So I was doing a wiki walk after reading this news article: 2 Russians who reached Alaska’s St. Lawrence Island were trying to avoid military service, Murkowski’s office says
From my wiki walk, I found out that in 1990, Alaska elected Wally Hickel as governor, breaking the 2 party system, as he was with Alaska Independence Party. This same Wally Hickel previously served as Alaska's governor from 1966-1969, and was supported Alaskan statehood in his earlier career.
What happened in the run-up to the 1990 election to make Alaska elect a pro-independence governor? What happened to make Wally Hickel change from being pro-statehood to pro-independence?
Wally Hickel, a man who spent his early political career fighting for Alaskan Statehood, was obviously not a pro-independence candidate, actively opposed the very minor amount of secessionist activism during his governorship, and frankly was not voted into office due to the niche support for Alaskan independence at all.
The quite bizarre results of the 1990 Alaskan gubernatorial election were a result of the Republican nomination of state senator Arliss Sturgulewski, a moderate politician who was pro-choice and anti-death penalty. Her relative moderation on these social issues lead to major uproar among conservatives in Alaska and elsewhere, and her original running mate, arch-conservative Jack Coghill, jumped ship to the Alaskan Independence Party in order to run with Hickel.
Hickel himself had become a perennial candidate in Alaska, and the Republican establishment already feared that he would run as an independent in 1990 and siphon the right-wing vote from the Republican ticket, which caused to White House Chief of Staff John Sununu to threaten to sabotage the development of a major natural gas pipeline Hickel was championing as head of Yukon Pacific. This threat backfired and only further solidified Hickel's desire to run for office, and the AIP was happy to serve as his vessel, replacing their original ticket with one lead by Hickel and Coghill. Hickel rebuked any notion that he was campaigning on Alaskan independence, and the issue itself remained nearly irrelevant in the race, though Hickel certainly leaned into an anti-federal government populism that continues to be popular among Alaskans.
While many feared that Hickel's conservative candidacy would harm the Republican ticket and lead to Democrat Tony Knowles winning the race, it was actually the lack of substantive policy differences between Knowles and Sturgulewski that allowed Hickel to win the race. The two major party candidates cannibalized moderate and woman voters, while Hickel squeezed by with a strong plurality of social and economic conservatives. Once in office, Hickel continuously disavowed secession and in the late days of his term switched back to being a Republican, although Coghill remained with the AIP and would take 13% of the vote as its candidate in the 1994 gubernatorial election.