More than 100 supporters of U.S. House challenger Bill Hill turned up at a strip mall in Anchorage in early October for a meet-and-greet/crafting event.
The theme was make-your-own Bill Hill campaign swag. Some supporters stamped and decorated t-shirts, signs and caps. Others, like Kathryn Carovano of Anchorage, said they were just there to meet the independent candidate.
She said she gave to Hill early, in part because Ship Creek Group is managing his campaign and she likes other clients the firm has taken on. But, she said, she doesn’t see the same energy that she sees in the campaign of Jonathan Kreiss-Tompkins — a Democrat running for governor, also managed by Ship Creek.
“I don't feel like this campaign has been nearly as ambitious or out there, or you know, it just doesn't have the same momentum. And I don’t know why,” she said.
Hill is an outlier this year. Most polls of Alaska’s other statewide races show Democrats ahead of Republicans, who are tied in varying degrees to an increasingly unpopular president. But Hill, an independent endorsed by the Democratic Party, trails Republican Rep. Nick Begich. His supporters and at least one veteran consultant say avoiding the party brand may have cost him, and the campaign started building momentum late.
Hill mingled with the crowd, then took the mic and told his story. He said he grew up in a tiny village on Iliamna Lake, hauling wood and water and caring for a dog team. As a high school sophomore, he moved to Naknek, in the Bristol Bay region.
“I went from having one classmate in Kokhanock to having 12 in Naknek. It was the big city,” he said, to laughter.
He outlined his career in that school system and his initiative, as a school administrator, to meet the communities’ demand for more shop classes.
Carovano liked what she heard. But she said she expected the campaign to get more aggressive months ago. As early as March, she said, Kreiss-Tompkins was meeting with supporters and asking them to post about him on social media and to tell 15 of their friends about him. She said she tried to do the same for Hill.
“I brought probably 10 people here tonight,” she said. “But it's late for that.”
The Hill campaign is showing signs of increased activity. The candidate has raised about half as much money as Begich this year. But Hill took the fundraising lead in the latest quarterly financial reports. And two recent polls suggest he may be shrinking the gap with Begich. Hill supporters worry it’s too little too late.
The campaign has leaned into Hill’s identity as a fisherman so much that several attendees at his meet-and-greet said they hadn’t heard about his career as superintendent of the Bristol Bay School District. That lack of self-definition gave Begich an opportunity to portray his career as a failure.
“When he came into his tenure as a superintendent, his schools were at 74% math proficiency and 86% reading proficiency. After 10 years, those numbers dropped to 9% and 11% respectively,” Begich said during “Debate for the State” last week. “That's a poor record.”
Hill accused Begich of “cherry-picking” data and offered an indirect defense. He said Congress doesn’t have members who care about schools.
“They won't look at a school that went through a pandemic without good internet in their community, multiple children from foster homes in classrooms,” Hill said. “They will look at a school just through a single number, and that's wrong.”
After the debate, the campaign said the drop in test scores mirrored a statewide plunge after the state changed to a different testing method. The campaign also pointed out that he was named the 2023 “superintendent of the year.”
In a different year, the “independent” label might’ve been a real asset, Anchorage political consultant Jim Lottsfeldt said, but it hasn’t worked out that way.
“In this election cycle, where I think everything is a referendum on Trump, I think this was an excellent year to be a Democrat,” he said.
The Hill campaign is in the unusual position now of asserting that he’s not and has never been a Democrat while a political action committee spending millions to get him elected, Wheel Dog PAC, is running ads associating him with Democrats.
Meanwhile, both the campaign and Wheel Dog PAC are running negative ads on the only Democrat on the ballot: Eric Hafner, an inmate in a federal prison in New York.
Lottsfeldt said the campaign is late to deal with the obvious danger that Hafner’s party affiliation will draw votes away from Hill.
“There should have been a plan to contain or disqualify Hafner in the mind of the voter, and now they're sort of like, ‘Oh yeah, he's on the ballot too,’” Lottsfeldt said. “And now they're sort of scrambling to let everyone know that Hafner actually sits in a prison and has never set a single foot in Alaska ever.”
Lottsfeldt isn’t working on the U.S. House race, but he was a supporter of Democrat Matt Schultz, who reluctantly dropped out in July to clear a path for Hill. That episode was a tough one for Schultz fans like Laura Norton Cruz to get over. The West Anchorage social worker said she was mad at Ship Creek Group for running Schultz off the campaign trail but she likes Hill. She just wonders if there’s time for voter enthusiasm to build.
“I think probably the later start and having a more divided field early on meant that he couldn't coalesce as much support behind him and meet as many people,” she said. “So he's going in an uphill battle.”
At the end of the meet-and-greet in Anchorage, Hill’s campaign manager made a special plea to attendees to take yard signs and swag.
“Please post on your social media that you were here tonight,” Campaign Manager Kevin Groh said. “Take a selfie with your new signs, your stuff. Let people know you were here.”
And, he said, tell your friends to vote for Hill, not for the inmate who appears on the ballot as a Democrat.
