Alex Gimarc: Matt Heilala for governor? Not this round

By ALEX GIMARC

March 4, 2026 – Matt Heilala has been making the rounds running for governor as the Republican nominee.  He is well funded, largely on his own dime, which I like a lot, as he believes in his own stuff so far.

He spent a half hour or so with Amy Demboski on her KENI show a few weeks ago.  All in all, it was a decent visit on a performative basis, but a complete disaster on a policy and prediction basis.

Pretty harsh conclusion, right?  I don’t think so. My two top level reactions to the visit were his failure to understand the foundations of our ongoing fiscal difficulty and his default into a Rodney King, “People, I just want to say, you know, can we all get along?” approach.

Both of these are remarkably naive, especially for a grown male trying to be a Republican nominee for anything.

Heilala proposes to work with Democrats on the budget and other issues, coming to agreement on things we can agree upon and going elsewhere when we can’t.  Nice words but ignoring reality.

The reason we can’t get from here to there is because democrats don’t want to go there, not unlike Iranians in nuclear weapons talks .  Worse, we have 8-10 Republicans elected to do Republican (conservative) things fully onboard with those democrat goals, thus the “Bipartisan” majorities in both the senate and the house.  Democrats hate every single thing Republicans want to do, demonstrating that on a daily basis with votes against the Permanent Fund dividend, votes for unaffordable defined benefit state pensions, and the entire pantheon of democrat social issues lunacy.

Difficult to do the “Can we all get along” routine and survive with a group of people who hate you. When do you plan to fight?  Do you even know what that means?

Second, Heilala’s wraps himself in fiscal responsibility by refusing to support the statutory PFD claiming we can’t afford it anymore.  Yet his website makes the following mind-blowing claim that:

“The economy has to be energized, and the State Budget balanced, before we can address issues of spending – because right now – Alaska can’t afford a ham sandwich.”

If you don’t address spending, how, pray tell can you balance any budget?  I would say, “You idiot,” but that would be redundant redundant.

Spending is the key to all of this. And if you don’t realize this, you aren’t nearly the responsible businessman you pretend to be. In case you hadn’t noticed, under this crowd, the PFD is already gone, while the majority targets the corpus of the Permanent Fund, actively obstructing the natural gas pipeline.

Yes, we can crank up the state economy to bring in much larger amounts of money to the state treasury.  Your problem is that your new BFFs among the Democrats and Republican who caucus with them can and will spend the increased cashflow much quicker than you can bring it in.

What do you propose to do about that?  Zip.  Zero.  Nada.  Crickets, even though the solution is relatively simple:  Put control of spending as close to whomever it benefits as humanly possible, something Dr. Matt doesn’t seem to understand either.

While Clueless was a moderately entertaining movie 30 years ago, it is hardly an appropriate or successful governing style in 2026.  Perhaps voters need to consider another choice.

Alex Gimarc lives in Anchorage since retiring from the military in 1997. His interests include science and technology, environment, energy, economics, military affairs, fishing and disabilities policies. His weekly column “Interesting Items” is a summary of news stories with substantive Alaska-themed topics. He was a small business owner and Information Technology professional.