Impact On Alaska

Resource development

Outside-funded campaigns have repeatedly targeted Alaska’s core industries – oil, gas, mining, and fisheries.

The Alaska Conservation Foundation, funded by the New Venture Fund, has opposed the Ambler Access Road, a project projected to create thousands of jobs and open remote mineral corridors, reducing America’s dependence on rare earth minerals from China and other foreign sources.
SalmonState and the Alaska Venture Fund, alongside their affiliates, have fought both the West Susitna Access Road and the Ambler Road, portraying them as environmental threats while state leaders view them as crucial economic lifelines.
- These groups have been heavily influenced by outside funding to continue such campaigns.
Financial records show continuous NVF and Hopewell grants to these same anti-development nonprofits, reinforcing the pattern of coordinated funding.
The Organized Village of Kake is a sovereign tribal government in Alaska that has long struggled to ensure food security for its members. The tribe has defended their access to natural resources and subsistence rights in landmark legal disputes. Recently, it received a $50,000 grant from the Windward Fund.

Why would a fund oppose Alaskan fishing (a key source of sustenance for the state) while simultaneously supporting a tribe fighting to feed its people? The answer: these dark money organizations have a national activist agenda that is deeply misaligned with the cultural realities of Alaskan communities.

Economic Costs

These efforts come at a price: lost jobs, declining revenue, and diminished opportunity for working Alaskans. What’s billed as “grassroots environmentalism” often results in billions of dollars in lost economic potential. Organizations like the Tides Foundation and NEO Philanthropy continue to fund activism that opposes infrastructure and industry under the guise of “equity” and “climate justice,” undermining Alaska’s long-term economic independence.

The Alaska Conservation Foundation (ACF), which received $20,000 from the New Venture Fund, has consistently opposed the approval of the Ambler Access Road, a project that would facilitate mining operations and the transport of extracted materials, significantly increasing the potential of Alaska’s mining industry.
- Proponents argue that the Ambler Road could be transformative for Alaska’s struggling economy, which currently ranks among the worst-performing in the nation. Despite this, ACF maintains its stance against the project, citing concerns about its long-term environmental and cultural impacts.

Voting Reform

Across Alaska and the lower 48, leftist activists are pushing ranked-choice voting (RCV) – a system that could threaten to upend the democratic process. In Alaska, Democrats have already succeeded, thanks in large part to millions in funding from outside groups. But before embracing RCV as “reform,” it’s worth asking what it really does – and who it truly serves.

Under Alaska’s system of voting, the traditional elections were replaced with two sweeping changes. First, a nonpartisan primary puts every candidate, regardless of party, on a single ballot, with only the top four advancing to the general election. Then, in November, voters must rank those candidates by preference. If no one wins an outright majority, rounds of elimination begin – and thousands of ballots are thrown out in the process until a “majority” winner finally emerges.
The result is a confusing, costly system that leaves many voters wondering if their vote even counted. Ranked-choice voting doesn’t strengthen democracy – it weakens it. By discarding ballots to manufacture majorities, it erodes confidence, dilutes representation, and hands power to the few who understand its complexity.
However, there are several additional concerns accompanying that warrant consideration:
- Complexity and voter understanding. RCV is inherently more complex than a traditional “select one” system. Voters must understand ranking, possible elimination rounds, and how their lower‐rank choices come into play only if earlier choices are eliminated. According to Alaskan election observers, this complexity has led to confusion and has become a factor in declining participation in some areas. The system’s intended benefits may be compromised if its cognitive complexity favors better-educated or more politically engaged voters.
- Delayed results and reduced transparency. Traditional elections often yield results on election night; however, in Alaska, under RCV, the counting may require several rounds and redistribution of ballots, which can delay outcomes and reduce immediate transparency. The delay may frustrate some voters’ perception of responsiveness and may reduce the clarity of “who won and why.”
- Strategic and structural unintended consequences. As with any electoral system change, there is the risk of unintended behavior. For example, in the elimination rounds, voters may not rank a second or third option; if many choose to only vote for a single candidate, their ballots “exhaust” when that candidate is eliminated, effectively reducing the pool of continuing ballots. Alaska’s rules note that voters are “allowed” but not required to rank multiple candidates. This raises questions of fairness: strategic voters who rank more candidates may give an edge to organized or informed campaigns. The “top-four” system can still sideline smaller parties and niche candidates, leaving major-party dominance largely intact.
- Administrative cost and resource implications. Ranked-choice voting demands more administrative work, complex ballots, extensive voter education, and updated tabulation systems. In Alaska, critics note that election costs have surged since the adoption. Without clear benefits like higher turnout or fairer representation, the system may not justify its expense – especially given the added challenges of educating and serving voters in Alaska’s remote communities.
- Political backlash and legitimacy concerns. Even though the reform passed by ballot measure, it has faced sustained political backlash –including efforts to repeal it. When an electoral reform is contested so closely, its legitimacy may be undermined in the eyes of some stakeholders. If major parts of the electorate feel the system is confusing or unfair (regardless of empirical evidence), the system’s stability and public trust may suffer.
Alaska’s ranked-choice voting law embodies a bold attempt to modernize electoral democracy: by combining a non-partisan primary and RCV general election, the state seeks to produce winners with broader support, reduce strategic “lesser-evil” voting, and open the field beyond traditional party lines – laudable goals in theory.
Yet, the law raises several significant concerns: increased complexity for voters, impacts turnout and participation (especially among less‐resourced voters), administrative and cost burdens, and questions about fairness and unintended strategic consequences. A reform of this magnitude requires substantial investment in voter education and administrative capacity; absent that, the promise of greater representativeness may fall short.
Funding transparency has also been questioned. State records show that the largest donor to the multi-million-dollar ballot initiative was Action Now Initiative, a group backed by Texas billionaires John and Laura Arnold, who contributed over $2 million. While not to the extent that they supported the RCV ballot initiative in Alaska, the Action Now Initiative supported similar RCV proposals in New York City and in the state of Maine. That raises an important question: why are out-of-state billionaires influencing how Alaskans and the rest of the country vote?
The next few years will test whether Alaska’s ranked-choice system delivers on its promises of legitimacy and inclusiveness – or instead creates confusion, inequality, and diminished public trust.

