Shelley Hughes campaign: Instead of Alaska being at the end of the road, Alaska will be the door to the globe

We are going to kick off our huge day's press conference, and I just want to introduce right now Senator Hughes, Terry Hughes, who's pig-pigging me right now over there. Let's give her a hand.

Senator Shelley Hughes, here we are.

So thank you, thank you, Marcus Sanders, for kicking off this. We have people who have joined us online, we've got people here in the room, we're at the Odd Man Brewing Company in Eagle River. Woo! And yeah, good food, beverages, and we're excited to have you here because Based on my work in the legislature, we have some really exciting news that we're building upon in that regard. You know, um, do we have something that's going to show on the screen?

Okay. Yeah! Our first time, the Administration of Strategic Security Initiative— that's a mouthful— ACTS. Okay, let's go to the first slide. We're just going to be kind of informal here.

Okay, so in 4th grade we all looked at a map like this with Hawaii and Alaska tucked down under, under the lower 48, right? And we also— next slide please— often looked at Alaska from this angle, tucked up in the left corner, right, on the globe. But I want to tell you, it is time to rotate the globe. It is time to start looking at Alaska from the top of the world. So next slide.

This is how we need to view Alaska from now on. We need to shift our parameter. Alaska is at the top of the world, and we need to take our rightful place. We are positioned in the next few decades, based on the work that I and others in the legislature did, to become the transportation hub of the Northern Hemisphere. We are positioned to be the crossroads of the globe at the top of the world.

Did you know that we are as close to Europe as the East Coast is, as Boston, Massachusetts is? Did you know that we are the closest state to Japan, to all of Asia? So we're going to, to go with that, and you can see this has to do with air cargo. You know, from that standpoint, we are very, very important. Only about 8 hours from most of the major population hubs in the northern hemisphere.

So go to the next slide. But this, this is why it's time for you to talking about what we're going to do, plan to do over the next couple of decades. When you look at the traffic through the Bering Strait and through the Arctic, we're seeing increasing shipping routes every year. Now, can you—. It may be one of the last slides, but it's the one that has a lot of lines on it.

Can you find that one, Amanda? That is the shipping that is happening right now. Now, if you look at that closer, each of those colors represents whether it's tourists or what kind of cargo, whether it's military, all those kind of things, and they're crossing. So a lot of increased traffic. So we know that's happening, right?

And that has changed things from 20 years ago. It is something we need to capture the moment as a state of Alaska. We have had a small private sector. We've been very dependent on state and federal dollars to get through the years, the fiscal years, and you know the struggle, Sally Juneau, with the fiscal budget. You know right now we have young people leaving the state.

We have what young working families are picking up and going to other places because it's not affordable to live here. We used to call it the brain drain when young people would go to college and not come back, but now it's a brawn and brain drain. Brain drain because people even that aren't going to college and working in other fields are leaving. So that is at the crux of why I decided to run, because the state was very, very good to my family. You know, I've been here 50 years, lived all over the state, but back in those days you could do and become whatever you wanted, and it's not the case anymore, and we want to change that.

And so stepping into this rightful place is the next step. And we will talk about the core pillars of our campaign and where we want to take our state and our economy. And this is kind of the next step from that, because infrastructure is very, very important. And you know, those potholes on your local road, you feel those every day, and we need to get our fiscal house in order so we can fill those potholes. But we also have to think big.

We have to think big. You know, General Gannett and I, we want to do— turn the corner for the state for the long term. We're not just talking about the next 4 years or 8 years, not just for you and me, as I see some of us have gray hair, but I'm talking for our children, for their children, and for their children's children. We have to think big and we have to think long term. So let me start by talking about the prior work that I did in the legislature, which is really fascinating, and how it fits into this.

