Heikes Would Ship Illegal Alien Criminals to Guantanamo Bay To Be Tried and Killed

I really want to do a post on Ranked Choice Voting and how candidates seem to not trust voters to actually use RCV the way it was intended.  But I got a bit side-tracked by Gerald Heikes' 5th place finish.  But it turns out to fit right in to what I want to write about RCV.  So let's leave it here as background for that future post.  (Not too far in the future I hope.)

With less than 1% of votes yet to be counted Gerald Heikes is in 5th place in the US Senate race, 19 votes behind the 4th place candidate David Leslie.  Leslie is listed as a Democrat who listed no funding or campaigning, but was heavily promoted by an Outside conservative PAC.  The top four candidates will be on the general election ranked choice ballot. (Unless they withdraw, in which case the next highest vote getter moves up.)  I'd note, there appear to be about 900 votes left to count.  

The Alaska Beacon (August 12, 2026) said 

"Of Right For Alaska’s $1.2 million in spending through Aug. 7, nearly $574,000 went to oppose Sullivan with $410,000 backing Republican Gerald Heikes and nearly $219,000 to support Earl “Skip” Southworth of the Alaskan Party – the successor to the right-leaning Alaskan Independence Party. An Earl Southworth of Dutch Harbor, Alaska, donated to Democratic nominee Kamala Harris’ presidential campaign in 2024 and to Democratic state Sen. Forrest Dunbar a decade earlier, FEC records show. OpenSecrets reached out to Heikes and Southworth but did not immediately receive responses from either." (emphasis added)

Below is from a 2020 interview when Gerald Heikes was running for the US House against Don Young.  It's worth reading his positions

From KTVF, Fairbanks (includes video):

Photo from Ballot Ready

"Published: Aug. 7, 2020 at 4:10 PM AKDT

FAIRBANKS, Alaska (KTVF) -

Republican Gerald “Jer” Heikes is running to represent Alaska in the U.S. House of Representatives. This seat is currently occupied by Don Young.

He said he is running because what he sees in Congress “doesn’t fit the narrative for anybody being truthful and honest.”

“I see every politician up there grandstand[ing] for some reason, then they lie about anything and everything to get what they want. That’s something I cannot do, is be able to lie or compromise because I’m a born-again Christian, which makes me a perfect target for the left, and lying is not part of life. If you can’t be truthful about what you’re doing and be honest in your opinions and what you have to say, then the deception won’t work for you as a human being going through life.”

According to Heikes, if he gets to Washington, there are things on the floor of the House that he would love to talk about. “This started out as a godly nation. Now we’re an ungodly nation, and everybody’s pointing fingers and they’re backbiting like little children and squabbling and they’re putting on shows and antics because of the camera. But they’re actually hiding their true selves in the lies that they’re putting forth.”

Heikes said he’d like to make Alaska a place where children can grow up and be safe. “We can have laws that protect us from illegal aliens -- that if you’re an American citizen and you’re attacked, or something happens to you and your family because of an illegal alien, they are shipped out of the country to like Guantanamo Bay. We’ll have like a three-judge military panel try them. And if they caused harm enough or they murder an American citizen, then they’ll be immediately sentenced to death, taken out in the back of the courthouse and done in. And there should be a cremation facility there, because there’ll be a lot of people going there.”

He added, “If they find that they are not worthy of death, then they’re deported back to their home country; but if they are found back in America illegally, then they go back and face the death penalty again and from the same three-judge court.”

Heikes would also like to see a federal loan for road-building in Alaska. “We need to build roads in Alaska. We need to build roads from Fairbanks to Nome, to Bethel, to branch out like that and fill in the blanks,” he said, adding, “A lot of people outside don’t realize that half the stuff is either flown in or barged into Alaska, and we need a decent roadway system that spans the whole state.”

He said, “From the first of January to the first of May, 9,900,000 babies were aborted worldwide. And since the COVID thing came on, there’s 150,000 deaths due to former ailments that people have and things of that nature. We spent trillions of dollars, yet we murder, at an unprecedented rate, the unborn. That has to stop.”

Heikes is running against John Nelson and Don Young on the Republican Primary Ballot on August 18th."

Here's (a bit of) what the Anchorage Daily News said about Heikes in 2024:

"Gerald Heikes, a Palmer resident and perennial candidate for public office in Alaska, has no money to spend on building a campaign website or advertising his positions. But a Democrat-backed group is spending hundreds of thousands of dollars highlighting Heikes’ anti-abortion stance in a quest to bolster Democratic incumbent Rep. Mary Peltola’s chances at reelection."  (emphasis added)

I've got more to say about the Alaska US Senate race and ranked-choice voting strategies in general.  Meanwhile, let's get this up so people know who this candidate is.  He still has a chance to be on the November ballot."

Here's the vote count as of August 20, 2026 1pm: