Mark Oppenheimer is the author of Wisenheimer, his memoir of competitive debating, and hosts the podcast Unorthodox.

On May 23, 2012, after finishing final exams at the end of his junior year at Yale, a 23-year-old named Jonathan Kreiss-Tomkins got two phone calls from people back home in Alaska. The first came from an erstwhile losing candidate for state Legislature; the second, from a longtime high school debate coach who remembered Kreiss-Tomkins as a standout from a rival school’s team. Neither one knew the other was calling, but both had the same idea: Kreiss-Tomkins should drop out of college.

Specifically, he should drop out of college, move home to Sitka and become a Democratic candidate for the state House of Representatives. They told him he had 10 days to decide.


Kreiss-Tomkins was dubious. There were plenty of reasons to say no. First, he had already planned out the year ahead: A relaxing summer in Sitka, with its 17 hours of sunlight, before starting the White House internship he’d lined up in the fall, then returning to Yale in the spring to finish his political science degree. Even if he could convince himself that giving all that up would be worth it, the race would be a steep uphill climb. Of the 40 members of Alaska’s Statehouse, only 16 were Democrats, several of whom caucused with the Republicans. Kreiss-Tomkins would have to campaign across a district made up of hundreds (if not thousands) of islands, strewn over an area the size of Connecticut. The incumbent Republican, Bill Thomas, chaired the House’s powerful Finance Committee and was widely seen as unbeatable, having eviscerated every opponent since his first election in 2004. In sum, it all added up to a sobering explanation for the phone calls: Alaska’s Democrats couldn’t find anyone else who would run, and turned their lonely eyes to a 23-year-old college student 2,900 miles away.

But why him?

By the time I had met Kreiss-Tomkins earlier that semester in a course I taught at Yale, he was already a campus semilegend, known for his serious hobbies (mountain climbing and ultramarathons) and singular appearance: bald, with a fringe of snowy blond hair and bright blue eyes—at once prematurely aged and precociously youthful, old man meets newborn.

What the folks back home knew—and his college friends didn’t—is that as a teenager, Kreiss-Tomkins had been, in his words, “autodidactically ferocious” about politics. While in high school, he’d memorized all 50 state attorneys general, all 100 U.S. senators, and a couple hundred members of the House of Representatives. At 14, his organizing prowess on Howard Dean’s presidential campaign earned coverage from NPR, The Washington Post and The New York Times Magazine. From his home on a “remote Alaskan island,” the Times Magazine reported a month before the 2004 Iowa caucuses, “Kreiss-Tomkins has become especially adept at finding pen pals and online friends, and he now uses that skill on behalf of the Dean campaign, recruiting supporters through the Internet and then sending lists of e-mail addresses to the campaign.”

On Nov. 19, 2012, Jonathan Kreiss-Tomkins poses next to a whiteboard at his Sitka home showing the unofficial results of the state House race. | AP Photo/Daily Sitka Sentinel/James Poulson

In college, feeling a bit of “been there, done that” syndrome, as he put it, he had dropped political organizing. But the phone calls from home, urging him to run for office stirred something inside. “I see politics in VORP-like terms,” he explains, using the baseball stat-nerd acronym for “value over replacement player.” Would he be better than a hypothetical average candidate recruited to run for the seat? The deadline approached. Finally, he made up his mind. On June 1, 2012, on his way to the Newark airport to fly home for the summer, he took a detour to the FedEx/Kinko’s in Times Square. “It was the last fax I ever sent,” he remembers. He got his paperwork in just under the wire, “at 8 o’clock Eastern time”—4 p.m. Alaska time. He was in.

Over the next five months, Kreiss-Tomkins campaigned doggedly. He went door to door, by foot, ferry and bush plane. He visited Alaska Native villages, arriving with only a backpack containing a change of clothes, a tube of Ritz crackers, some peanut butter and a stash of business cards.

