Ranked Choice Voting Won’t Hand Bill Hill A Win in Alaska. Here’s What Could.

Monday, October 19, marks the beginning of early voting in Alaska. There are tight races for a Senate seat and for the governor’s mansion. Measure 2 seeks to repeal the Top Four primary, ranked choice voting, and campaign finance disclosures that were part of the same reform package approved by voters in 2020.

And the race for Alaska’s lone House seat continues to look the way it has looked throughout the summer. Incumbent Republican Rep. Nick Begich is ahead in the polls and in money, and independent Bill Hill is second.

They both are well ahead in resources and polling over the Democrat (who is running from a federal penitentiary in New York, having pled guilty to making threats against elected officials) and the Libertarian candidate.

Much of the commentary on this race has been focused on those two minor candidates. Conservative outlets have argued that Eric Hafner, the Democrat on the ballot, could end up deciding the race through second-choice rankings. Hill’s campaign seems to be counting on it. Both sides treat the minor-candidate vote as a reserve Hill would need to draw on in order to win the seat.

However, that may not be the case. In the 2024 congressional race, nearly half of the voters who backed candidates other than Nick Begich and Mary Peltola did not have their votes transfer to either finalist under ranked choice voting.

If that pattern holds in 2026, Hill cannot count on second-choice votes alone to erase a double-digit deficit against Begich. His path to a victory, therefore, runs through first-choice voters he hasn’t won yet.

Where The Race Stands

Polling has shown some minor shifts, but nothing too far outside of a margin of error. The race appears to have moved little since August:

Siena’s first-round numbers (the most recent) put Begich at 47%, Hill at 35%, Hafner at 8%, and McDermott at 5%; its final-round figure is Begich 53%, Hill 47%.

While this may appear to show that Hill will pick up a lot of votes in later rounds, it’s important to remember one thing: many Alaska voters haven't ranked past their first choice in recent elections.

While a poll may pick up people’s preferences, their behavior on Election Day tends to show a significant dropoff between first- and second-round votes. These “bullet voters” (called because they put only one bullet on their ballot) drop out after the first round, lowering the total votes cast and shifting numbers.

Looking at Alaska’s prior elections can show us what we can expect as to voter behavior on election day.

What Happened to the Minor-Candidate Vote in 2024

The 2024 race had the same structure: Begich; a Democratic-aligned major candidate (then-Rep. Mary Peltola); the Alaskan Independence Party’s John Wayne Howe; and Hafner. Begich took 48.4% of first choice votes to Peltola’s 46.4%. The official tabulation report shows where the remaining ballots went.

When Hafner was eliminated, 267 of his ballots moved to Begich, 661 to Howe, and 1,300 exhausted. When Howe was eliminated, 4,817 went to Begich and 6,295 exhausted. Fewer than 40% of Hafner’s ballots, 1,303, transferred to Peltola, even though she was the Democrat. By the final round, 7,595 ballots had exhausted, and Begich won with 51.22% of the remaining continuing ballots.

That’s about 45% of every ballot that ranked a candidate lower in the polling first. A Hafner voter is not automatically a second-choice Democrat, or, in this case, a vote against a Republican.

One caveat matters. In 2024, Hafner was a 1% candidate. This year he’s polling at 8–9%, almost certainly because he’s the only “D” on the ballot. His 2026 voters are more likely to be straight-ticket Democrats, and those voters may rank Hill second at higher rates than his 2024 voters did.

The Projection

The scenarios below start from Siena’s first-round numbers, set aside the 5% undecided or other, and test three assumptions about where Hafner’s voters go. In all three, McDermott’s voters behave like Howe’s did in 2024.

The 2024-repeat scenario lands close to AARP’s 57–43 result. Siena’s published 53–47 is close to the total-consolidation scenario. In other words, the most Hill-friendly public poll already assumes nearly every Hafner voter ranks him. Even then, Begich wins.

What Hill Has to Do to Win

Independent voters are the group this race turns on, and the only public breakdown of them comes from Hill’s own pollster. That campaign poll, conducted by Democratic firm GBAO, had Hill leading among independents by 16 points. This poll results comes in a state where roughly 60% of Alaska’s registered voters (nearly 380,000 people) aren’t registered with either party. 

The final two weeks, therefore, need to be a persuasion campaign, not a turnout or transfer campaign, if Hill wants to win. And he still has room to grow. Only about a third of voters had any opinion of him in August, and after hearing his positions on affordability and housing, voters broke in his direction (though that result came from Hill’s pollster).

Instead of working solely on turnout, Hill needs to make his case to undecideds and Democrats, convincing them that an Independent is their best option. At the same time, he needs to continue to target weak Begich voters. Without some of them, his path to victory, even in Alaska’s ranked choice voting system, is a long shot.

That’s probably why traders at Kalshi have him at 13%: he’s a long-shot, but he has a path.