A larger, more diverse, and competitive candidate pool coincided with the introduction of open primaries and ranked choice voting.

In Alaska, 2022 was the year of the Independent. Freed by the state’s return to open primaries, nearly half of Alaska candidates running for governor, lieutenant governor, US House, and US Senate chose not to identify with either major party. As a result, the pool of candidates in those statewide races actually came close to mirroring Alaska’s majority-Independent electorate.

This and other changes may be the result of a decision by Alaska voters in 2020 to adopt a new election system pairing open primaries with ranked choice general elections. While many factors affect a candidate’s choice to run for office, we hypothesize the new system opened the door to candidates who wouldn’t have chosen to run otherwise, leading to a more diverse candidate cohort and more competitive races.

Sightline analyzed seven primary election candidate pools from 2010 to 2022. The focus was on statewide candidates. (Our analysis of state legislative races is coming in a separate article.) We found the 2022 statewide candidate cohorts looked different from earlier cycles’ pools in the following ways:

More candidates identified as Independent and third-party.

More Alaskans ran for office overall.

No statewide primaries involved just one candidate (so, more of these races were actually competitive).

More women ran for office.

CANDIDATES DRIFTED FROM THE MAJOR PARTIES

In 2022, the primary candidate pool came closer than ever to reflecting the independence of Alaska voters. About 58 percent of Alaskans are registered Independents, not affiliated with any political party, and another 5 percent align with third parties or political groups. But historically, candidates in Alaska have had far less freedom than voters to define their political identities.

In 2018, Jason Grenn, an Independent, was aiming for his second straight term in the state House. Grenn was one of just a few Independent candidates running, which was odd given that more than half of Alaska voters were Independents, too. The demand was there, but the supply was not. What could explain the disconnect?

Getting through an election is difficult for any candidate, but Alaska statute at the time put up particularly high barriers for candidates who didn’t identify as Democrat or Republican. Getting on the primary ballot required candidates to, well, run in a primary. And there were just two choices: the Republican primary or the Democratic primary. But you couldn’t just hop into a primary and run as an Independent. State statute required all candidates to register as a voter with the political parties running the primary they wanted to enter. On the Republican side, only Republicans could run. The Democrats had a slightly bigger tent, sharing their primary with registered Libertarians and Alaskan Independence Party candidates. (Note: The Alaska Independence Party is different from the “Independents” described in this article. Its primary goal is to hold a statewide vote for secession.)

Grenn had been a registered Republican, but as a fiscal conservative with progressive social views, running as an Independent felt more authentic. As a political hybrid, he had no natural home in the primaries. The only path was to get his name on the general election ballot through a petition process. And so, just as he had in 2016, he waited outside coffee shops and went door to door gathering enough signatures from registered voters in his district to get into the general. Grenn ultimately lost the three-way race, his old seat going to a Republican with less than half the vote. He now represents Alaskans for Better Elections, the nonpartisan group that led advocacy for Alaska’s new election system.

“I could honestly say I had conservative street cred, but I wanted to be more honest about who I was as a candidate and where my values were,”

Grenn said in an interview this month.

“Th...