Thomas, his opponent, hung back, slow to awake to the seriousness of the challenge. Meanwhile, Kreiss-Tomkins, sounding a populist note, hammered him on a vote Thomas had taken to cut taxes for the oil industry. “I framed my candidacy primarily as a referendum on that vote,” Kreiss-Tomkins says, “because I thought his vote on such an important issue directly conflicted with the public interest.”

On election night 2012, Kreiss-Tomkins, center, talks with his mother, Connie Kreiss, while looking up election results on his computer. His father, Floyd Tomkins, watches from the stairs. | AP Photo/Daily Sitka Sentinel/James Poulson

The election went down to the wire, then past it as absentee ballots arrived from Alaskans around the world—“from a military person in Bahrain, from somebody living abroad in Cambodia”—the closest contest of the season in Alaska and possibly the whole country. State Democrats watched with gnawed-down fingernails and high bar tabs. If Kreiss-Tomkins lost, the Alaska House Democrats would have just nine members, below the one-fourth of the assembly that is required to be considered an official caucus—at which point, according to the Legislature’s rules, they could be excluded from committees and even denied funds for hiring staff. “At one point, my race was dead-even tied,” says Kreiss-Tomkins. “The tabulation would change by the day. Up by two, down by seven. Then there was a recount.”

On December 3, 2012, Kreiss-Tomkins was declared the victor by 32 votes. And although he had no way to know it at the time, it was the beginning of something very unexpected.

In the five years since Kreiss-Tomkins’s upset victory, a most unusual thing has happened: Alaska—which elected Sarah Palin governor and has not supported a Democratic presidential candidate since Lyndon B. Johnson—has turned from red to a bluish hue of purple. Throughout the state, unknown progressives, like the kind Kreiss-Tomkins once was, have been winning. Before the elections of 2012, conservatives controlled all the major seats of power in Alaska: the governorship, both houses of the Legislature, and the mayoralty and city assembly of Anchorage, where 40 percent of the state’s 740,000 residents live; now, progressives and moderates control all of those offices but the state Senate, which has been gerrymandered beyond their control. More than half of the 40-member Alaska House of Representatives has been newly elected since 2012, most of them Democrats or independents; together with three moderate Republicans, they have remade the Democratic-independent caucus into a 22-18 majority.

Not all of these newcomer state legislators are typical progressives—“the NPR-listening liberals hunt, fish or camp here,” says Joelle Hall, political director of the Alaska AFL-CIO—but in defeating more conservative candidates, they accomplished something that didn’t happen anywhere else in November 2016: In a state that went for Trump by 15 points, they flipped a red legislative chamber to blue.

The skyline of downtown Anchorage, Alaska. | Ash Adams for Politico Magazine

Alaska remains a gun-loving and tax-averse state, defined by its military bases and love of hunting. It has two Republican senators and a Republican congressman. But the state is changing. In the past four years, Alaska has raised its minimum wage, legalized recreational marijuana and passed the strongest universal voter registration bill in the country. Governor Bill Walker—an ex-Republican who has the support of organized labor and most liberals—and the House majority coalition are publicly advocating the introduction of a statewide income tax, a move long thought impossible in Alaska’s notoriously libertarian political climate.

To be sure, this tectonic political shift would have been impossible without traditional Democratic players, like unions. But what’s been less noticed, even in Alaska, is the role played by millennials who, rather than spending years working their way up on the team, instead reinvented the playbook. Three men in particular—Kreiss-Tomkins, Forrest Dunbar and John-Henry Heckendorn—have pointed the way to reviving progressivism in the state by recruiting new, outsider candidates, teaching them how to win, and connecting them with fellow travelers. In bypassing traditional channels—which in Alaska, as everywhere else, tend to elevate predictable, uninspiring pols who have paid their dues—they’ve propelled a wave of untested candidates with little experience and even less party identity, but who believe in the economic populist agenda shared by a coalition of labor, environmentalists and the state’s large, politically engaged Alaska Native population.

