A Democrat Wins the Alaska Governor’s Race for the First Time Since 1998

Jonathan Kreiss-Tomkins, an energetic former state lawmaker who ran as a pragmatic coalition-builder, will be Alaska’s next governor, The Associated Press said. He will be the first Democrat elected to lead the state since 1998 and the youngest governor in state history.

Mr. Kreiss-Tomkins, 37, defeated Bernadette Wilson, a former Republican talk show host who owns a garbage-collection company.

In his victory declaration, Mr. Kreiss-Tomkins said that Alaskans had “voted for change.”

“Our administration will not waste a single day getting to work to solve problems for Alaska,” he added.

Mr. Kreiss-Tomkins is a former ultramarathoner and mountaineer from Sitka who dropped out of Yale to win his first legislative seat at age 23, and then spent a decade building bipartisan coalitions and sounding alarms about the state’s precarious finances.

He visited all 19 of Alaska’s boroughs during his campaign, making promises to rebuild public education and the state’s ferry system, lower the cost of housing and energy, and protect Alaskan fisheries. He also pledged to put Alaska’s finances on a more sustainable footing. That might mean he has to persuade the Legislature to find new revenue sources in an oil-rich state that has no personal income tax or statewide sales tax and has struggled in recent years to fund basic public services while also paying an annual dividend to residents from Alaska’s oil revenues.

“I am the pro-math candidate,” he said at one debate.

Mr. Kreiss-Tomkins won in a state where Democrats make up just 11 percent of the electorate with a campaign built to appeal to moderates and Republicans tired of legislative gridlock in the capital, Juneau. In the final stretch of the campaign, he touted endorsements from a string of Republicans and pledged to appoint a politically balanced transition team and cabinet. He has also promised to live in Juneau, a sore point among some Alaskans tired of governors who essentially commute to the capital from more accessible and urbanized Anchorage.