So when I was in the House, I was the Transportation Chair, and I called two hearings, and one was what was happening in the Arctic as far as the beginning of shipping, and that was about 12 years ago, okay, so now the activity has really increased. I also did a hearing on the need for a port in western Alaska, and we did a lot of focus and looked at the potential for the city of Nome to have that port. Okay, so that, that's kind of some basic work that happened a long time ago. More recently, I want you to think of the map of Alaska, and you've got— so this is going to be backwards for, for me, so it's right for you. So the eastern the border and the western border.

So I did work on the eastern border, and what that was was a Senate resolution to support the presidential permit for a border crossing for a rail to Canada all the way to the Lower 48 that would come and connect with our rail system. And I worked with former Lieutenant Governor Mead Treadwell on that, and that project is called the A2A Project. Alaska to Alberta. I think it's Alaska to Alberta. It might be Alberta to Alaska.

The H2A project, okay, and there's still work being done on that. There's renewed interest. We already have the right of way. We have the presidential permit that was signed in 2021, um, based on that prior work, okay. Now on the other border, uh, on the western side, am I saying that well?

So this would be, this would This is eastern for you, right? So the border crossing is here. The western border, then we look at the ports, and it was determined that Nome was the best place. Well, a couple of years ago, I brokered the deal on the Senate floor to get $175 million for the Port of Nome. Had I not stepped in, that money would not have gotten.

And that money then, now federal dollars, And the Port of Nome is now under construction. So that's, that's phase 1 of this project. So the vision that I— let's go ahead and look. Is there a slide that actually has the rail route?

That's part of it. Is there another one, Josh, that she has that could show the whole thing? Next one. Okay, actually let's leave it on that one, that's a good one because that's going to tell the whole picture. And so you can see the rail coming up actually even from the lower 48, coming up from the lower 48 through Canada and connecting to the Alaska rail system, that's in red, and it gets to our existing rail system, and that would be Phase 2.

Port of Nome is Phase 1, the connection from Alberta to Alaska's rail system is Phase 2, and the third phase then would be, and this is the big one, Nenana to Nome. And that is not a new concept. That has—. That needs the most work, but but it is not a new concept. But that is what would make us the global economic hub, the global transportation and commerce hub, the global crossroads of the North Hemisphere.

Because now we can— Palora 48 can get goods all the way up to Nome, they can get it all the way over to Asia, they can get it all the way over to Europe. And that's the rightful place, and that is our vision. For working on over the next years. And so with that, I'm, you know, I just want to say we're not talking to state partners with this. This is the state's role is to make it possible for the private sector to have this discussion and for the investment considerations.

The A2A, there are a lot of discussions about about that, and that's getting closer and closer. The other phase, there will be work to be done, but can you imagine the opportunities for mining and even get trucks, heavy trucks carrying ore off the roads to get lower cost goods and products to Alaska? Even in rural Alaska, we'd be able to provide things to rural villages, and what that would do for the city of Nome, This is the next step, and this is where Alaska needs to look. It's very, very critical that we have hope about what's coming down the road. You know, I was thinking of the phrase, "Alaska has been the end of the road, now Alaska will be the door to the globe." And that's really what this is about.

It's about stepping up and doing, taking our rightful place stepping into our destiny as a state, because the nation actually needs this. And here's something that really, um, got my attention and made me know that we need to start having this conversation right now. Those shipping lanes are dominated 90% by Russia. The state of Alaska needs to step up for the sake of this nation and get that balance right. We need to take our rightful place.

We need to use that word "no," and connecting it to the rail system is going to be a game changer for the state. It's going to be a game changer for our young people and for the next generations. And I'd like to invite retired General Geddes up to say a few words, if you'd like to come up.

Hello everybody. Hello. So I, being retired military, I need to have a little bit of military stuff in this. So there was a man back about 100 years ago, his name was Billy Mitchell, and many of you have heard the name, Brigadier General, same rank I am. But he was really the father of aviation, military aviation.

And everybody told him, "We need to rely on horses and boats. We don't need aviation." And he was adamant about the fact that we need aviation. It's going to change the future.