Their emerging coalition has been a boon for the Democratic Party, of course, but what’s remarkable is how little of this transformation has depended on the party. To the extent that the Democratic Party has helped in its own revival—and in transforming Alaska from deep red to a blue-ish purple—it was in part by getting out of the way. As progressives across the country try to pry Republicans out of power, they have important lessons to learn from a state where they are wrongly thought to have no power at all.



***

There’s a refrain you’ll hear as you report about Alaska politics, especially if you’re an outsider: “You have to meet Forrest.” Last May, after I’d spend a few days in Juneau, I’d heard this advice often enough that I hopped a plane to Anchorage to meet the mythical Forrest Dunbar.

Dunbar, 33, grew up in the rural towns of Eagle and Cordova, then attended American University, Harvard’s Kennedy School and Yale Law. He spent a summer working for Michelle Rhee, the controversial former chancellor of Washington, D.C.’s public school system. He’s a captain in the Alaska Army National Guard—hence his sidewalls haircut—which checks an important box in this heavily pro-military state. In 2014, he gamely ran for Congress against Don Young, Alaska’s sole U.S. representative since 1973. He lost with 41 percent of the vote, but he lost well, as they say: He impressed people, made a name for himself. After losing, he lowered his electoral ambitions, focusing on Anchorage politics. Last November, Dunbar won a seat on the Anchorage Assembly, which in the past five years has bounced out almost every hard-line conservative: liberals and moderates now control nine of the 11 seats, and two members of their caucus are openly gay men. In that capacity, he now works closely with Mayor Ethan Berkowitz, a Harvard-educated Democrat elected in 2015.

On Election Day 2014, Forrest Dunbar, then a congressional candidate, greets a supporter at a downtown Anchorage restaurant. | AP Photo/Michael Dinneen

But for all Dunbar’s success in Anchorage, the main reason people wanted me to meet him was that he had played an important, behind-the-scenes role in flipping the Alaska House. Whenever I asked about the progressives’ winning streak, how they went from a 10-seat superminority in 2012 to a majority today, people pointed me to three men: Kreiss-Tomkins, Dunbar and a political consultant named John-Henry Heckendorn. According to the story I kept hearing, these three young progressives—at 33, Dunbar is five years older than the others—had found candidates who could win swing districts, coaxed them to run, and taught them how to win. All while persuading labor and Democratic Party elders to support their untested candidates, rather than more experienced pols who had paid their dues.

When I bluntly asked Dunbar if there was any truth to the narrative, he chuckled and demurred. “What did JKT tell you?” he asked after a very long pause (“JKT” is what everyone in Alaska politics calls Jonathan Kreiss-Tomkins). I said that I had not yet asked JKT about candidate recruitment.

Dunbar chuckled again, a bit nervously.

“What did John-Henry tell you?” he asked.

John-Henry, I said, would not talk on the record.

Dunbar considered this. “I will say that there are a number of young progressives doing this work in Alaska,” Dunbar said, “and we have been fortunate that the old-guard Democrats, and old-guard labor folks, have been quite supportive.”

This trio of like-minded, freakishly wonkish politicos came together randomly, although it was only a matter of time (everyone in Alaska meets eventually). Dunbar first met Kreiss-Tomkins in 2010, in New Haven, Connecticut, when they were both at Yale. “I saw a bald kid in cold weather biking down York Street in dolphin shorts,” recalls Dunbar, referring to the short-shorts preferred by runners, “and I was like, ‘Who the hell is that?’” A little bit later—Dunbar thinks it was 2013—he met Heckendorn, who came to Alaska in 2012 to work on a House campaign after graduating from Whitman College, in Walla Walla, Washington.

Anchorage Assemblyman Forrest Dunbar (left) and political consultant John-Henry Heckendorn (right) await results from a ballot initiative vote, April 5, 2016. | Marc Lester/Alaska Dispatch News

The three of them bonded over a shared vision of Alaska’s future: conservationist with a heightened voice for Alaska Natives and an economy sustained, but not dominated, by oil interests. In this vision, the state budget—which has, for years, been totally reliant on oil prices—would have more revenue sources, including an income tax, which would shelter public services from the fickleness of the market. And a diversified, higher-tech economy would be anchored by Anchorage, which like many American cities has experienced a renaissance, with the public art, bicycle lanes and well-used parks that one expects in a Seattle or Portland.

