On September 2 Bill Walker and Byron Mallott threw aside parties and announced they had merged tickets for Governor and Lt. Gov.
We asked Walker what decided that move for them.
Walker: “It was not any one single thing, it was a number of things, but one of the things that was clearly involved was the polls showed for quite some time that Alaskans were looking for a new governor. We looked at that and we looked at the three way race, how that would turn out, did some head to head polls with just two of us in the race and it just made sense that if we keep saying and doing what we’re doing we’re not going to give Alaska a new governor so we sat down and had a discussion and said can we put our state ahead of politics and ahead of parties so that’s what we did.”
He also said the move never could have been done without the actions of Senator Hollis French and Craig Fleener.