Election reform

The Mobilization Center (TMC) is an Alaska-based political consulting and field-organizing firm that specializes in voter engagement through door-to-door canvassing, phone banking, texting, and data targeting. The group markets itself as “community-powered,” but its funding and partnerships reveal clear ties to progressive political movements and environmental advocacy networks, many of which conflict with Alaska’s traditional, resource-based economy and independent spirit.

TMC was fiscally housed under The Alaska Center, a well-known left-of-center nonprofit that focuses on environmental protection, “just transition” energy policies, and progressive electoral campaigns, until 2022, when it became financially independent. In 2022, the Alaska Center granted TMC with $100,000 from the Chorus Foundation for a project titled “Mobilizing Alaskans to Build Power for Conservation, Democracy, and Social Justice.” TMC operated under The Alaska Center’s financial and organizational umbrella to carry out advocacy and political mobilization work aligned with the Center’s mission.
The Alaska Center’s stated goals align closely with the national progressive environmental agenda and frequently overlap with positions that challenge Alaska’s traditional economic pillars, such as oil and gas development, mining, and commercial resource use. By serving as an operational arm of this movement, TMC effectively helps extend those values into Alaska’s electoral and civic spaces.
TMC’s partnership with The Alaska Center positions it as a powerful player in Alaska’s progressive movement. While it claims to empower communities and elevate civic participation, its funding sources, leadership backgrounds, and campaign strategies reveal an effort to instead advance an out-of-state progressive, environmentally driven agenda that may not reflect many Alaskans priorities – especially those who depend on the state’s resource economy and value its independent, pragmatic character.
TMC operates a dedicated Rural & Indigenous Outreach (RIO) division that engages rural and Native communities. While this outreach is framed as empowerment, it also represents a channel for progressive campaign messaging in regions where political views tend to be more traditional, economically pragmatic, and reliant on resource development.
The influence of The Mobilization Center extends far beyond individual campaigns; it contributes to a gradual, but significant, shift in Alaska’s political landscape. By focusing on conservation – emphasizing the “just transition” away from fossil fuels, and social-justice issues – the organization promotes priorities that often clash with the state’s long-standing values of self-reliance, responsible resource development, and economic independence.

The Bigger Picture

Alaska is not an isolated case — it’s a frontier testing ground.

From criminal-justice reform to climate lockdowns and minimum-wage mandates, Arabella’s constellation of nonprofits – the New Venture, Sixteen Thirty, Hopewell, and Windward Funds – are using Alaska to test policies conceived in D.C. and Silicon Valley. These imported agendas are turning Alaska from a state of opportunity into a laboratory for outside political experiments. This is not a hypothetical –

Read from the Alaska Venture Fund themselves

From the Alaska Venture Fund Website

“Alaska – creating the blueprint for a more just and prosperous future.

With our people, resources and potential, Alaska is poised to become the model for a sustainable future. Our rich cultural heritage and biodiversity, incredible carbon reserves, and abundant renewable resources offer untold opportunities.”

Alaska – Outsized opportunity. Outsized impact.

– Alaska Venture Fund Website

“At nearly one-fifth the size of the U.S., everything in Alaska is outsized. Alaska has more coastline than the rest of the country combined, a third of the nation’s federal lands, more than half of its carbon stores, two-thirds of its fisheries landings, much of its potential freshwater, most of its largest intact ecosystems, and all of its Arctic territory. More Indigenous people reside here proportionally than in any other state.

But Alaska isn’t just outsized in its physical landscape. Like many low-population states, Alaska’s roughly 735,000 people have an outsized impact on national decision-making, with the same number of U.S. Senators as the country’s most populous states. As Alaskans wrestle with our future in a place that is warming at more than double the speed of the global average, our ability to transition to a sustainable future has importance not only for Alaskans but also for our country and the world.”