We are about five weeks from the Municipal Clerk (who works for the Assembly) mailing out ballots for the Anchorage Municipal Election in 2024. Voters will have until April 2 to return them for tabulation, so it is time to start considering candidates for mayor this year.
Mayor Dave Bronson completes his first term in office. He has nine challengers as of this writing. While I don’t want to discuss the entire field, I do want to mention a couple Democrats running this time around.
The two democrats with the best name recognition are former legislator Chris Tuck and former Assembly Member Suzanne LaFrance (who is technically independent). Both have strong union support. Both present well and are not publicly the typical frothing at the mouth Democrat we’ve come to know and love in recent years (Forrest Dunbar, Zack Fields, Chris Constant, you know who you are).
But any time we elect a seemingly moderate Democrat, awful things seem to happen. Our last Democrat mayor, Ethan Berkowitz, was one such example, needlessly locking down Anchorage for over a year, forcing mask mandates, social distancing, presiding over the wanton, senseless destruction of small businesses across town during that time, creating the current Homeless Industrial Complex, and spending as much money as humanly possible, all before resigning in disgrace over a sexual peccadillo that went public.