Walker faced a tough four years in office thanks to a budget crisis from declining oil revenue, and he was a top GOP target early in the 2018 cycle. The governor’s road to victory got even tougher when former Democratic Sen. Mark Begich entered the race, which cost Walker the chance to benefit from Democratic institutional support. Ultimately, Walker dropped out weeks before Election Day and endorsed Begich following Mallott’s resignation in the face of a sexual harassment scandal, but this late development wasn’t enough to stop Dunleavy from prevailing the following month.
Walker launched his comeback campaign arguing that, while he wasn’t able to solve the state’s budget woes, the state dramatically reduced its deficit during his tenure. He also declared that Dunleavy had done a poor job in his place, saying that Alaskans didn’t know “about how much more from the university is going to be cut, how much more can be cut from the marine highway system and how government services will continue to decline.”
Unlike in 2014, when Walker appealed to Democrats by enlisting Mallot (who died in 2020) as his candidate for lieutenant governor, his running mate this time is a fellow independent, former Department of Labor and Workforce Development head Heidi Drygas. Still, the state’s new top-four primary rules, which will pit four candidates on one instant-runoff ballot in the fall of next year, gives Walker a path to victory even if a notable Democrat runs.
It’s also still possible that Dunleavy could face the voters earlier than 2022. The website of the bipartisan group Recall Dunleavy, which has been trying to launch a recall campaign against the governor since 2019, includes a tracker that says it has collected about 58,000 signatures as of late April, though it has not provided an update since then.
Recall Dunleavy has until early June of next year to submit the 71,000 valid petitions needed to force a recall election; if Dunleavy is removed from office early, he would be succeeded by his fellow Republican, Lt. Gov. Kevin Meyer. We haven’t seen any polls this year, though, to indicate if the governor is vulnerable in either a recall race or the regular 2022 contest.
