The Alaska Republican Party is moving quickly after Republicans in the Alaska Senate confirmed Gov. Mike Dunleavy’s picks for two vacancies in the Senate on Saturday.
Sens. George Rauscher, R-Sutton, and Cathy Tilton, R-Wasilla, encountered no significant opposition from Republican lawmakers and were sworn in after a secret ballot vote on Saturday morning in Anchorage. They replace former Sens. Mike Shower and Shelley Hughes who are running for lieutenant governor and governor, respectively, in 2026.
Rauscher and Tilton resigned from their House seats immediately after the vote and were promptly sworn in as senators.
Their resignations open two vacancies in the Alaska House, and the Alaska Republican Party has set a deadline of 5 p.m. on Dec. 4 to receive applications from local Republicans interested in representing the approximately 36,000 Alaskans in House District 26 and House District 29 in the Matanuska-Susitna Borough.
Party officials are slated to meet Saturday at the Best Western Lake Lucille Inn in Wasilla to pick three applicants for each seat to send to Dunleavy for consideration.
Those meetings are not open to the public, according to the party’s request for nominations.
Dunleavy has until Dec. 29 to make a final selection and is not required to pick from among the party-nominated candidates.
Legislators expect him to act sooner than the deadline in order to allow House Republicans time to take a confirmation vote and for the new lawmakers to settle in before the regular legislative session begins Jan. 20.
Rauscher and Tilton each said they don’t have a preferred nominee at this point.
“Every day, somebody else calls me to ask whether they should put their name in,” Rauscher said, adding that the short deadline means interested people should hurry.
Tilton said she’s aware of “five really great individuals” in her former House district. “At this point in time, I don’t have one I would say I would endorse … they are all excellent,” she said.
Both Rauscher and Tilton said they are keeping their House staff members as they transfer to the Senate; Rauscher said he’s been busy handling the administrative duties that involve shifting from the House to the Senate, including shifting offices and handling paperwork.
“We’re hitting the ground running,” he said.
In a short-lived moment of comedy, Rauscher’s listing on the official legislative website displayed the picture of former Rep. Sara Rasmussen, R-Anchorage, instead of Rauscher’s proper headshot.
Before the legislative session begins, Rauscher and Tilton will join four other Republicans in choosing a new Senate Minority Leader, to replace Shower, to become the face of the Senate’s six-person minority caucus. No date has been set for that decision.
The Senate is led by a bipartisan 14-person caucus that includes five Republicans and nine Democrats.
In the House, Republicans didn’t wait for their vacancies to be filled before selecting a minority leader to replace Rep. Mia Costello, R-Anchorage, who stepped down from the role last month.
On Saturday, the House’s minority Republicans picked Rep. DeLena Johnson, R-Palmer, as Minority Leader and Rep. Justin Ruffridge, R-Soldotna, as Minority Whip.
The House is divided between a 21-person multipartisan majority and a 19-person Republican minority. Of those 19 Republican seats, only 17 are filled, and several members were absent from Saturday’s vote due to prior commitments.
On social media, Reps. Kevin McCabe, R-Big Lake, and Jamie Allard, R-Eagle River, denounced the choices, saying in part that they were untimely.
In a news release announcing the vote, Johnson said, “I don’t want to see the House Republicans go too long without leadership in place. If we had at least one of the leadership positions filled, we could have carried on but without either position we were lacking in key tools to move forward and be effective as a caucus.”
James Brooks is a longtime Alaska reporter, having previously worked at the Anchorage Daily News, Juneau Empire, Kodiak Mirror and Fairbanks Daily News-Miner. A graduate of Virginia Tech, he is married and has a daughter, owns a house in Juneau and has a small sled dog named Barley.
Alaska Beacon is part of States Newsroom, the nation’s largest state-focused nonprofit news organization.
