Carpetbagger Alert: AK GOP Working With Lower-48 QAnon Election Denier to Kill Ranked Choice Voting
AK GOP Chair Warfield and the Alaska Republican Party are making a deliberate choice to import a Lower-48 anti-Muslim, QAnon-supporting, election-denying carpetbagger to tell Alaskans how to vote.
Alaska Republican Party Chairwoman Carmela Warfield has found her new political bestie in MAGA activist Scott Presler. According to recent social media posts, Presler is coming to Alaska with a stated mission to defeat Ranked Choice Voting and somehow pass the SAVE America Act. Warfield, true to form, is welcoming him with open arms while the Lower-48-based Presler tweets his thanks to her and begs his 2 million followers to give her a follow.
Presler is a key operator in the far-right MAGA movement. He first came to prominence in 2017 as a coordinator for the "March Against Sharia" rallies organized by ACT for America. The Southern Poverty Law Center designated them as an anti-Muslim hate group and reported these marches attracted white nationalists, neo-Nazis, and antigovernment extremists united by anti-Muslim animus.
Reportedly, he once spoke at an event that also featured Nick Fuentes, the white nationalist and Holocaust revisionist with close and cozy ties to President Donald Trump, and who Rep. Jamie Allard once "accidentally" hash-tagged in a Facebook post.
Pressler (to nobody's surprise) is a full-blown election denier and a major figure in the "Stop the Steal" movement who has spoken at rallies across the country, regurgitating Donald Trump’s lies about non-existent election fraud in the 2020 election. He attended the January 6 rally and posted a video describing the resulting attack on the U.S. Capitol as the "largest civil rights protest in American history."
Even worse, Media Matters for America documented that Presler promoted the QAnon conspiracy theory in dozens of Instagram posts in 2018 and 2019.
Notably, Pressler, who is gay, briefly worked with the Republican Party of Virginia.
A 2023 report from Politico Playbook confirmed his time with the Virginia GOP ended abruptly in 2016 after he engaged in sexual activity inside a Virginia Beach office the RNC shared at the time with the state party. Naturally, Pressler enjoyed the sex so much that he posted explicit pictures of the encounter on Craigslist.
Maybe it's too punchy, or perhaps I'm overthinking it - but the AK GOP is almost certainly making a catastrophic strategic error by elevating Scott Presler while the ink is barely dry on the Craig Valdez indictment. Maybe they can put in place measures to ensure their office space is protected. 🤷🏻♂️
Anyway, Presler and Warfield have a very clear agenda for our state. First, they want to defeat Ranked Choice Voting because non-partisan election reform empowers voters and minimizes the influence of extreme partisans. Second, they want to pass the SAVE America Act to enact transparent voter suppression. This proposed legislation would harm rural Alaskan voters, require strict documentary proof of citizenship to register to vote, and create unnecessary barriers that statistically target marginalized communities. That all of this relies entirely on the exact same election fraud lies Presler has built his entire career on is unsurprising.
The TL;DR is that AK GOP Chair Warfield and the Alaska Republican Party are making a deliberate choice to import a Lower-48 anti-Muslim, QAnon-supporting, election-denying carpetbagger with a history of an explicit office-based sex scandal to tell Alaskans how to vote.
Alaskans voted for Ranked Choice Voting twice, and it is my most sincere hope that we will firmly defend it against any carpetbagger trying to break our democracy.
