A pro-life Catholic, one of Dunleavy’s signature issues in the legislature was a failed amendment to the state constitution that would have allowed public-school funding to go to private and religious schools. As governor, his religious views have continued to influence his decisions. Last February, the Alaska Supreme Court blocked an effort to restrict the use of state Medicaid funds for abortions. Federal Medicaid funds can only be used for abortions that end pregnancies that are the result of rape or incest, or for those that threaten the life of the mother. States can make their own rules, however, and the legislature had wanted to limit the use of Medicaid funds to cases deemed “medically necessary.” One of the most controversial vetoes that Dunleavy issued last summer cut the Alaska Court System budget by $334,700, the amount the government paid for what he called “elective” abortions. Dunleavy said that the amount was chosen in direct response to the court’s abortion rulings.

The decision contributed to growing anger over Dunleavy’s conduct and the harshness of his budget cuts. On August 1st, a recall effort to remove him from the governor’s office was formally launched. Alaska’s recall law, while onerous, allows for the removal of government officials on certain grounds: lack of fitness, incompetence, neglect of duties, or corruption. Two legal justifications for the recall effort were Dunleavy’s abortion-related spending cut to the state’s court system and the Facebook campaign targeting state legislators. Dunleavy had also failed to appoint a judge within forty-five days to the Palmer Superior Court and mistakenly vetoed an additional eighteen million dollars in Medicaid funds.

The recall’s proponents were first required to gather signatures from ten per cent of the voters in the last general election, or 28,501 people, which would be submitted to the state’s director of elections for certification. Within a day of the certification launch, they had gathered more than ten thousand signatures, and by early September they had submitted nearly fifty thousand. (By contrast, it took a group of citizens trying to recall Governor Wally Hickel, in 1991, a year to gather twenty thousand signatures.) In early November, the director of elections, following the legal advice of the attorney general, Kevin Clarkson, a Dunleavy appointee, rejected the petition. Clarkson’s twenty-five-page opinion asserted that none of the four main justifications reached the statutory requirements: the failure to appoint a judge in Palmer was “merely procedural rather than substantive”; the Facebook campaign paid for by the governor was not proved to be partisan; the Medicaid-funding mistake (which, counting federal matching requirements, could have cost the state tens of millions of dollars more) was a “typographical error”; the abortion-related veto was a “dispute over policy” and within the governor’s constitutional rights.

Recall Dunleavy, the group leading the effort to remove the governor, appealed the decision in Alaska’s Superior Court, which ruled in January that the recall could proceed. “The recall process is fundamentally a political process,” the judge said. “This is not an issue for the judicial branch to decide whether the governor should stay in office or not.” The Department of Law, under Clarkson’s leadership, appealed the ruling to the Alaska Supreme Court. Craig Richards, a former Alaska Attorney General and a leader of the legal team for Stand Tall with Mike, a group formed to oppose the recall, told me, “This is completely political. They’re trying to basically overturn the election so that they can get the solution they want.”

Meda DeWitt, the chair of Recall Dunleavy. “I know we will win,” she said.

A significant number of the recall proponents, however, had been Dunleavy supporters, including Joe Usibelli, Sr., the chairman of Alaska’s largest coal-mining company. “From a company viewpoint, at the time, it sure seemed the right way to go,” he said, explaining his vote for Dunleavy. “But you’ve got to look at the bigger picture. Ideology is not a good way to set policy.” For Usibelli, who is one of Recall Dunleavy’s co-chairs, the movement to remove the governor is a chance to reclaim the state’s tradition of political independence. “A lot of people identify themselves simply as Alaskans,” he said. “The recall has brought together people you would never find in the same room, let alone agreeing on something.” For Dunleavy’s strongest supporters, such opposition within the governor’s own party amounts to an unforgivable act of betrayal. “There is a serious problem when some do not back the governor,” Carol Carman, a local Republican Party chair, wrote last year, in an e-mail to Dunleavy’s legislative allies. “Traitors need to be identified and replaced or the ship will sink.”

A few weeks after his election, Dunleavy named Donna Arduin, a consultant based in Florida, as the director of the Office of Management and Budget. Arduin is a partner in Arduin, Laffer & Moore Econometrics, a consulting firm that specializes in advising governors and legislators on state budgets. The firm’s other principals, Arthur Laffer and Stephen Moore, have devoted their careers to the economic theory that lowering taxes will inevitably lead to economic growth. Laffer is the father of supply-side economics, and he worked in the Administrations of Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan; Moore, the founder of the anti-tax advocacy group Club for Growth, was nearly nominated to the Federal Reserve Board by President Donald Trump, but Moore withdrew his name from consideration after he was widely criticized for his history of sexist remarks. In a profile in the Duke alumni magazine, Arduin, a self-described libertarian, said that she had “joined government to shrink it.” “I have no sympathy for people who want handouts from the government,” she said. The article noted that, when she saw a man on the street holding a sign that read “Anything helps—Smile—God Bless,” she said, under her breath, “Get a job.” (Arduin denied making the remark.)

For three decades, Arduin has been helping design austerity budgets for Republican governors. In 2003, she was the chief budget adviser for Jeb Bush, in Florida, when, as part of an effort to cut taxes, the state put fifty-five thousand low-income children on health-insurance waiting lists and eliminated funding for eyeglasses, hearing aids, and dentures for seniors. Later that year, Arduin began advising Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger, of California, who ultimately reopened two shuttered private prisons, one of which was owned by a spinoff of the GEO Group, which is now the largest prison corporation in the country. As the Los Angeles Times reported, ten days after Arduin left her job, in 2005, the spinoff company, Correctional Properties, named her as a trustee. (Arduin denied any involvement in Schwarzenegger’s decision.) While working for another Florida governor, Rick Scott, Arduin designed a budget that called for the elimination of nearly nine thousand state jobs and for “utilizing inmate labor to grow prison food, and competitively bidding health care contracts resulting in public prison costs that are as low as private prisons.” (Scott eventually tried, unsuccessfully, to privatize twenty-seven prisons in the state.)

A major victory for anti-labor advocates originated in the office of Arduin’s previous employer, Governor Bruce Rauner, of Illinois. In 2015, Rauner, a Republican, filed a federal lawsuit to bar AFSCME, a public-employee union, from requiring the payment of agency fees, which fund its nonpolitical activities, such as collective bargaining and grievance representation. A court ruled that Rauner did not have standing to file the suit, but three state employees, including Mark Janus, a child-support specialist, replaced him on the case. In 2018, the U.S. Supreme Court issued its decision in Janus v. AFSCME. The ruling—a break with forty years of precedent—allowed public-sector workers to opt out of paying agency fees, which, over time, is almost certain to erode the unions’ bargaining power. Though Arduin was not directly involved in the Janus case, she served as a senior fellow at the Illinois Policy Institute, a conservative think tank that helped fund the suit. (Mark Janus is now a senior fellow at the Institute.)