Trump asked Alaska’s Republicans to pick one candidate. Three stayed in, and a 37-year-old Democrat won without needing a second count

Alaska has elected a Democratic governor for the first time in almost a quarter of a century.

Jonathan Kreiss-Tomkins, a former state representative from Sitka, won the 3 November election with 50.8 per cent of the vote once late ballots were counted. Bernadette Wilson, the Republican endorsed by President Donald Trump, finished on 28.1 per cent, ahead of former Anchorage mayor Dave Bronson on 13.6 per cent and former attorney-general Treg Taylor on 7.7 per cent. The margin over Wilson is 22.7 points.

Kreiss-Tomkins crossed the 50 per cent line late on Thursday Alaska time, with about 88 per cent of the vote counted. The race was called on Friday evening Alaska time, Saturday in Australia.

“Alaskans voted for change,” he said, describing a government that “works across party lines”.

How did one Democrat beat three Republicans?

Alaska runs an open primary in August, and the top four candidates, regardless of party, go through to a ranked-choice general election. In August, Kreiss-Tomkins and another Democrat, former state senator Tom Begich, both drew more votes than any Republican. Wilson came third, with less than half Begich’s total.

Begich then withdrew, leaving one Democrat on the November ballot against three Republicans. Trump had pushed for the Republicans to consolidate behind Wilson and criticised Bronson and Taylor for staying in. Together the two drew more than a fifth of the vote.

The ranked-choice system would have mattered if no one had reached a majority: the last-placed candidate is eliminated and those ballots move to their next choice, round by round. Kreiss-Tomkins made that unnecessary.

What does he want to do?

He campaigned on schools, lower energy costs and protecting Medicaid, the public health insurance program for people on low incomes. He backed the bipartisan coalitions that already run both houses of Alaska’s legislature, and his campaign said it drew 10,100 donors.

He replaces Republican Mike Dunleavy, who has governed since 2018 and cannot run again because of term limits. Dunleavy repeatedly fought the legislature over education funding and how to spend the state’s oil wealth. Alaska governors can veto individual lines in a budget, and lawmakers need a three-quarters vote to override them, so the shift in the governor’s office changes who holds the pen on the state’s spending.

Why does a single state race matter beyond Alaska?

Alaska last voted for a Democratic presidential candidate in 1964, and Trump carried it in each of his three campaigns. A Democrat winning a majority outright there, against a Trump-endorsed opponent, is one of the clearest signs of how far the ground moved on 3 November, when Democrats took control of both houses of Congress and won governorships in states that usually vote Republican.

It also lands in the middle of a fight over the voting system itself. Ballot Measure 2, which would repeal ranked-choice voting and the open primary, was trailing in the latest published counts, by about 52 to 48 per cent. Wilson is one of its sponsors.

Who controls Alaska’s Senate seat?

That is still open. Democrat Mary Peltola, a former congresswoman, has led Republican Dan Sullivan on first-choice votes in each update, by about a percentage point in the counts released earlier this week, but neither has reached 50 per cent. If that holds, the smaller candidates will be eliminated and their voters’ later preferences counted until one candidate has a majority. Sullivan’s campaign has said tens of thousands of ballots remain to be counted.