First Anchorage Election Totals Have Dunbar Ahead By 114 Votes Out of 72,036 -UPDATE 3

UPDATE 3:  Friday May 14, 2021 - The Bronson lead continues to grow.  With 6,043 new votes reported today, Bronson now leads Dunbar by 1,116 votes - 489 more votes than yesterday.  

So Bronson must have gotten 3266 new votes and Dunbar must have gotten 2777.  So that would be 54% for Bronson and 46% for Dunbar this round.  

I suspect later analysis will show that Bronson had much more enthusiastic supporters - they were angry about how COVID restrictions affected their businesses and their sense of liberty. And many of them believe or pretend to believe that the presidential election was stolen.  Dunbar's supporters were split among three candidates and were mostly motivated by fear of Bronson winning - a fear they apparently didn't feel too strongly.  

I would guess that national GOP supporters did a better job of targeting their voters via social media and other forms of communications than Dunbar was able to do.  But that's just speculation.  

UPDATE 2:  Thursday May 13, 2021 - The tallies are following the pattern of the original election.  Each new report increases Bronson's lead.   It's now 627.  Of course, I exaggerate a bit since there have only been a total of three reports.  But it's not looking good.  Add your own favorite profanity.[

[UPDATE 1:  Wednesday May 12, 2021 - new numbers today put Bronson ahead by 278 votes. 

  

There we're 3,986 new votes counted.  (Today (76,022) minus yesterday (72.036).  In this batch Bronson would have received 2189  and Dunbar 1797 - Bronson needed 114 to catch up with Dunbar and then another 278 to get 392 votes ahead today.  

That means out of 72,036 votes reported yesterday, Dunbar got 50.08% and Bronson 49.9%.

But out of 3,986 votes counted since yesterday, Bronson got 55% and Dunbar got 45%.  That's quite a difference.  I don't know which votes were counted today.

But in the general election, Dunbar led the first two or three results, then Bronson went ahead and his lead kept increasing.  That's not a good sign.  

How many votes are left?  Not sure.  if we speculate about the same as came in today (I'll round up to 4000 to make it easier to calculate), Dunbar would need to get 55% of the votes just to break even with Bronson.  

The odds aren't good.  The only positive I foresee if Bronson wins is that the Assembly will fight him all the way.  But there's still a lot of damage he can do. ] 

People said the vote would be close, but I believed that Anchorage had moved further along than this, than half the voters voting for a pandemic denier, a virulent pro-lifer who has been equally opposed to LGBTQ rights.  

These are the results as of 8:15pm.  There haven't been any updates since then, so  that's probably it for tonight.  I'm guessing these are all the mail in ballots that arrived by yesterday or this morning.  Maybe people who voted in person before today.  So people who voted today in person or by mail are probably not counted.

There are more votes to come in during the next week - mail in votes that were post marked by today. Maybe people who voted in person today.  I'd like to think that the anti-masker crowd got all its voters out and the progressive folks just couldn't believe it could be this close.  But that's probably wishful thinking.  

Unless the first mail-in votes depart radically from the trend so far, it looks like we aren't going to know who our next mayor is for at least ten more days.  And if it stays this close, there will be an automatic recount.  

For the visually impaired whose devices can't read the image, Dunbar is ahead by 114 votes:

Dunbar   36,075

Bronson  35,961

72,144/236,777 - These numbers are listed as "Times Cast" which has never been an obvious descriptor.  It also says 30.47%.  I understand this to mean the number of votes over the number of registered voters.  If that's correct, then 69% of Anchorage voters did not vote.  (Well, we probably have a few thousand more votes coming in.)  

But it also raises the question of the 108 difference between this number (72,144) and the number of votes listed if you add Dunbar and Bronson's votes.  Are those write-ins?  There's a line that says "Unresolved Write-ins = 0".  I'm guessing they mean they've resolved all the write ins.  

Anchorage, I'm ashamed it's this close.  Ashamed that so many people voted for Bronson, ashamed for all the people who didn't vote.  I had thought people had learned from Trump and Dunleavy, but I am obviously wrong.  

Dave Bronson Cancels Appearance At Alaska Black Caucus Because Of "Last Minute Conflict"

 Attending the Alaska Black Caucus Sunday meeting.  They had confirmed RSVPs from both Mayoral candidates - Dave Bronson and Forrest Dunbar.  