Soon after Kreiss-Tomkins’ upset election in 2012, he met Heckendorn, who convinced him and Dunbar that other conservative lawmakers were vulnerable. They agreed that the key to winning in those districts was candidate recruitment—and that the key to candidate recruitment was assuring potential candidates who lacked political experience that they’d have the help they needed to win.

As Heckendorn understood, state parties are skeletal operations, except in the few months before an election; they endorse, and lend help where they can, often by steering candidates toward trusted consultants, who are happy for the work. But they are actually poorly set up to find novice candidates and help them build momentum and win. So Heckendorn turned the process on its head. After working first under his own name, and beginning in January 2015 with the Ship Creek Group, his model was to act as a central repository of talent—a one-stop shop offering neophyte candidates help with everything from graphic design to fundraising, from advice on their door-knocking speeches to an experienced campaign treasurer.

Candidate recruitment always rests on a kind of faith: that the best people are out there, if only you look hard enough. Heckendorn, Dunbar and Kreiss-Tomkins spent hundreds of hours looking for candidates in vulnerable districts, making phone calls to local players, seeing who had good word of mouth. They didn’t ask who would run—a question that largely yields candidates who have run, and lost, before—but who should. When they reached potential candidates, they often steered them to Ship Creek—as a startup, it needed clients, and so candidate recruitment, in the words of the AFL-CIO’s Hall, “was also job creation.” And by making campaigning seem if not easy, then at least possible, and by promising good advice and support, they made it difficult for would-be clients to say no.

Several years ago, Heckendorn approached Hall to see if labor might be a willing partner in a new, expansive vision of candidate recruitment. Alaska has the third-highest union membership in the country, after Hawaii and New York, so labor-endorsed candidates get cash and manpower that can make the difference in close races. Immediately, Hall was game. “The Democratic Party does what it always does,” she said. “They promote from within—people working hard, doing community councils, a meritocracy. But that is harder and harder to do and win.” And she was impressed by another idea he had: running independents.

John-Henry Heckendorn, founder of Ship Creek, understood that state parties are skeletal operations—and that a strong consulting group could help fill that void. | Marc Lester/Alaska Dispatch News

In a state where 26 percent of voters are registered Republicans and only 15 percent are Democrats, there were districts where a progressive could win, but not if he had a “D” next to his name. Hall got organized labor to work with Ship Creek. “We chose districts where people could run as an independent,” Hall says. “And then we were able to keep the Democrat out of the race. Because in a three-way race, the Republican wins.”

As Hall notes, it’s not only about avoiding the “D” in name, but in style. The state’s pro-choice, pro-gun, pro-oil ways call for candidates who’d map oddly onto political landscapes elsewhere, and its very strict campaign finance laws limit the power of incumbency. You have to be comfortable with guns, hunting and fishing—that goes without saying. It also helps not to be a carpetbagger: you don’t have to be a fourth-generation Alaskan born in a log cabin, but at the very least you have to have proven your small-town, backwoods, Wild West bona fides.

Which is how the Statehouse’s 22-member majority coalition came to include the manager of a dog-sled race, a bar owner and former jazz drummer, and a beloved high-school teacher who’d written college recommendations for probably hundreds of his potential constituents: People would rather vote for their bud than for that annoying guy in a suit who’s run twice and lost.



***

Zach Fansler is a part-time lawyer, full-time math teacher and seasonal manager of the Kuskokwim 300 dog-sled race in Bethel, a far-western town across the sea from Russia. After graduating from college in 2001, Fansler moved to Alaska with the Jesuit Volunteer Corps; he has the good-guy air of the frat bro you trust to protect you from other frat bros.

