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The key word in their name is "Independence." Note that this does NOT say "independent." These are not, and never were, moderates or independents in any way. They were extremists.

They advocated for decades for Alaska to retreat from statehood. They were pretty much the Alberta separatists, only without the foreign sponsorship. Weirdly, it's debatable how core the separatism was to them. It was never formally adopted in their party platform--although they consistently called for a referendum.

By the time I encountered them in the 1990s, they were a right-wing/libertarian extremist party with all the platform planks one would expect.

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At their height of power, the AIP managed to capture Alaska's Governor's Mansion, but that's really overstating it. Wally Hickel was always a fairly vanilla Republican--more moderate than some, more of a jerk than many--and it always seemed to me that he had co-opted the AIP to facilitate a right-flank attack on the party and, running for re-election in 1994, he switched back to the GOP.*

I saw lots of examples of this when I was a journalist. Sour-grapes candidates who were behind in a primary switching to AIP to unfurl their RW flag. None of them talked about secession.

*I met Wally a couple of times.

#election #alaska #uspol