And he had a quote, and the last time he spoke in public, his quote was 1935, he spoke to Congress, and he said that in the future, whoever holds Alaska, they will control the world. Yep, that's right. Alaska is the most strategic location in the world, and that slide that Charlie had on that showed the distance to every other location, aviation figured that out. That's why we became— I used to fly for Northwest Airlines, It's a cargo hub. I think it's the second largest cargo hub in the world.

UPS, FedEx, and plus all the other carriers that come here. It's important because the location, you can transload things here and go anywhere else. If something made in Beijing can transload here and then stuff can go to Europe from there, it's, it's the perfect location. That's why we're there. The military didn't figure this out right away.

Uh, took World War II to understand that we had some threats in the North Pacific, and that kind of put Alaska on the map for a lot of people in the rest of America. Then everything got quiet, and then the next thing was in 1977, they decided that the Trans-Alaska Pipeline— pretty big deal. That's pretty much the last big thing we've done in this state. We're talking about a gas line Not sure that's going to happen. It might be taxed to death before it ever produces.

What Shelley is bringing up is bigger than all those. A gas line's a gas line. Oil line's an oil line. This would be tying Alaska into world commerce. So you could leave Nome and actually take a train all the way down to Florida.

That'd be cool. Currently, we have about a 1-week supply of food We grow food in South Central Alaska. If for some reason our pork gets wiped out, we are— We're in bad shape. We can't airlift enough food in here. If they have grail, it will decrease the price of everything.

And a big reason why our people, our young people, are leaving here is because it's too expensive. Energy's too expensive and there's not enough jobs. This would be an economic powerhouse. For the state of Alaska. We talk about the rare earth minerals that are— they're locked up in the state currently.

How do you get them out? We have 47 or 48 or 51, but there's no way to get them anyplace. You can't fly them out. But if we have rail going across that area, we're in good shape. There's jobs for all the the rest of the state of Alaska.

This will be creating jobs for Alaskans. So those young people right now that are leaving the state, uh, we— if we get the gas line, we'll have cheaper energy. If we get cheaper energy, then we can develop that mining. And if we have this railroad, then we will have jobs like we've never seen before. That's right.

Yes. So I don't want to talk too long, but I need to bring up our next Speaker, and this is the spur that will come off of Banana and go to Nome will start in Banana, and Mayor Joshua Hayden is here to speak, the mayor of Banana.

Mayor, there are many things coming up, you know, one of the things is, you know, what's the cost? We don't know the cost. This is not going to be a state funded project, but, you know, we've been hearing costs of what the gas line might cost in perspective. Just the construction part, you know, the gas line's been $50 billion, $60 billion. The construction cost for the Alaska section is simply construction costs— there are other costs— would be somewhere in the neighborhood of $25 billion, and that is a very, very rough estimate.

So when you think about that, you know, that's a lot of money. When you think about the cost of the gas line, it really puts it into perspective. This is really something that we should think about doing and that we should do. So, Mayor, Bernardo. Yeah, thank you.

It's you all here today. My name is Josh Graham, and I've been the mayor of the city of Indiana for about 8 years. And, um, I knew Shelley in the legislature. I worked I worked in Juneau for 3 years. I worked with Fred Wilbur when he was down there.

And a lot of these ideas and opportunities are not new. They predate a lot of us. Just a tiny bit of history is I grew up in Neenah where somebody that's pretty famous in the state grew up, Jack Coghill. And Jack Coghill was one of the founders, or one of the authors of the Alaska Constitution. And a delegate to the state convention.

He was state senator twice, and then he became our lieutenant governor with Walter Pickle in 1990. Jack had big visions for Alaska, and at the time when he was mayor, there was no Parks Highway. The only way to get to Fairbanks was to drive around the other way or to take the train, and he helped get the rest of the pieces together to make the Parks Highway complete. Completed, but he also had maps, which I still have in my office, of a proposed railroad to Nome, from Minnan to Nome. That was also not his idea.

