[…] Alaskan Republican strategist Art Hackney, who last month signed on to Florida Senator Marco Rubio's presidential campaign, is happy to credit AFP with a long list of accomplishments outside the state, including in Iowa, North Carolina and Colorado. "In most of those states what they did worked but in Alaska it doesn't," he said. "In Alaska they had an impotent system." As evidence, he cites a commercial AFP ran during the Begich-Sullivan [Senate] race featuring a woman describing how Begich's positions hurt her family. "Senator Begich didn't listen. How can I ever trust him again?" she asked. But the woman decrying Begich turned out to be an actress from Maryland, and that didn't play well in Alaska, where it drew considerable media attention. "Alaskans know she is not Alaskan and never voted for Begich in the first place and it's a lie," Hackney said.

The Koch brothers' Americans for Prosperity is having a hard time extending its reach in purple Western states. It's not bothering with the deep red states, but in those that still have actual moderate Republicans left, they're doing their best to take over, with limited success at best. In Montana , they're pretty much in out-and-out war, and losing. They has some similar problems in Alaska, where conservatives view them as a potential problem.Hackney believes that the AFP ad might have actually helped Democrat Begich, because people were so pissed off at being lied to in the ad. The kinds of tactics the Kochs like to deploy just don't go over well in states like Montana and Alaska, which pride themselves on having a unique, and strong, identity. They also have not just a distrust, but genuine loathing, of outsider political groups. "Alaska is really good at having world-class oil, world-class mines, world-class fisheries," explains Dave Stieren, a conservative talk radio host in Anchorage, "and we're really good at growing our own, world-class crazy political movements." That's an understatement.