Historic haul: JKT raises $1.85 million for governor’s race — with 80% coming from outside Alaska

By SUZANNE DOWNING

July 21, 2026 – Jonathan Kreiss-Tomkins may not be the best-known candidate running for governor of Alaska, but nobody should make the mistake of taking him lightly.

The former Democratic state representative from Sitka has assembled a fundraising operation unlike anything Alaska has seen from a candidate, especially one with relatively limited statewide name recognition and with such a thin resume. His campaign raised more than $1.84 million between early February and July 17, according to the 30-day report filed with the Alaska Public Offices Commission.

An Alaska Story analysis of all 4,079 contribution entries found that $1,481,523 — more than 80% of the campaign’s total income — came from donors listing addresses outside Alaska. He has spent more than $1.3 million of that and has $194,000 in debts to pay.

Only about $365,808, or just under 20%, came from Alaska addresses.

The campaign reported 1,787 out-of-state contribution entries representing 1,387 distinct donor names.

The geographic concentration is even more remarkable. California donors, mostly from the Bay Area, supplied $822,207 — nearly 45% of all the money raised by the campaign. New York City donors added $206,207, while Washington state supplied another $93,153.

Texas donors gave $77,740; Minnesota donors contributed $50,450; and donors in Washington, D.C., supplied $36,388.

Altogether, money arrived from nearly every state in the country.

But the center of gravity is unmistakable: California’s Bay Area and New York City, leftist strongholds.

The single largest donor listed in the report was Drake Thomas of Berkeley, California, a member of the technical staff at artificial intelligence company Anthropic. Thomas gave $100,000. Anthropic is the company at the center of a controversy after it  refused to remove certain safeguards on Claude (an artificial intelligence program) for military use, specifically regarding lethal autonomous weapons without human oversight and mass domestic surveillance of Americans.

Other major JKT contributors included Emma Jane Abele, a Berkeley nonprofit executive, who gave a combined $70,000; Anthropic employee Jan Leike of San Francisco, who gave $70,000; AI Futures Project researcher Eli Lifland of Berkeley, who gave $70,000; and Jane Street quantitative researcher Dylan Mavrides of New York, who gave $70,000.

Daniel Ziegler, a Berkeley machine-learning researcher with Anthropic, contributed $70,000.

Steven Bills, an Anthropic AI researcher in San Francisco, gave $50,000, while Evan Hubinger, an Anthropic research scientist living in Alameda, California, also gave $50,000.

Tao Lin of Berkeley, another Anthropic technical staff member, contributed $32,000.

The pattern shows that Kreiss-Tomkins has tapped into a deep network of artificial intelligence researchers, technology professionals, nonprofit executives and major philanthropic donors — a fundraising universe far removed from the traditional Alaska campaign circuit.

That network helps explain one of the great mysteries surrounding his candidacy: How did a former legislator from Sitka, who had been out of elected office since January 2023, immediately begin raising money at a pace that eclipsed better-known statewide candidates?

Kreiss-Tomkins, widely known as JKT, registered after the Feb. 1 cutoff for the APOC year-start reporting period and publicly launched his campaign on Feb. 4. That timing meant Alaskans would not see his full donor list until the 30-day report was due in July, just weeks before the Aug. 18 primary.

Within two weeks of entering the race, however, his campaign announced that it had already raised $750,000.

Million-dollar mystery: Sitka Democrat JKT surges past $1 million, but where’s the money coming from?

That was more than twice the amount raised at the time by fellow Democrat Tom Begich, who had been campaigning since the previous August. Begich had reported about $350,000 and said 92% of his contributions came from Alaskans.

Former Attorney General Treg Taylor reported roughly $880,000 in the year-start period, but about one-third came from Taylor himself. Former Revenue Commissioner Adam Crum reported approximately $350,000, much of it from himself and family members. Other candidates with much greater statewide name recognition raised only a fraction of Kreiss-Tomkins’ eventual total.

Kreiss-Tomkins raised nearly $1.85 million without financing the campaign himself and without beginning with the natural statewide donor base that typically comes from years of campaigning in Anchorage, Fairbanks, the Mat-Su or statewide office.

That may be historic in Alaska politics.

It is difficult to identify another Alaska gubernatorial candidate in state history with so little statewide name recognition who raised this much money this quickly, overwhelmingly from individual donors outside the state. Self-funded candidates have put millions into their own campaigns, and nationally known candidates have drawn substantial Outside support. Kreiss-Tomkins fits neither category.

What he does have is a network of millionaires, possibly with a few billionaires thrown in.

Before leaving the Legislature, Kreiss-Tomkins was a Yale University dropout who represented Sitka and several smaller Southeast Alaska communities for a decade. He later became involved in national policy and technology circles, including as a co-founder of Covid Act Now, the pandemic modeling organization that rose to prominence during the Covid era and helped create the Covid panic narrative.

Those connections appear to have opened doors to a donor class that most Alaska candidates could never reach.

The report does not show a typical grassroots Alaska campaign slowly collecting checks at community fundraisers. It shows a sophisticated national financial network capable of moving tens of thousands of dollars at a time into an Alaska governor’s race.

Kreiss-Tomkins remains less familiar to many voters than Tom Begich, Bernadette Wilson, Dave Bronson, Treg Taylor, Adam Crum, Click Bishop, or others in the crowded field.

But money buys advertising, staff, mailers, polling, travel and the ability to define a candidate before opponents can define him.

The fundraising report now answers the question The Alaska Story raised when Kreiss-Tomkins entered the race after the first reporting cutoff on Feb. 1: Who was financing this campaign?

The answer is that four out of every five dollars came from outside Alaska, with an extraordinary share flowing from California’s technology and philanthropic establishment.

JKT may be from Sitka, but the financial engine behind his campaign stretches from Berkeley and San Francisco to New York and Washington, D.C.

Alaska’s political class will be taking notice. Jonathan Kreiss-Tomkins is not running a small-town campaign. He is operating a nationally financed campaign for governor — and he has nearly $1.85 million in contributions to prove it.

JKT’s campaign filing is at this link: Alaska Public Offices Commission.

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