There's a survey from 1916 of the proposed railroad from Minnan to Nome, and as some folks who know much about the Gold Rush, there was an actual railroad that they started constructing from Nome headed to the east, and it only made it a few miles before the Gold Rush kind of petered out, but this is something we've been needing for a long time. Another part of history in Nenana, I like to say that Nenana is a small town where big things happen. We've had a lot of big things. We had the completion of Alaska Railroad there where President Harding, the first visit for a U.S. president, came to Nenana and drove a golden spike, which just a year ago we acquired that golden spike that had been gone for 100 years and got it back to Alaska. But that was a huge event that happened there.

And 2 years later, this serum run that was what's called the Great Race of Mercy— a lot of people don't know— started from Nenana. They brought the antitoxin from Anchorage up to Nenana, and then they brought it by dog team because that was the only way to get there from Nenana to Nome. And so when I got elected 8 years ago, I had the privilege of meeting the mayor of Nome at the time, Richard Benedill. And if anyone ever had the privilege meeting him, he was just full of enthusiasm and it was contagious. But he had a big vision of making a deep water port in Nome and of connecting to Port Nome by rail.

So him and I met at conferences and we talked a lot about this idea. Unfortunately, he passed a few years ago, but before he passed, he heard about this funding that Shelley got passed to get that deep water port started. I had a conversation conversation with him, he was ecstatic about it, so I know that he would be excited to hear that there's some interest in this moving forward. So it would mean a lot to the interior of Alaska if we had access to that coast where all of that transnational shipping that's going through the Bering Strait, we could export out of there to Europe and the Asian markets, we could import, get things for cheaper, and all that commerce going through there. The United States and Alaska aren't getting any of it because we can't get to it.

So I think this is a huge thing. Uh, Nenana has been a transportation hub for many years, uh, as a barging hub. We're a railroad town, and my dream would be to connect Nenana and Nome permanently with the railroad. Thank you.

Mayor Kenny Hughes virtually on the screen from Nome, but I just want to say one of the ways I've been thinking about this project and what this would make Alaska, it would make Alaska the Panama Canal of the 21st century. Right now the ships have to go down through the narrow Panama Canal to not super convenient. We have a wide open ocean when you think of off the west coast of Alaska. We don't have Strait of Hormuz, right? And so it's really a very, very direct route.

And also, General Geddes mentioned we've known we were in an important place militarily, strategically. It's now time to make Alaska— Alaskans to know that we are an important an important place economically on a global basis. And that's why I'm going to rotate that globe. We're going to look at it from the top of the world. And are we ready?

I'm getting a yes that we're ready to bring on Mayor Kenny Hughes of Nome. Thank you, Mayor Hughes. Oh, if you're wondering if we're related, we aren't. Great last name, Ken.

Yes, I'm Kenny Hughes, currently serving as both Mayor of Nome and President of the Nome Chamber of Commerce. I was good friends with Richard, miss him dearly, and we spoke quite often about the future of Nome and the future of Alaska should things come to pass. We've been talking for years out here about the possibility of a railway rather than a road to the interior. Now that we have America's only deep-cut, hard-to-forge under-construction at home, it makes even more sense. For rail links to the interior would mean the world to Nome, would stabilize our energy and supply costs so that we can actually continue to herbifeed villages, which is what we're trying to do, would also give Nome the opportunity to become the Arctic crossroads of the world, a great and positive thing for our region, our state, and our nation.

I'm positively delighted to discover that Shelley Hughes has been working towards this vision of connecting Alaska with the rest of the continent for a long time. It'd be tremendous to see it finally become a reality. I really appreciate your efforts on behalf of rural Alaska.

We need a governor who understands the nuts and bolts of how to get things done and has a track record of accomplishment. I'm really happy to support her and Blake Gaines as they push these ideas forward. Thank you. Thank you, Manny. Thank you.

We really appreciate you. We were excited, you know, when we started talking about this endeavor, and this isn't new. Like I said, this has been based on years of work and conversation. But recently we did start having conversations with people that have been involved from Canada, from the Lower 48, and from here in Alaska. And what we learned is the time is now.

