Alaska Senate Candidate Kelly Tshibaka on Beating Murkowski

CLAY: We are joined now by Alaskan Senate candidate Kelly Tshibaka. She is running in the primary that will be going on, and then I want to ask you about this, Kelly, because I think it’s kind of fascinating. I know we’ve got a lot of listeners in Alaska. But you guys have ranked-choice voting, is my understanding, and the top four end up being able to compete.

How will that work? What would you tell people who are listening to us right now that want you to defeat Lisa Murkowski? How should they rank going forward? What is the way that the voting will exist there compared to what a lot of times is different than a usual election?

TSHIBAKA: Well, it’s great to be with you. Thanks so much for having me. I’m calling in from Noorvik, Alaska, which is on the western edge of our state so we’re like a border state with Russia so I’m hoping that the connection stays great. As far as ranked choice this November, the answer is really simple. The top four candidates will go forward.

Right now, it’s basically a head-to-head with me and Lisa Murkowski. We’re both going to the general election. The Democrat has dropped out, and I don’t know who the other two candidates will be because nobody else has raised, you know, more than several thousand dollars. The answer for everybody who wants Kelly to win is: put Kelly as number one and don’t put anybody else.

And I’m confident that we have a really strong chance of winning. The Alaska Republican Party has officially censured Murkowski. They did that before I ever announced my candidacy. She is not allowed to use the Republican name in her election. She’s running to, quote, “keep Alaska independent,” like Bernie Sanders is independent and she’s voting a majority of the time with Bernie Sanders now.

And then the Alaska Republican Party has endorsed me as well as President Trump. I functionally am the Republican nominee and Alaska always votes Republican in statewide elections. So when it comes to this ranked-choice business, if you just vote Kelly and keep everything else blank, I’m confident I will be the number one candidate in the ranked-choice scenario.

Anybody else who drops off, your ballot’s still going to count, we don’t need to worry about anything else. And so a poll that came out last week by Breitbart says that in the ranked-choice scenario I will win by two points currently, and we still have seven months to expand that lead. So it’s looking really good!

BUCK: Kelly, it’s Buck. I just want to say thanks for joining us, and I’ve been very clear. I don’t have to do what some journos — I’m not a journalist — do where they pretend not to support or not on to support one way or another. For me, the Murkowski vote against Kavanaugh is an unforgivable political sin. I’m just wondering, is that what spurred you on to decide that Murkowski doesn’t really represent in any meaningful way the GOP? What got you into this race? Why did you decide that you wanted to do this?

TSHIBAKA: Buck, that’s definitely one that’s really high for many Alaskans. It’s like she indicted him simply for being male. She opposed Kavanaugh, she filibustered Amy Coney Barrett, and then, of course, what the heck did she do yesterday in giving her full support to this justice who bends over backwards to defend child sex abusers and refuses to distinguish between two genders?

For me, this is really concerning as an Alaskan mom of five children. But the vote that absolutely got me into this — I am not a politician by background, even though I am an anti-swamp bureaucracy whisperer — is February 24th, 2021. I watched Lisa Murkowski cast the tie-breaking vote to advance the nomination of this radical environmentalist Deb Haaland to be Biden’s interior secretary.

She said, “This will hurt Alaska; I have many of you givings about it but I’m gonna do it anyway,” and she did this knowing that Deb Haaland plans to champion Biden’s energy annihilating agenda. And with that single vote she killed thousands of oil and gas and natural resource jobs across our state without feeling it at all. But I felt it like a kick in the gut.

Because my mom got an oil job before I was born, and that oil job helped my parents fight their way into working class America because my parents had ended being homeless in Alaska, and they just struggled like heck to get their feet up under them. By the way, it was because of that oil job that they moved into a mobile home and then into their starter home and then had me.

And if it wasn’t for that job I don’t know where our story would have been. So Lisa Murkowski doesn’t feel it, though, Buck, because her dad literally appointed her to that Senate seat. She is the product of Washington, D.C., insiders and the political elite. She doesn’t depend on the resource industry in Alaska. She doesn’t know what it means to depend on other Alaskans.

But I owe everything to this state and to the Alaskans who came around my family and gave us the opportunities we had. When she killed all those jobs, I just thought, ‘She’s not fighting for us. She’s fighting to be popular in D.C., but who’s looking out for all of us Alaskans?” I’m gonna fight for the people who fought for me. It’s just that simple.

CLAY: Kelly, you’ve got an incredible bio. You’ve got five kids, as you just mentioned. Your parents were homeless in Alaska for a time. You were the first in your family to go to college, and then you went on to Harvard Law School. What was the cultural experience like for you to go from Alaska to all the way in to Boston and find yourself at Harvard Law School? I went to law school. It’s a bit of a cultural challenge for anyone. What was that experience like for you?