On May 31, 2016, Fansler got a phone call from an Anchorage lawyer he’d never met—one Forrest Dunbar. “I just presumed he was calling because he wanted me to, like, show him around,” says Fansler, 38. On the phone, Dunbar eventually mentioned he was looking for somebody to oppose Fansler’s state rep, a Democrat-in-name-only who caucused with Republicans. The filing deadline was the next day.

“And I’m not always the smartest guy,” says Fansler. “I’m thinking he wants me to give him some names, you know what I mean? Eventually he’s like, ‘No, I’m actually calling to gauge your interest in running.’” The filing deadline was the next day.

“I’d just kinda bought a house, and I was hoping to work on the house, and get, like, lazy,” Fansler says. “I had big summer plans, and it did not necessarily include running a full-scale campaign. And, you know, I had no idea about fundraising or anything like that.”

Dunbar explained that other Democrats would help out by raising money and teaching him whatever he needed to learn. And if he still needed convincing, he should, Dunbar told him, call John-Henry Heckendorn. Which Fansler did.

“We talked for maybe two hours while I kinda walked around the small boat harbor,” Fansler said. By the time Heckendorn explained that he could give Fansler a treasurer, an ad strategy, a graphic designer and filmmaker, and teach him which doors to knock on and what to say, Fansler was close to saying yes. After walking around all night—or more precisely, all twilight, since Bethel doesn’t get dark in the month leading up to the summer solstice—he called his parents at three in the morning (7 a.m. in central Pennsylvania) for some advice. They weren’t much help—“I talked to my mom, and she said she’d support me either way”—but later that day, he switched his party registration from unaffiliated to Democrat and filed his papers to run, just ahead of the cutoff.

That same day, some 400 miles away, Jason Grenn, a 35-year-old lifelong Republican, fourth-generation Alaskan and great-grandson of a fur trapper, received several panicked calls at the Anchorage nonprofit that he ran. One was from Heckendorn. Another was from Kreiss-Tomkins, by now a two-term veteran. Only one Democrat had filed—a very weak one—and they told Grenn, who had been helping them look for a suitable opponent to take on a hard-line Republican incumbent, that he was their best bet—and they hoped he would drop his party affiliation and run as an independent. They’d make sure no new Democrats entered the race against him. The filing deadline was 5 o’clock.

Grenn drove to the Division of Elections, sat in his car, called his wife, drove around some more. If he ran and won, he’d have to quit his job and would lose half his annual income; his wife, whom he’d met at a Christian college in Idaho, would be a single parent to their three children for about a third of every year. But Kreiss-Tomkins spoke his language. “I called JKT about an hour before the deadline,” Grenn says. “I respected his insight and perspective for two reasons: Here was a guy with a few legislative sessions under his belt, and he believed in me even though we hadn't met in person. And two, I saw him as another young person willing to sacrifice something—his 20s, personal life, etc.—to make the state better during perhaps the most difficult time in Alaska's history. He also assured me he would do whatever it took to make sure I had the support—personal connections, funding, etc.—to run a campaign that would have a good chance of being successful.” At about 4:30 p.m., he filed.

On Election Day 2016, Grenn and Fansler won by 186 votes and 315 votes, respectively. Fansler is quick to note that, all politics being local, he could not have won without a broad base of unpaid and low-paid volunteers, friends and neighbors who were not professional pols: “A lot of my help was locally based,” he says. But his campaign was unthinkable without Ship Creek.