But when the zoom meeting opened, Celeste notified us that Dave Bronson would not be at the meeting - "he had a conflict."   Later, explaining to those who got to the zoom meeting late and wondered where Bronson was, she said it was a "last minute conflict."

Here's Forrest Dunbar answering questions from people representing the Black, Alaska Natives, the Latinx, and the Asian-American communities.

So I went to Dave Bronson for Mayor Facebook page.  I was trying to find out how I could go to a meeting so that I could hear Dave Bronson.  A second thought was, where is he tonight, what was the conflict?   Here's his Upcoming Events page.  "No Upcoming Events."  It's hard to believe he's not campaigning and having events.  But there's nothing here to help us find where/how to hear what he stands for and to interact with him.  

I did double check on Dunbar's FB page.  Tonight's panel is on his main FB page and again on his Events page.  

However, before I posted this, I double-checked on Bronson's website.  He does tell us how to meet with him on his webpage.

I'd note, for those of you who do not keep track of local Anchorage affairs,  that these are the two diners that defied the initial lock down orders and stayed open in August 2020.  The court rejected their arguments.

Do I really want to enter a restaurant that doesn't care about its customers' health in order to meet Dave Bronson?  

Clearly, Bronson's message on COVID and other issues reflects his support of the former president of the US.  In a television ad for the general election he said "here in Anchorage a bunch of idiots are tearing up our city" with a picture of the Anchorage Assembly (city council) in the background.  

So was it just a weak moment when Bronson or someone at his campaign agreed to the Alaska Black Caucus mayoral forum?  Or did he know all along he wasn't going and thought this was a way to mess with the Black Caucus' weekly meeting?  

The professional thing to do is to decline in the first place.  

Bronson was the candidate with the most votes in the general election.  But there were more strong progressive candidates running for office than strong conservative (that's not even the right word for him) candidates.  My sense is that the votes are their for Dunbar, but if his coming in second scares people into voting, that's fine with me.

Incumbency Is Not Forever: The Difference Between A 'Nobody' And A Congressman Young Is Just Votes

The way labels affect how people treat each other has always fascinated me.  When I was a doctoral student and teaching my first graduate classes, I tried an experiment that was very revealing, though not completely successful at first.

The Experiment 

I was young and I looked younger.  I came to the first class and sat down just like all the other students.  I had arranged for someone to come in and say the instructor asked that the students divide into groups of four and talk about what they expected from a graduate class.  I went off with one of the groups as though I were an MPA student like everyone else.  Which I had been until just a year earlier.

When we got back into the class, there was a discussion led by the students.  My voice was not given any more deference than anyone else's and a few people vigorously disagreed with what I said.  When I tried to transition from the exercise to getting the class to move on, students resisted.  Finally, I went to the front of the class and declared I was the instructor.  Some people laughed.  Others told me to sit down. Slowly, my identification and status in people's heads changed.  I apologized for the deception, but said I couldn't think of a better way to make an important point.   How we treat people is based on all sorts of labels and social instructions we get.  I pointed out I had been a masters degree student not long ago and that I wasn't much different from any of them and that's how they treated me at the beginning of class.  But now that they learned I was the class instructor, they treated me differently and thought about me differently.  In reality, I was the same person.  But in their heads I was a different person. 

Most of the students got the point and took it in the spirit I intended: it was a learning experience about how we know things and treat people.  But one student, who refused to even give her name when I asked everyone to introduce themselves, went to the dean to complain.  She was sure that I would retaliate against her for things she said when she thought I was a student.  Fortunately, the dean knew me and he convinced her my intent was good and to stick with it.  At the end of the semester she invited the whole class to a party at her house.


I tell you this story because we think of people in special positions - teachers, police officers, doctors, elected officials - as somehow specially anointed.   And in their roles, they do have some special authority in certain areas and we are expected to give them deference consistent with those roles.  And they are expected to fill those roles with an appropriate level of dignity and respect. But the special stuff applies only when they are acting in those roles.  The rest of the time, they are just human beings like the rest of us.

