago,” noting that she had “actively campaigned against Senator Murkowski in 2010,” and pledging that as governor she would “actively work to unseat the worst ‘Republican’ senator in the country.” Wilson also attacked Kreiss-Tomkins with the nickname “Just Keep Taxing,” arguing that he supports an income tax and does not support a full Permanent Fund dividend. Kreiss-Tomkins has in fact proposed applying the corporate income tax consistently across major oil producers, taxing online sales, opening a discussion of broader-based revenue with the Legislature, and paying a dividend calibrated so as not to overdraw the Permanent Fund — positions his opponents describe as tax rises and his supporters describe as fiscal honesty. Taylor expressed disappointment with the endorsement and kept his fire on taxes and the dividend. Bronson, the former Anchorage mayor, took the mildest line of the three, emphasizing Murkowski’s right to endorse whomever she chooses.
A career built on crossing lines
None of this is new territory for Murkowski. In 2010 she lost the Republican primary and won the general election anyway as a write-in candidate — one of the rarest feats in modern Senate history. In 2022 she won re-election under Alaska’s ranked-choice system against a Trump-backed challenger, Kelly Tshibaka. She endorsed Democrat Mary Peltola for the U.S. House in both 2022 and 2024. And she remains, notably, capable of orthodoxy when she judges it right: in January she endorsed her fellow Republican Senator Dan Sullivan for re-election. She is not on the ballot herself this year; her seat is next contested in 2028.
What the endorsement sets up is a test, in the nation’s most independent-minded state, of whether a cross-party coalition can still outpoll a divided party. If Kreiss-Tomkins wins on November 3, he will do so with the backing of a Republican senator, two Republican-heritage former governors and a polling lead built partly on Republican fragmentation. If the Republicans consolidate in the final days, the race tightens. Either way, Lisa Murkowski has once again made herself impossible for her party to ignore — and, her critics in the GOP would add, impossible to discipline, since the voters of Alaska keep sending her back.
The system that makes it possible
Alaska’s electoral machinery is built for exactly this kind of politics. The state uses a single top-four primary followed by a ranked-choice general election, a system that rewards candidates who can assemble coalitions beyond their party base and punishes pure factionalism — and that Murkowski herself credits, implicitly, every time she survives. With about 63 percent of registered voters recorded as nonpartisan or undeclared as of early September, Alaska’s median voter is an independent, and its most successful politicians have behaved accordingly for a generation. Murkowski’s record fits the system: she declined to support Brett Kavanaugh’s confirmation to the Supreme Court, has broken with her party on signature votes, and yet retains sufficient standing with Republican voters to have been re-elected comfortably in 2022. Her endorsement of Kreiss-Tomkins — like her earlier endorsements of Peltola — is less a departure from her brand than its purest expression.
The final week will test whether the coalition holds. Kreiss-Tomkins leads a four-way race in which the three Republicans together command a majority of the polled vote but cannot agree on which of them should collect it; every day the Republican field stays divided is a day the Democrat’s plurality hardens. Wilson, armed with Trump’s endorsement and the pledge to campaign against Murkowski herself in 2028, is the Republican with the clearest path to consolidation — but Bronson and Taylor have shown no inclination to yield. For national Republicans, the Alaska governor’s race has become an unwelcome parable about divided fields and independent-minded senators. For Murkowski, it is something simpler: another election in which she has bet that Alaska comes first, and dared her party to do something about it.
Sources
USN reviewed reporting from multiple outlets for this story. Read more from Alaska News, Times Now News, The Hill (via CW7) and iHeart/WTAM.