Blake Gettys Builds LG Bid Around Personal Survival Story

Blake Gettys, the candidate for lieutenant governor on Shelley Hughes's Republican ticket, released a campaign video June 15 that trades almost entirely in biography and faith rather than policy — a personal introduction from a ticket that, by current public polling, sits far back in a 17-candidate field.

Filmed at his off-grid cabin in the Funny River area of the Kenai Peninsula, the video recounts three hardships Gettys says reshaped his life. A retired airman who came to Alaska in 1994, he describes returning home one day to find his wife, Kathleen — a former president of the Alaska Nurses Association whose health had declined after work injuries — unresponsive; he tried to revive her and called 911, but she had died. A week later, he says, the 2014 Funny River Fire bore down on the cabin as family and friends gathered around him. Separately, in 2012, he survived a brown bear mauling that he says severed his left quadricep to the bone, broke his leg, and badly injured his face before he was flown to Anchorage for treatment.

Gettys frames the sequence not as a ledger of loss but as a turn toward renewed faith. "The fire actually kind of renewed my faith," he says in the video, describing it as "a rebirth" and a push to appreciate what remained in his life.

The video does not address what the office he is seeking actually does. In Alaska, the lieutenant governor serves as the state's chief elections officer and keeper of its official records, among other constitutional duties — none of which the video takes up.

It also arrives with the Hughes–Gettys ticket polling near the back of the pack. In Alaska, candidates for governor and lieutenant governor run as a joint ticket, and the top four vote-getters in the August 18 open primary — regardless of party — advance to the November general election. The Dittman Research poll conducted April 27–30 placed Hughes at 2 percent, tied for last among the named contenders and well below the cluster of candidates around the fourth-place threshold; the poll was led by former state senator Tom Begich at 21 percent, with several Republicans bunched between roughly 4 and 7 percent. No public poll to date has shown the Hughes ticket approaching the top four.

That standing can still change before the primary — the candidate field itself does not fully lock until the June 27 withdrawal deadline — but as of mid-June, the ticket's introductory video is reaching voters from outside the race's competitive tier.