The time is now. And so there is— next we have, I believe it's Peter Schultz. So we put out in our media alert that we have two mayors and two business leaders. So Peter Schultz is on the Canadian side, and he is also— I can see him on the screen, so, Amanda, if you want to bring him in, and he can kind of tell us a little bit about his background, his work briefly, as far as the line from Canada to Alaska railroads— railway system. Thank you, Peter, for joining us.

And where are you located right now?

If you start talking here, you maybe will show up on screen.

Peter, can you hear us?

Try again. Yeah. Where are you right now and just what your association is and your work on the theme itself?

Uh, I'm the host. I was born in Calgary in southern Alberta. I was recruited by the HCA Rail back in 2020 when I lived in Heartland, Canada, and came down to Edmonton. The company had a sound business plan and it failed due to financial malfeasance of two Canadian crooks who were using Canada's lax white-collar crime laws, but that's not what you asked—. That's not what I'm here to talk about.

So the— it struck me a lot that the business plan made a lot of sense. I'm not going to go into numbers, but the latent demand for the Lower 48 to access the Pacific Ocean would come to Alaska if a railway was built through Canada, and that amount is enough alone to justify the railway, never mind opening up resources of untold value in an area probably bigger than Texas within 100 miles of the future railway. This would mainly be a Canadian project. Um, now we're looking at about 3,000 kilometers, only 500 kilometers of which are in Alaska. So, um, is there support in Canada?

Yes, there is. Um, in the federal government, we just kind of completed an application for pre-feasibility funding to the Canadian federal government, which, a program just set up for establishing new and innovative corridors through the Canadian Arctic. The Canadian military is, is well connected with the American military through NORAD and NATO, and the both, both, both of our respective militaries are are well aware that this is the spine and fortress of North America, that, you know, if there's an active war, you're not going to fight around more Alaska, you're going to isolate it, and you're going to starve it out. And the only way to prevent that from happening is through the road. So it's— in an active war, the railway is essential.

At the provincial level, the province of Alberta, of the Māko, the Chutina RRP, to do pre-feasibility on railroads to Alaska. They are actively interested, and as I'm sure you know, Alaska— sorry, Alberta is Canada's wealthiest province per capita by far, and it is interested in providing that, being that crossroad between the prairies, Great Plains, and Eastern markets to the Alaska Tungva. For stations, I have in my hands letters of support from several nations in Canada that are on the best route between Edmonton and the coast, Taiwan or Alaska, and we've been talking to pretty much every other nation there as well. It's ranging from, "We want to learn more," to, "When can you build this thing? 10 Years ago?" where there's no, there's no party that's actively opposed.

They are interested in co-governance, co-ownership, um, and we have a lot of momentum on that front. And municipalities, uh, same kind of story. We have, uh, 5 or 6 letters of support from various municipalities along the route. Um, so yeah, that's my messaging. Um, if— and I think what a lot of students do is say that If the wine is coming from Canada, we'll eat it.

We'll link up with it at Toba or at the Yukon border, and Alaska is ready to build that extension to get us to the Yukon border. Yeah! We need to grow! We need to grow wine on the other side of that border, and we need to really make it happen here. That's what this is all about.

Thank you. I want to mention too, I've always been a strong advocate for the completion of the northern rail extension as well as the Matsu rail extension. And those are under work too. In fact, I spoke with Bill O'Leary with Alaska Railroad, and there should be some good news as far as some federal grant dollars for the Matsu rail extension. I don't have an update, but those are integral to this whole system and for this all to work together to bring us in a brand new place where we have a much stronger and more secure economic future.

We've been living the ups and downs of a volatile oil and gas world, and it's really time to look at diversifying the economy. And so that's what this is about. And our final speaker is a business leader and former Lieutenant Governor of Alaska who is a visionary. And so, Meet Treadwell, if you come up and if you want to close us out.

Thank you, Senator, and I hope we call you Governor.

I have here— I've had my exploration hat on for a long time, but I'm going to put on my camouflaged Shelley Hughes hat.