Clockwise from top right: State Representative Ivy Sponholtz (D-Anchorage) on the parkstrip in downtown Anchorage; Rep. Jason Grenn (I-Anchorage) has a morning coffee meeting with constituents Brian Jackson and Adam Legg at Kaladi Brothers Coffee in Anchorage; Rep. Adam Wool (D-Fairbanks) at his desk in the Capitol Building in Juneau; Rep. Zach Fansler (D-Bethel). | Ash Adams for Politico Magazine; Kate Wool; Marc Lester/Alaska Dispatch News

When Fansler and Grenn got to the Capitol, they met Adam Wool, a state representative from Fairbanks. A bald and burly jazz drummer, he used to run Hot Licks, a local ice cream joint, and now owns the Blue Loon, a music venue and movie theater locally famous for having brought rapper Snoop Dogg to Alaska. Despite that esoteric background, Wool had something in common with the two freshmen: One day in spring 2014, he heard his phone ring. On the line was Heckendorn, who wanted Wool to run for office. Wool, who has two young daughters, had no interest in politics, and had never heard of Heckendorn. But Heckendorn was persuasive. That November, Wool defeated a Republican incumbent by 342 votes.

State Representatives Fansler, Grenn and Wool all hired Heckendorn or, later, his Ship Creek firm, either to manage or help with their campaigns, as did other members of their new majority coalition elected in 2016, like Ivy Spohnholz and Dean Westlake (who recently resigned). In the Anchorage Assembly races last April—the city’s municipal elections occur in spring every other year—Ship Creek went a perfect four for four in managing candidates’ campaigns.

Afterward, Charles Wohlforth, a columnist for the Alaska Dispatch News, tried to figure out the firm’s success. Campaigns “traditionally have bought services à la carte,” he wrote, “with different professionals producing media, buying media, providing strategy and handling the money, and an energetic young person to manage it all. Lucky candidates would find a manager who was hard-working and could quickly learn the necessary skills. Every campaign re-invented the structure every time.” But Ship Creek offered a campaign-in-a-box. Paula DeLaiarro, one of the firm’s small handful of employees, was the campaign treasurer for four victorious state reps in 2016, all of them now in the majority coalition.

It may not sound like much, but it’s hard to overstate how time-saving and comforting it can be to have an insta-treasurer, an expert who will make sure that all your financial filings are kosher—and does so while sitting in the same room as your graphic designer and campaign manager.

“The thing about these three guys getting together,” says Joelle Hall of JKT, Heckendorn and Dunbar, “[is] they understood that the party is limited in how they can help a candidate.” Most state parties—Democrat or Republican—are sclerotic and dutiful, and little help to local candidates. At the national level, parties are more professionalized, with competent strategic thinkers on staff, but at the state level, especially in small states, good consultants are rare.

“They did such a good job,” Hall says of Ship Creek. “They figured out something that is totally franchisable, and could be replicated throughout the entire country.” She concedes that the men themselves, and their tight alliance, might be one-of-a-kind: “JKT and Forrest and John-Henry are very close,” she said. “JKT is a big thinker” while Dunbar is, she said, “Alaska-famous”—in part because of his Gump-ian slogan from his failed congressional campaign: “Run, Forrest, Run.” She predicts that “he will be a legend in Alaska politics,” but says there is a brilliant simplicity in the way they made it possible for other, less legend-making candidates to run.

And operatives in the rest of the country are slowly taking notice. Among them is Nick Troiano, executive director of the Centrist Project, an effort to seed a movement of pragmatic, non-ideological candidates at the state and federal levels. He believes that Alaska can be the template for other closely divided states, like Colorado. “By combining a smart political strategy with professional tactical support, [John-Henry and Ship Creek] have accomplished what few have been able to outside of both parties: prove it’s possible to win,” Troiano tells POLITICO Magazine.

But as Alaska’s insurgent Democratic-independent coalition is finding out, it’s one thing to be the scrappy upstart with nothing to lose, and a whole other thing to govern and hold on to power.



***

On a busy day in Alaska, you’ll meet an old hippie who first arrived in the 1970s, a Native whose family has been here for millennia, an Army veteran proud to live out of mobile-phone range, and a Greenpeace activist who visited one summer, stayed for the outdoorsy lifestyle, and has the expected bumper stickers.

To varying degrees, all of them depend on oil money.

