The start of my 2016 Independent Expenditure effort …

Starting today I am running some radio ads and, on Monday, will be putting up a digital campaign to support two candidates in the coming Republican primary. The ads will run through election day next week.

I explain my support for David Eastman in the House District 10 (Susitna River Drainage and Wasilla) Republican primary here.

I explain my support for Craig Johnson in the Senate District L (South Anchorage) Republican primary here.

This is what political types call an “Independent Expenditure” (IE) effort, meaning its on my own dime and independent of the candidate’s campaign.  Quite frankly, to me its simply a continuation of what I do every day on this blog and elsewhere — talk about what I think is important to Alaska from an oil, gas and fiscal policy perspective — this time put in the context of a choice among candidates.

Because this type of effort costs me a bit to do and is in the context of a campaign, under Alaska law the costs and details of the effort are required to be made public.  You can find the filings related to the effort by searching APOC’s records here.

I engaged in a similar effort in the 2014 election cycle which I discussed here.  As I explained at the time:

Rather than sit around and continue to complain [about where the state was headed], I am going to put some of my money where my mouth is in an effort to change that dynamic going forward.

Like everything else where a person advocates for a position with which others disagree, the 2014 effort had its good parts and some not so good.  Like any first political campaign, a lot of it was a learning experience.

Now I am going to do it again, for the same reason and hopefully applying some of the lessons I learned the first time.  To me, one of the marks of whether you believe in something is whether you are willing to put your own money where your mouth is.  Some do that by running for office and I think the world of them for doing that; this type of effort is the way I have chosen to do it — to this point.

For what its worth, here is Casey Reynolds’ take on both the last effort and this in this week’s Friday in the Sun column, a regular feature of his The Midnight Sun blog.  He teased the piece with the title, “Keithley back in the game.”  I have bold/italicized what I think ultimately was the most important point about the last, and what I hope won’t be — because others will understand the point in the middle of the effort — this time.

At It Again — Fiscal conservative advocate Brad Keithley spent well over $100,000 of his own money two years ago in a campaign to convince lawmakers that the state was on the verge of a budget crisis, only to see Republican candidates and radio hosts alike declare loudly he was being an alarmist. They of course then acknowledged he was right the day after the election.

Keithley is back at it again this cycle. Word is he will be spending his own money to run radio ads beginning tomorrow to support Wasilla area house Republican candidate David Eastman and South Anchorage Senate candidate Rep. Craig Johnson in their primary battles.

Eastman is advocating a fiscal philosophy in line with Keithley’s and making it a priority in his campaign. Johnson appears to be getting rewarded for his opposition to pressure from the Governor and State Senate to reform the Permanent Fund to provide revenues to cover state services, even though he’s been apart of the supposed problem for years.

As always, we will see how this goes.