Alaskans First

Community & Governance

Alaska's Election Experiment: Ranked-Choice Voting, Open Primaries, and the National Gaze Turned North

Alaska's adoption of ranked-choice voting and open primaries has transformed the state into an unlikely laboratory for electoral reform, drawing researchers, political operatives, and reform advocates from across the country. The system has already produced outcomes that would have been impossible under traditional party-controlled primaries, reshaping how candidates campaign and how voters engage. Whether Alaska's model can—or should—travel south is now a serious question in electoral reform ci

Oct 12, 2026

Fiscal Policy

No Income Tax, No Free Lunch: The Hidden Costs of Alaska's Unconventional Fiscal Foundation

Alaska's celebrated status as one of only a handful of states with no income tax is frequently cited as a point of pride and a competitive advantage. But a closer examination of the state's revenue structure reveals a system that distributes its burdens and benefits in ways that rarely favor working Alaskans, rural communities, or the public services upon which they depend. The conversation about who actually pays—and who actually gains—in Alaska's fiscal arrangement is long overdue.

Oct 12, 2026

Community & Governance

Working From the Last Frontier: What the Remote Work Migration Means for Alaska's Economic Identity

A growing wave of remote workers, recruited by Lower-48 tech firms and startups, is quietly reshaping Alaska's workforce landscape. While advocates see an opportunity to reverse the state's long-standing professional drain, others warn that an influx of high-earning remote employees could deepen tensions with traditional Alaskan industries and communities. The question is no longer whether Alaska can attract outside talent—it is whether that talent will put down roots or simply pass through.

Oct 12, 2026

Fiscal Policy

Ground Zero: How Melting Permafrost Is Turning Alaska's Infrastructure Into a Fiscal Time Bomb

Across Alaska, roads are buckling, buildings are tilting, and utility lines are snapping—not from neglect, but from the ground itself giving way. As permafrost degradation accelerates, municipalities and state planners are confronting infrastructure repair bills that dwarf available budgets, forcing a reckoning over who pays and how priorities get set. The answers will define Alaska's fiscal landscape for a generation.

Oct 6, 2026

Fiscal Policy

Degrees to Departure: The Economic Toll of Alaska's Vanishing Professional Class

Alaska's universities are producing graduates who increasingly pack their diplomas and head south, drawn by salaries, career ladders, and professional networks that the state has yet to build. The consequences extend far beyond individual ambition—reaching into Alaska's tax base, its innovation capacity, and its long-term economic resilience. Understanding why they leave, and what it would take to keep them, may be among the most consequential policy questions the state faces this decade.

Oct 6, 2026

Fiscal Policy

Rooted in the North: How Alaska-Owned Businesses Hold Their Ground—and What the State Can Do to Help Them Keep It

Alaska-based businesses have long defied the odds, competing against Lower 48 corporations with deeper pockets and cheaper supply chains. Understanding what gives homegrown enterprises their edge—and how state policy can reinforce it—may be among the most consequential economic questions Alaska faces in the decade ahead.

Oct 5, 2026

Community & Governance

Shifting Ground, Shrinking Representation: How a Warming Alaska Is Redrawing the Democratic Map

As permafrost thaw accelerates across Alaska, entire communities are being displaced, roads are vanishing, and the legal boundaries that define where Alaskans live and vote are struggling to keep pace. The intersection of climate science and electoral law is producing questions that no redistricting manual has ever had to answer.

Oct 5, 2026

Fiscal Policy

Crumbling Beneath Our Feet: Who Bears the Cost When Alaska's Ground Gives Way

Across Alaska's municipalities, thawing permafrost is buckling roads, tilting buildings, and rupturing water lines—leaving local governments to absorb staggering costs that federal climate pledges have yet to meaningfully address. As the damage accelerates, a fundamental question of financial responsibility remains unanswered: who is actually obligated to pay for a crisis that no single community created? This investigation examines the widening gap between Washington's climate commitments and t

Oct 5, 2026

Community & Governance

Classrooms Without Teachers: The Quiet Collapse of Rural Alaska's Educational Foundation

Across Alaska's most remote school districts, a deepening shortage of qualified educators is leaving classrooms understaffed, students underserved, and entire communities facing an uncertain future. The crisis cuts especially hard in Indigenous villages, where schools serve not only as centers of learning but as anchors of cultural identity. Without urgent intervention, the consequences may prove irreversible.

Oct 5, 2026

Community & Governance

Bankrolled from Away: How Out-of-State Money Is Quietly Reshaping Alaska's Elections

National political action committees, dark money networks, and out-of-state donors are pouring unprecedented sums into Alaska's state and local races—often advancing agendas that have little to do with the concerns of everyday Alaskans. A closer look at recent campaign finance data reveals troubling transparency gaps that leave voters in the dark about who is really funding the candidates on their ballots.

