BARROW, Alaska — Three children whiz by on a snowmobile as Gabe Tegoseak, crunching through icy streets in the town that’s as far north as you can go and still be in the United States, is hunting for votes.
He’s tired after a late night spent butchering one of three bowhead whales that subsistence hunters towed in from the pewter-colored waters of the Chukchi Sea. Slabs of blubber cover front yards all over town, and Tegoseak has some whale of his own to cut up and cook at home.
But not yet. There is an election coming soon, and doors await his knock. Harold Snowball answers one of them.
“Are you a Republican or Democrat, do you mind if I ask?” Tegoseak asks. Snowball thinks he’s a registered Democrat but says he votes for who he believes will do a better job. In this case, that will probably be Alaska’s Democratic U.S. senator, Mark Begich.
“Yeah!” Tegoseak says with a fist pump, and later makes a note of this on a spreadsheet.
It takes 22 hours and four connections to get from Washington to Barrow, a place where the sun will set two weeks after Election Day and not rise for two months. Gas is $7 a gallon, off-brand milk nearly $11.
Polar bears sometimes prowl the edge of town. The roads are dirt, because pavement won’t make it through the cold of winter, and the shortcut to downtown is a path across a frozen lagoon.
This is the Alaska bush, home to the hardest political ground game in America. And this election season, Republicans need to pick up six seats to win control of the U.S. Senate.
They like their chances in Alaska. So, too, do Democrats, who are investing in an unprecedented effort in rural Alaska to get out the vote.
Although independent voters make up the largest voting bloc in the state, Republicans have expanded their edge over Democrats in registered voters since 2008, when Begich carried rural Alaska on his way to defeating Sen. Ted Stevens by fewer than 4,000 votes.
This time Begich faces former state Attorney General Dan Sullivan, who has largely focused his get-out-the-vote efforts in the state’s more-populated areas, such as Anchorage, Fairbanks and Juneau. Sullivan, nevertheless, visited Barrow and its 4,700 residents as part of a recent rural swing and has won the endorsement of leaders of the locally based Arctic Slope Regional Corp., with 11,000 shareholders primarily of native Inupiat descent.
“Begich doesn’t have rural support sewn up,” said Kyle Kohli, a spokesman for the Republican National Committee.
Begich has racked up endorsements from Alaska Native and fishermen’s groups, key constituencies. But in places like Barrow, it’s the door-to-door, face-to-face interactions that can make the difference, and why the ground game — no matter how arduous — matters so much.