Thank you very much. You know, I have a confession to make. My confession is that I used to run elections, but I never ran in or ran a ranked choice vote election. And I was elected Lieutenant Governor when I ran after a contested primary, joined up with Governor Sean Parnell, We won, and we did the elections just the way the constitutional founders expected.

So I got a little confused this year. I thought ranked choice voting was gonna let us vote for 4 people in the primary. So I encouraged a lot of my friends to run. I even contributed to a couple of them. And I personally, like almost everybody who's out there, including some of the people in the other parties who I've known before I even knew they were Democrats.

But after I encouraged one person to run, or more than one person to run, I learned I had to pick one team, one vote to vote for. And I guess my criteria for this is After going to a couple of Governor's Forums, it was kind of like listening to all those crows on a tree at my house. The caw, you couldn't tell which caw was which caw. You couldn't tell when you hear a bunch of crickets which cricket is which cricket. It was sounding very, very, very similar.

And I said to myself, I sure hope somebody breaks out. I sure hope somebody breaks out with visionary ideas and good ideas to move Alaska forward.

And the interesting thing about this team is this: what you've heard tonight is a vision, and I hope you put that big picture up there of the whole from the Arctic, as Shelley mentioned, but the kind of vision that we heard tonight is the kind of vision I've had the honor to talk about with Shelley Hughes for years. And it is the vision to take the next giant steps for Alaska and to use every piece of leverage she has to do that. And I saw you do that in the Senate. I was working on a balanced budget issue with a group of people around the country and they said, "Well, we have this Commission on Federalism." And I said, "Who's on it?" And they said, "There's an Alaskan who's vice chair. Her name is Shirley Hughes." And so I ran into her there too with a big stick.

Step. And the kinds of questions that you were asking here tonight are so important. It's how do we get Alaska to meet its destiny? How do we play in global transportation with an opening Arctic? How do we make sure shipping is safe, secure, and reliable?

Those are three words that Dan Sullivan and I worked into the president's Arctic policy, which still is the policy the day George W. Bush signed that policy. How do we get North American rail to connect to Alaska rail to connect to Arctic ports? It makes sense. And yes, the idea has been heard before. I—.

There was a governor of De— Colorado who proposed it one time in the 19th century. The North Commission, which Governor Wally Hickel started and Frank Murkowski ran in the '60s, put together a right-of-way to Nome. Out of that did come the road to the North Slope and Prudhoe Bay, so it was not a wasted effort. It looked at northern transportation of rail and highways. And I think it's about time we have a governor who thinks about big steps again.

So there are going to be people in this race who say we should think about moose more than unicorns. This is not a unicorn. All right? This is our destiny. It is our destiny to connect the world.

We already connect the world, as Blake said, by air. I was in northern Norway earlier this summer with a bunch of people who did not— you know, and They're smart people, believe me. If I told you who they were, you'd say, "Pretty amazing group." And they didn't know that when we were standing there, they were 1,000 miles closer to my home in Anchorage than we were to their home in New York. And the interesting thing about this is that we know the world is round when the rest of the world doesn't. So we're just going to have to prove it to the flat earthers.

All right. So, I told you I run into Shelley a number of different places, but I was in Washington the day Donald Trump approved the border crossing for the A2A rail. I had actually been with him in a room about this size with about as many people, and I got about 7 minutes to speak. And what do you do after you've gone toe-to-toe with the president on something like this? You probably go out and have a drink.

And then I go up and I call my wife and I'm explaining to her what happened and I get a tweet from Shelley Hughes. And the Senator said, "You better watch out, the President just approved your project." And Shelley, it's not my project, it's your project, it's everybody's project. And that came 2 seconds after the President had tweeted it, but I am absolutely sure that he had in his packet the resolution that you passed in the Alaska Legislature. And the reason why I'm absolutely sure of it is because I put it there.

