Getting out the vote in Alaska presents unique challenges

“For most of our volunteers, though,” Kohli added, “that’s pretty standard.”

This is the quirky ground game in the Alaska Senate race, one of the most heated political battlegrounds in this midterm election cycle and the state that could tip the balance of power in the Senate. And for Republican Dan Sullivan and Sen. Mark Begich, the Democratic incumbent, cracking the turnout code could be the key to victory.

Getting voters to the polls in any competitive contest is vital, but in Alaska turnout is uniquely important and can present monumental challenges. The state’s population is so small that it warrants only one congressional district, and a swing of only few thousand votes can shift a race by many points. Meanwhile, the land mass of Alaska is so large — one-fifth the entire continental U.S. — that reaching those few voters can be a Herculean undertaking. Many towns and villages in Alaska are accessible only by air or sea.

With roughly 70 percent of the state’s population concentrated in and around Anchorage, some of the turnout operation in Alaska can look deceptively normal: a door-to-door, neighbor-to-neighbor effort, just like anywhere else. (Until a moose enters the scene, that is.)

On Friday afternoon, Will Friar knocked on doors on Bounty Drive in Anchorage, an average suburban-looking street, with Kohli and a Washington Examiner reporter in tow.

Friar, a longtime Alaskan who moved to the state in the ’70s, is a first-time campaign volunteer who walked into Sullivan’s campaign office earlier this year and asked how he could help. The campaign needed his hiking boots on the ground.

Now, armed with the RNC’s iPhone app, Friar feeds data back to the campaign, one house at a time, about the likelihood a given person will vote for Sullivan.

The app, with a clean interface not unlike Google Maps, charts out homes of low-propensity Republican voters or independents, indicating how many times each person has voted in the past four elections. It is being used not only in Alaska this year, but by GOP volunteers across the country.

Indeed, the get-out-the-vote operations by both parties have already been so aggressive in Alaska that some fatigued residents have affixed curt disclaimers to their doors.

“If you want to talk politics, go somewhere else!” a sign posted outside of one front door on Bounty Drive read.

On this day, however, a few people were willing to talk politics with Friar.

One man answered the door sporting a hat with the Tea Party motto, “Don’t Tread On Me.”

“My family will probably vote for Dan Sullivan,” he told Friar. The man explained further that he was unhappy with Begich because “he voted with Obama 97 percent of the time” — a common refrain from Republican attack ads.

A man at another home down the street echoed his neighbor’s sentiment. “I wouldn’t vote for Begich if you paid me,” he said. Friar marked the home accordingly on his app.

For Sullivan, winning over and turning out voters in Anchorage and its environs will be an important component of a successful election strategy. Begich is a former mayor of Anchorage, and Sullivan hopes to peel off some of that base of support.

For Begich, the turnout task at hand is more complex.

Facing an uphill climb in a year when he has been linked to a devastatingly unpopular president and his policies, Begich has mounted an unprecedented turnout operation in Alaska, with 16 regional field offices and approximately 60 field employees.

The focus has been to reach native Alaskan voters in the most rural, isolated areas of the state, where historically people often have not voted. His campaign points to this effort as a wild card that is not reflected in public polling, which has shown Begich trailing Sullivan by a few points since August.

“Just this last week, we knocked on 30,000 doors. You knocked on every single door in rural Alaska,” Begich told a shivering crowd of supporters Friday at Town Square Park in Anchorage. “No one has ever done that in the history of campaigning up here.”

Then Begich urged the crowd, sustained by free chili and coffee, to walk across the street to City Hall to vote early.

Perhaps as important, or more so, than Begich’s vast field operation are the 128 new early voting locations statewide — many in rural areas that will likely vote to Begich’s advantage. Representatives from the group Get Out The Native Vote touted this number this week at the Alaska Federation of Natives conference in Anchorage this week.

Sullivan, of course, has not conceded the rural vote to Begich. Although Sullivan’s field operation has not been as widespread, he has touted his family’s ties to the Alaska’s native communities: Sullivan’s wife, Julie Fate Sullivan, comes from a family of Athabaskan leaders.

Both Begich and Sullivan have traveled to the farthest reaches of the state to make their case.

“I go wherever there’s a body breathing,” Begich told the Washington Examiner.

At that moment, Thursday night, Begich was hosting a small meet and greet at an Anchorage coffee shop, where just a few people filtered in and out to say hello or take a photo. A PTSA meeting might have drawn a bigger crowd — but, for Begich, this was not about quantity. In Alaska, campaigning even at the highest levels is all about retail: meeting everyone, everywhere, wherever and however.

“I don’t care what they do in other states,” Begich said. “It’s nothing like this.”