Alaska's Congressional Race Between Don Young and Forrest Dunbar

I say all this because Alaska has a Congress Member who has been in that role since 1974.  He's been the Congressman from Alaska for the lifetime of both my kids.  But, he's just a human being, though it appears that he no longer sees a difference between his official role and his private self.  And he doesn't particularly stick to the level of decorum expected of a Congress Member.  In fact, he's a pretty fallible human being as he most recently demonstrated at Wasilla High School.

Yet despite his bizarre behavior over the years, Alaskans have continued to reelect him.

Partly, because he is a pretty smart guy, who has been able to pull himself together when it counted.  When he debated Ethan Berkowitz in the US House race in 2008, for example, he had facts at his finger tips, he was charming and funny, and he handily took the debate, much to many people's surprise.  He wasn't the bumbling clown some expected.

But I also think that voters are dazzled by the pixie dust that transforms incumbents into a special, superior species.  But they are just normal humans, with more power.

This year Young's opponent, Forrest Dunbar, is an extraordinary, ordinary human being.  But a lot of people looking at him might think, well, ok, but he's nobody. How can he transform into "Congressman?"  That just means they haven't done their homework and found out who he is.  After all, there was a time when Don Young was just as 'nobody.'

In fact, all of the next ten presidents of the United States are now alive and many, if not most, are living their lives as relative 'nobodies.'  You could probably set up lunch dates with most of them.  They are just people.  But at some point they will morph from just people into "The President."

 The 'nobody' who is challenging Don Young this year is just like you and me - some guy from Alaska.  And if he were elected, he'd stay a genuine guy, I'm sure.  He's like me in class as a student, before I became, in their eyes, the instructor.

Here's what the Alaska Public Media said about Dunbar:

He spent his pre-school years in the Yukon River town of Eagle, cutting his teeth on caribou while his father worked as a Fish and Game biologist.  After the Exxon Valdez oil spill, the family moved to Cordova, where Dunbar says they had running water for the first time. . . 

Dunbar spent summers working on a commercial fishing boat and was an exchange student in Japan. A high school teacher, Tim Walters, remembers him as determined.
“Forrest was intense. And he was serious,” Walters says.
He says it was obvious, even then, that Dunbar was going places.

“In a teacher’s career, there’s usually a handful of students that really kind of stand out, that ‘Some day,’ you say to yourself, ‘they’re going to be on the cover of Time magazine.’ And Forrest was one of those kids,” Walters says.

Dunbar went on to an East Coast education:  Undergrad at American University in Washington. Harvard for a Master’s in public policy, Yale for law school. He fought wildfires out of Fairbanks for a summer and served in the Peace Corps in Kazakhstan. He was an intern for then-Sen. Frank Murkowski in Washington. He worked for Guam’s delegate to Congress. He worked in the Alaska Office of Public Advocacy. Last year, he joined the Alaska National Guard, as an officer and an attorney — a JAG.

He's a pretty special 'nobody.'

People vote for Young for all their own special reasons.  But if anyone is thinking, "yeah but the other guy's nobody" well I'm writing this to say

1. Everyone is nobody until they suddenly become somebody - as I was just another student in my class until I became 'the instructor'
2. Don Young was nobody until he got elected
3. One day, a nobody will replace Don Young
4. Forrest Dunbar is one perfect candidate for Alaska's sole US House seat - he was raised in rural and small town Alaska, he was educated in some of the best universities in the US, he's got experience in Washington DC, and he's got international experience.
5. Dunbar is far, far better prepared to be a Congress member than Young was in 1973

Young has criticized Dunbar as immature.  I think he was referring to his being only being 29.  But I'd point out that Alexander the Great was 32 when he died and Jesus was 33.

Don Young's recent arrogance at Wasilla High School should convince people that he really needs to retire.  'But what's the alternative?" 

I'm here to assure folks that we have a very viable replacement who would change our lone Congress Member's office from an embarrassment to the state to one that will bring honor to Alaska.

It's all a matter of people getting their head around the idea of what makes a nobody a somebody.

Incumbency Is Not Forever

And that change can happen.  Here's an example from the LA Weekly Voter Guide:

A year ago, Lee Baca was considered a favorite to win re-election to a fifth term as sheriff. Historically, incumbent sheriffs have needed only to be able to fog up a mirror in order to win. And though Baca was beset by scandals in the county jails, it was an open question whether voters would care. How times change. After 18 sheriff’s officials were indicted last December, Baca was forced to resign.