Now, not all these roads, ports, railroads, space ports may come true in my lifetime. But, you know, hockey and basketball and soccer teach us that you only get the shots that you make. And you get none of the shots that you don't take. And we got to take the shot. Shelly Hughes and her running mate, General Blake Geddes, know that we have one lifetime to make these shots, and it's time we started thinking big again.

That's why I want to see this team in the top 4. That's why I'm going to vote for this team. And that's why I urge you to tell your friends and neighbors that there's one way to break out from the crowd, and it's somebody who will actually make this state a great state for the world. Shelly, Godspeed. And if I could just say, it's a pleasure to work with Josh, who helped a number of times when I was Lieutenant Governor and always showed his vision.

Cool to see you in Nenana. I see you brought a councilman with you who's going to get us fresh corn when it heats up a little bit. Mayor Hughes, it's great to see you. Peter, it's great to see you. And just looking at this map, some of the news— Peter mentioned the RFP that's gone out in Alberta, you know, and the mayor talked about what's going on with the Nome Port.

I can tell you that When that financial problem happened in Toronto, a long, long way, they told us to put the A2A efforts together and preserve what we've got, what we've done. That's ready for you to include in some sort of RFP to bring other investors if you need to do that. Last week, the Secretary of Transportation announced a new Federal Advisory Committee on Arctic Shipping. There's a piece of legislation legislation that I worked with our delegation and Don Young, one of Don Young's last pieces of legislation to get passed in 2020. And that's about to be appointed.

So Mayor Hughes, just realized we're going to be talking about ship services out of your new port. So you might want to apply to be on that commission there. And I can also just say that the United States is thinking about this. They're criticizing Donald Trump for building icebreakers on an agreement that was negotiated and signed by Joe Biden, where discussions began under Barack Obama. So the New York Times doesn't know one end from the other, but we're going to show them.

Thank you very much. And ladies and gentlemen, we have a great team running here who, in my mind, they have broken out of the pack. Not because of very specific issues and resaying again and again what the Republican platform says, but by realizing we can build on our strengths as a state and build this nation, build this world. God bless. Thank you.

I didn't know that we were going to be his pick. I knew he He supported the project, so I'm very, very honored, Meade. Extremely honored. So Alaska is no longer going to be the end of the road. It is going to be the door to the globe, folks.

So we have been very, very pragmatic in this campaign. Go to our website. It's very comprehensive. We're very solution-focused. Focus.

General Geddes and I don't like slogans, we don't like rhetoric. We're very pragmatic. Now this is— we're also visionary because you have to be visionary, you have to think big, and we're going to be pragmatic in this, in this approach. But there is definitely a role for the state, there's definitely a role for the governor and lieutenant governor to play in this, and with that missing piece, it won't happen. And so with that, we, we need your support.

And I will say we are, we are looking pretty good in this race. And just so you know, we do pick one. The top 4 vote getters move up, get vote getters move up in November. We have been around 5th place. We have 2 weeks to get up into the top 4.

But there is high favorability. We don't have baggage, we don't have skeletons, and every day we learn about undecideds getting on board the Hughes-Gettys train, which since we've been talking about rail, let's say the Hughes-Gettys train. We've also heard of people that have been supporting other candidates realizing that they need to get beside— behind our candidacy. And here's something important to know. We can actually beat the Democrats.

I have beat Democrats. I've had 6 elections. And just let me remind you, yes, Matsu is conservative, but Palmer is the blue pocket. Right now the Democrats control the city council. A recent election that I had, I ran against a Libertarian, a Democrat, and I still got 78% of the vote.

We can beat the Democrats. So that's very important because we do not want an income tax to sink this state. We do not want the suppression of oil and gas development. We don't want a mass exodus. We want our young people back.

We need a conservative ticket that is very focused on diversifying and growing the economy. And what we've talked about, this Arctic Crossroads, this new destination opportunity for Alaska. We're going to take the practical steps to get there, and you'll be hearing more about it in the weeks to come.

Paid for by Alaskans for Hughes, P.O. Box 1496, Palmer, Alaska 99645.