Alaska is something like Times Square in the 1970s: gorgeous and libertine and free, but built on a foundation of grimy capitalism. At the time it became the 49th state in 1959, Alaska was already pumping oil in small quantities. But the 1967 discovery of the Prudhoe Bay oil field, North America’s largest, changed everything. Construction began on the Trans-Alaska pipeline in 1973, and production began in 1977. Unlike in Texas or North Dakota, where oil is mostly in private hands, the state of Alaska owns the sub-surface rights to its largest oil fields, which it leases to oil companies. The state makes money from oil in multiple ways: leases on the fields, a share of royalties and taxes on both oil production and oil-company profits. In a strong year, oil money makes up 90 percent of state revenue.

All this wealth has been good to Alaskans. In 1980, Governor Jay Hammond signed a bill eliminating the state income tax, making Alaska the only state without either an income or sales tax. Under Hammond, Alaska also amended its constitution to create the Alaska Permanent Fund, which invests oil revenue for future generations. In 1982, the state began paying every resident the Permanent Fund Dividend, which is determined by a formula that relies on the fund’s income over the last five years. At its low point, in 1984, the dividend was $331.29 per person, and it peaked in 2015 at $2,072—meaning a family of four could expect a check from the state worth nearly $8,300. For a family that lives in a center of commerce, like Anchorage, the annual check is nice bump in living standard, but for a rural family that survived on subsistence fishing, the dividend is indispensable.

The dividend has turned Alaska into a shivering paradox: Despite its proud libertarian streak, they are the only Americans living the socialist dream of a guaranteed income.

Top: Ice forms on pipelines near the Colville-Delta 5 drilling site on Alaska’s North Slope. Bottom left: At the Mug-Shot Saloon in Wasilla in Sept. 2008, regulars are full of praise for former mayor Sarah Palin, who was then the GOP’s vice presidential candidate. Bottom right: Then-gubernatorial candidate Sarah Palin and husband Todd campaign in October 2006. | AP Photos; Getty Images

Yet while the dividend is sacred, it’s unpredictable. So long as oil prices stayed high, or high enough, much stayed the same: Oil got pumped and the industry elected its own to the legislature—the last Senate president, Kevin Meyer, was employed by ConocoPhillips while in office. State government was hardly immune to the inherent corruption of the petro-state—in 2007 and 2008, nine Alaska state legislators pleaded guilty to, or were convicted of, taking bribes from the oil industry—but nobody could imagine an Alaskan economy—or for that matter, a political system—that wasn’t dominated by oil.

That was then. In 2008, crude peaked at $156 a barrel, Alaska government was flush, and Palin was, unsurprisingly, one of the country’s most popular governors. But by January 2009, oil was at $48 a barrel, and while it has yo-yoed since, today it’s $62 a barrel, roughly a third of what it was at its peak. Adjusted for inflation, oil has never been worth less.

What does an oil recession do to a state budget that’s funded almost entirely by oil? “Our budget four years ago was seven billion dollars,” Jason Grenn told me when we met in May. “We’ve cut it down to about $4.1 billion.” One hears about Kansas and Arizona, which have embarked on radical experiments to cut taxes and shrink government, but as painful as cuts have been there, Kansas’ budget shrank by only 1 percent from 2015 to 2016, about the same as in Arizona. By contrast, in Alaska, where the courts, policing and plowing are mostly state-run, nearly half the state budget has disappeared. Oil revenue, once regularly 80 or 90 percent of the budget, was less than a quarter last year. When the legislative session began this year, there was about a $3 billion budget deficit—on a $4 billion budget.

For the House’s majority Democratic-independent coalition, that means that sooner or later, “new revenues”—taxes, preferably progressive income taxes—are inevitable. Because the price of oil is unlikely to rebound to anything like its high point, there are very few other options, and none of them are palatable. Using his line-item veto, the governor can withhold a portion of the dividend to help pay the state’s obligations, as Walker did in 2016, when checks were cut in half, to just over a thousand dollars per individual. Or the state can also cut services like policing, prosecuting criminals and paying teachers. But as Republicans are learning at the national level, too, the politics of cuts can be fraught, for conservatives no less than for progressives.

