By SUZANNE DOWNING
June 4, 2026 – The Alaska chapter of the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers has unintentionally provided one of the clearest illustrations yet of how bizarre Alaska’s jungle primary and ranked-choice voting system has become.
This week, IBEW Local 1547 announced it is endorsing both Democrat Tom Begich and Republican Click Bishop for governor.
Both men. At the same time. In the same race.
The union’s rationale is straightforward enough: Anchorage singer-songwriter Tom Begich is a longtime member of IBEW Local 1547. Fairbanks’ Click Bishop is a longtime member of Operating Engineers Local 302. Both are retired state senators. Both have long and friendly relationships with organized labor.
But step back for a moment and consider how strange this would have sounded under Alaska’s former election system.
A labor union would have endorsed its preferred Democrat in the Democratic primary and perhaps offered favorable comments about a Republican ally across the aisle. Yet, I can find no record of IBEW 1547 ever endorsing a Republican.
In the past, voters would sort things out in their respective party primaries, and each party would nominate one candidate for the general election. Instead, Alaska now has a jungle primary where every candidate appears on the same ballot and the top four advance.
That changes incentives dramatically.
Under ranked-choice voting, the goal is no longer simply to elect your preferred candidate. The goal is often to get multiple ideologically compatible candidates into the final four so their supporters can exchange second-choice votes later.
That’s why the IBEW endorsement is so revealing. The union is effectively telling its members: Pick either one. We like them both.
Tom Begich and Click Bishop may come from different political parties, but on many labor issues they occupy the same exact territory.
In a traditional election system, those similarities might be secondary to their party differences. In Alaska’s ranked-choice system, those similarities become a strategic advantage as we march toward ranking candidates in November.
The union’s press release encourages members to vote for whichever of the two “best fits their values and vision for Alaska,” while making clear that both candidates are acceptable outcomes.
That is not a bug of the system. It is a feature. The objective becomes maximizing the chances that at least one preferred candidate survives into the general election — and ideally both of them, which would lead to the union advising how to rank them on the ballot.
Once both reach the final four, ranked-choice dynamics take over, first and second-choice votes pile up. The endorsement offers a fascinating glimpse into how organizations are adapting to Alaska’s election rules.
The news release itself contained one amusing mistake. It encouraged members to vote in the “August 20” primary election. Alaska’s primary is actually August 18. Surely that will be fixed by noon today, but it’s fitting: Even seasoned political organizations seem confused by Alaska’s election system that drags on for weeks after Election Day.
They’re not alone in being confused. Many voters are, too. When a labor union endorses both a Democrat and a Republican for governor in the same primary and encourages members to choose either one, it is worth asking whether the system is simply producing new forms of four-dimensional chess.
The IBEW endorsement may not settle the debate, but it certainly illustrates it how the system is suited to organizations that can game the system.
Suzanne Downing is founder and editor of The Alaska Story and is a longtime Alaskan.
One thought on “Suzanne Downing: IBEW wants to queue up Tom Begich and Click Bishop for the general election”
Suzanne, you leave out an important component of ranked choice voting: the majority of Alaska voters don’t vote along the strict binary choice of political party. Instead, we value and vote based on other things, such as performance, character, experience, as well as each candidate’s position on issues that are individually important to us. I don’t see what is ‘complicated’ about that. When IBEW endorses two candidates, they are simply saying: “we can work with either one, and we prefer either of them over other candidates”.