Oct 4, 2026

Community & Governance

Disconnected by Design: How the Broadband Gap Is Draining Rural Alaska of Its Future

Across rural Alaska, inadequate internet infrastructure is doing far more than slowing download speeds — it is costing residents jobs, medical care, and the basic economic footing that sustains community life. As better-connected regions attract the businesses and young workers that Alaska's villages desperately need, state policymakers face mounting pressure to treat broadband not as a luxury, but as essential public infrastructure.

Oct 4, 2026

Community & Governance

Priced Out of Paradise: How Alaska's Housing Crisis Is Hollowing Out Its Essential Workforce

Across Alaska's cities and coveted communities, soaring housing costs are driving out the very workers who keep local schools, clinics, and public services running. A convergence of geographic constraints, construction barriers, and speculative investment has created conditions where earning a professional salary no longer guarantees the ability to live where you work. Understanding how this crisis unfolded—and what other high-cost frontier regions are doing about it—may determine whether Alaska

Oct 4, 2026

Community & Governance

Divided Waters: The Battle for Alaska's Salmon and the Future of Who Gets to Decide

Alaska's salmon fisheries have long been the economic and cultural backbone of communities stretching from the Kenai Peninsula to the Yukon-Kuskokwim Delta. But as stocks decline and competing interests collide, the question of who governs these waters — and for whom — has never been more urgent or more contested.

Oct 3, 2026

Community & Governance

Drilling Into Democracy: How Extractive Industries Are Rewriting Alaska's Environmental Playbook

Major oil and gas corporations are deploying millions of dollars in lobbying expenditures and political contributions to reshape Alaska's environmental regulatory framework, exploiting new terrain exposed by accelerating permafrost thaw. As legislative battles intensify in Juneau, a coalition of indigenous communities, conservation organizations, and ordinary Alaskans is pushing back against what they describe as a systematic dismantling of the state's environmental safeguards.

Oct 3, 2026

Community & Governance

Empty Waiting Rooms: How Alaska's Rural Health System Is Unraveling From the Inside Out

Across Alaska's most isolated communities, clinic doors are closing and medical professionals are leaving at a pace the state's health infrastructure cannot absorb. The compounding pressures of extreme cost of living, geographic isolation, and systemic underfunding have pushed rural healthcare to a breaking point—and the consequences are being measured in lives. What remains to be seen is whether the solutions being tested in a handful of determined communities can scale before it is too late.

Oct 2, 2026

Community & Governance

A Way of Life on Trial: The Mounting Threats to Alaska's Subsistence Heritage

For generations, subsistence hunting and fishing have formed the backbone of Alaskan life—feeding families, sustaining cultures, and defining what it means to belong to this land. Today, a convergence of federal jurisdictional disputes, shifting wildlife patterns, and outside political pressures is placing those traditions in serious jeopardy. What is lost if subsistence protections erode is not merely a legal privilege, but a civilization.

Oct 1, 2026

Community & Governance

Sinking Ground, Uncertain Futures: The Legal and Financial Reckoning Beneath Alaska's Feet

Across rural Alaska, thawing permafrost is doing more than warping roads and tilting homes — it is exposing deep gaps in property law, insurance coverage, and disaster policy that leave Alaskan landowners with few protections and even fewer options. As the ground beneath entire communities becomes unstable, state lawmakers and local officials are confronting a governance crisis that federal frameworks were never designed to address.

Oct 1, 2026

Fiscal Policy

Northern Exposure: The Tech Industry's Turn Toward Alaska and Whether Alaskans Will Share the Gains

Technology companies are beginning to cast their eyes northward, drawn by Alaska's unique geographic advantages, competitive tax environment, and expanding digital infrastructure. But as interest grows, a critical question remains: will the economic benefits of this emerging sector reach everyday Alaskans, or will the profits flow south to Outside corporations while local workers are left watching from the sidelines?

Sep 30, 2026

Community & Governance

The Thaw That Changes Everything: Alaska's Freshwater Future Is at Stake and the Clock Is Running

Alaska holds a significant share of the world's freshwater, but that abundance is under mounting pressure from glacial retreat, industrial extraction demands, and competing claims from mining interests, agricultural developers, and Indigenous communities whose cultures and subsistence practices depend on clean water access. As climate change accelerates these pressures, state water policy remains fragmented and underfunded — leaving Alaskans at risk of losing control over their most vital resour

Sep 30, 2026

Community & Governance

Losing a Generation: The Forces Pushing Young Alaskans South and What the State Must Do to Keep Them

Alaska is quietly bleeding its most vital resource—its young people. As economic pressures, limited career pathways, and quality-of-life concerns accelerate an exodus of working-age residents, state and local leaders face a defining question: what kind of future does Alaska want to build, and for whom?

Sep 30, 2026