When I visited Juneau in mid-May, the Legislature—which normally meets only three months a year—had been in session almost nonstop since January, and while it had resolved minor issues—allowing Uber and Lyft to operate in the state; approving the governor’s nominees for the Board of Barbers and Hairdressers—the House and the Republican-led Senate were stalemated on the budget. Senate Republicans wanted more cuts than the House majority could stomach, while the House wanted new “revenue” (never say taxes), a nonstarter for the Senate.

The legislators were already in their first special session—the first of several overtimes. They had signed up for a part-time job and now, for want of a budget, weren’t going to see their families, hundreds of miles away in this nation-sized state, for half the year. The House could cave on new taxes, agree to more cuts, a smaller dividend check for Alaska’s families, and another raid on the state’s savings. They didn’t want to, because somebody had to draw a line.

But the Republicans, many safe in gerrymandered districts, weren’t budging. And if they couldn’t send the governor a budget by July 1, the government would shut down.

Left-right: Jason Grenn, Jonathan Kreiss-Tomkins and Adam Wool chat at the Dimond Center Hotel in Anchorage on Nov. 9, 2016, where a group of Democrats and Independents announced they'd formed a majority coalition for the state House of Representatives. | Marc Lester/Alaska Dispatch News

In the end, the Legislature kicked the can down the road. To avert the shutdown, the two chambers came together on June 22 to pass an operating budget. Like most budget compromises, this one left everyone unhappy. The progressives did manage to end the much-loathed tax credits for the oil industry, but even with the governor on their side, they couldn’t overcome Senate intransigence to create an income tax. To avoid slashing the oil dividend, as well as thousands of state jobs, they agreed to raid the Constitutional Budget Reserve, a rapidly shrinking savings account funded in part by tax settlements.

But this is a one-year stopgap plan, which will do nothing to close the long-term structural deficit, which, unless oil prices zoom up again, isn’t going anywhere. If they raid the budget reserve for another year or two, it will be gone, at which point conservatives are likely to go after the annual oil dividend paid to residents; progressives will argue that a better path will include some kind of state taxing power, and for that, they’ll need to win even more seats—increasing their majority in the House, and eventually taking the Senate.

Dunbar, Heckendorn and Kreiss-Tomkins are cautiously optimistic.

Heckendorn is now running strategy for Governor Bill Walker, an independent who won after the Democratic candidate agreed to stand down and run as Walker’s lieutenant governor. (Because of his new job, Heckendorn refused to speak on the record.) One of Heckendorn’s last successes as a consultant before handing Ship Creek over to a lieutenant in January 2016 was to conceive of Measure 1, a referendum that passed in November 2016 and which automatically registers all Alaskans to vote when they submit their application for the oil dividend. Since everyone wants their oil dividend, this reform should get Alaska to near 100-percent voter registration in 2018—and the new voters are likely to be relatively poor, more heavily Democratic, and sympathetic to a progressive income tax. Meanwhile, Anchorage’s reputation as a diverse, progressive city, the oil recession, and the state’s coming marijuana economy—pot shops are slowly opening around the state, after a 2014 ballot measure legalized pot sales—are likely to skew the population more liberal.

But as Dunbar, Heckendorn and Kreiss-Tomkins see it, the changing demographics alone are not sufficient to win anything. They are just an opportunity, one Democrats will need the right candidates in order to capitalize on.

“Frequently, the people you really want in office are the people who have a life,” Kreiss-Tomkins said. “They have jobs, and successful businesses, and other stuff.” These are people who aren’t necessarily ambitious—for whom the pay cut and time away from their families are “a sacrifice, in the noncontrived, nonplatitudinal sense of sacrifice,” as he put it.

But these are, Kreiss-Tomkins is convinced, a necessary condition to turning around the unwieldy ship of a state Legislature. “You want the best possible people in those positions. It’s not going to happen by accident.”