Democrat Jonathan Kreiss-Tomkins has won the race for governor of Alaska, after the Associated Press and NBC News projected him the winner on Friday evening. He will be the first Democrat elected governor of the state since 1998, ending a run of Republican control of the governor's office that stretches back more than two decades.

Source: Associated Press

The call came ten days after polls closed on November 3, once late-counted ballots pushed Kreiss-Tomkins over the majority line. In the Alaska Division of Elections' unofficial summary released Friday evening, with every precinct reporting, he held 139,293 first-choice votes, or 50.8 per cent. The Associated Press count later put him at 141,623 votes with about 97 per cent of ballots counted. His closest rival, Trump-endorsed Republican Bernadette Wilson, finished on 28.1 per cent, ahead of former Anchorage mayor Dave Bronson on 13.6 per cent, with former attorney-general Treg Taylor taking the remainder of the four-way vote.

A majority that made ranked-choice counting unnecessary

Alaska votes under a top-four open primary and ranked-choice general election: if no candidate wins a majority of first-choice votes, the last-placed candidate is eliminated and those ballots move to each voter's next choice. Kreiss-Tomkins crossed 50 per cent in the results the Division of Elections released on Thursday, Alaska Public Media reported, so no ranked-choice tabulation was ever needed in the governor's race. Republican leaders, including outgoing Governor Mike Dunleavy, had urged voters to rank all three Republicans in any order as the party's best route to keeping the seat; added together, the three Republicans' first-choice votes still fell roughly 5,000 short of Kreiss-Tomkins's own total.

Kreiss-Tomkins, 37, is a former Democratic state representative from Sitka who ran as a centrist and drew cross-party backing, including an endorsement from Republican U.S. Senator Lisa Murkowski, which Awaaz Punjab reported earlier in the count, and support reported from three former governors. Election trackers noted he would be the youngest governor in Alaska's history when he takes office.

From an early lead to a called race

The result confirms the direction of the count that this site has tracked since November 4, when Kreiss-Tomkins led the ranked-choice field in the first returns. Two of his three Republican opponents have since conceded, the Juneau Independent reported, and the remaining formality is the state's own certification process rather than any realistic path for the result to change.

Source: Juneau Independent

He replaces Mike Dunleavy, the Republican governor since 2018, who was barred by term limits from seeking a third straight term. Dunleavy won re-election in 2022 by more than 25 points, which underlines the scale of the shift: a state that returned its Republican governor by a landslide four years ago has now elected a Democrat outright, in the first round of counting, against three Republicans combined.

The Senate race Alaska is still waiting on

Alaska's U.S. Senate race remains uncalled. Democrat Mary Peltola, a former congresswoman, led Republican Senator Dan Sullivan by 10,412 votes in Friday night's release, on 49.84 per cent of first-choice votes to Sullivan's 46.09 per cent, with fewer than 12,000 ballots left to count and the Associated Press estimating about 96 per cent of ballots tallied. Peltola's campaign said on Friday night that there is, in its words, no mathematical path for Sullivan to win; that is the campaign's claim, and the AP has not yet projected a winner. Because neither candidate holds a majority, the race is expected to be settled by the ranked-choice tabulation scheduled for Wednesday, November 18.

The Senate contest has also drawn a certification fight. Governor Dunleavy has refused to commit to signing off on certification if Peltola wins, according to reporting on the race, and a federal judge threw out a Trump Justice Department suit that sought to block a narrow Peltola win, a decision the department is appealing; those accusations and counter-claims remain before the courts. Separately, Ballot Measure 2, which would have repealed ranked-choice voting and the open primary, has failed, so the system that decided this election stays in place for the next one.

For now, the transition begins with a governor-elect who won without needing a single transferred ballot, a Senate seat that will be decided by the ranked-choice count he avoided, and a Republican Party that split its vote three ways and could not close a 5,000-vote gap even on paper. Alaska's final certified numbers land on November 25.