TSHIBAKA: Well, the best part of Harvard Law meeting my amazing husband who — as a first-generation Congolese immigrant — his dad grew up in a mud hut in the rain forest of Africa. And I love my husband dearly. However, at Harvard Law they don’t take very well to outspoken conservatives from Alaska, and I won’t be bullied, and I won’t be silenced and I won’t controlled.

My dad always said, you know, “Talk straight, kid. They might not like what you say, but they’ll always know where you stand, and that’s called integrity.” And I really value my integrity, and so they posted death threats regularly against me in the student common. I think that’s funny when liberals and leftists post death threats, because, look, I grew up in the land of predators.

When you walk outside your front door, I was taught to look both ways ’cause you don’t know what’s gonna eat you. (chuckles) And so it just didn’t faze me much because, you know, this is Alaska, and you gotta look out for yourself no matter where you’re going — and there’s just not much bite to the leftists’ bark. I guess I’ll put it that way.

And so also learned looking back that going to Harvard Law and having all those death threats really trains you well for running for the U.S. Senate. And that was my experience there. I got trained well, I learned well, but I didn’t stop talking and expressing my conservative views. So that was Harvard. (chuckles)

BUCK: We’re speaking to Senate candidate for the Republican Party in Alaska, Kelly Tshibaka. And, Kelly, I just want to know — ’cause there’s so much focus on the energy industry right now and obviously the price of gas people are paying at the pump is a major concern for a lot of families struggling to make ends meet.

The geopolitical situation because of Russia, Ukraine, and the price of gas in recent weeks and how that’s affected it. What is the truth? Because the Biden administration makes it seem like they’re all in favor. Drill wherever you want! lots of permits out there. You must know in your home state of Alaska what the truth is of this. And how are they making it harder to produce fossil fuel energy and to bring down those gas prices with domestic production in Alaska?

TSHIBAKA: So Biden’s an expert at the blame game. for a while it was Putin’s fault and it’s the meat industry fault, the oil industry’s fault, Republicans’ fault. It’s really only Biden’s fault. When Biden fails at the blame game, he then plays the spectrum of deception game, and this misinformation thing. Well, look. Up here, because we talk straight, we just call it lies.

There is a… Anyone who knows the oil industry knows you can give out the permits all you want or the leases all you want. But if you kind of draw the analogy to a lease in an apartment building, we can sign the papers but if you don’t hand over the keys a paper is meaningless. That’s sort of what they’re doing. They say, “Oh, you know, we gave out the leases.”

But they hold us up with the permits, they hold us with environmental survey reviews. There is an entire process in the oil industry of once you get a lease you’ve gotta get your permits, you’ve gotta get your environmental surveys, you’ve gotta go through exploration development, drilling, before you can actually start producing. So I’ll give you the example of ANWR.

The courts have said open ANWR. Congress has said open ANWR. Trump let us open ANWR. Biden has come in and shut it down, and even though everybody has told him “open it” from courts and Congress, et cetera, Deb Haaland — who’s only there because of Senator Murkowski — has held us up saying she has to redo the environmental impact survey that was previously done and approved over two years.

Remember we’ve done decades of EIS reviews and passed them all. Simply because she wants to hold us up! So we’re cleared and green to go for ANWR, and Deb Haaland’s the one who shut us down. So that’s kind of that spectrum of deception I’m talking about. “Oh, we’ve said, ‘Drill, baby, drill,'” and they’re the ones who are shutting us down. If you want to know the real truth I’ve toured more miles in state than it takes to circumnavigate the globe.

Here I am in Noorvik. I can’t even count the number of people I’ve talked to who in one year have gone completely bankrupt, lost their homes, lost their cars lost their bank accounts, lost everything because of this Biden administration, and all their money that was tied to oil, whether it was jobs, contracts, et cetera, all because of the decisions made by Deb Haaland, confirmed by Lisa Murkowski. So do not believe those lies. I’m sitting up here fighting for the people just like my mom and dad who have lost everything because of them.

CLAY: Kelly, if people want to support you instead of Lisa Murkowski, what would you tell them to do? You told them how to vote. Where would you tell them to go?

TSHIBAKA: We’re at KellyForAK.com, K-e-l-l-y, f-o-r, AK.com, KellyforAK.com.

CLAY: Fantastic stuff.

BUCK: Thanks so much.

CLAY: We appreciate the time. That’s Kelly Tshibaka. She is running as the Republican in Alaska potentially to beat Lisa Murkowski. That’s gonna be a race worth following for sure.