Senate Candidate Kelly Tshibaka on Election Day in Alaska

BUCK: We have Kelly Tshibaka with us now. She’s running for Senate up in the great state of Alaska. Kelly, thanks for calling in. Appreciate you making the time. I know it’s a big day.

TSHIBAKA: I’m so happy to be with you. And thanks for making time for me.

BUCK: Tell us about what everybody, not just across the country, but certainly in your home state of Alaska ’cause we got a great Alaska audience listening to this. What do they need to know about why they should go with you as the real Republican here over Lisa Murkowski as the fake Republican. Maybe I just gave too much away, but go ahead.

TSHIBAKA: I think you just summed it up. But here’s like three top reasons. Number one. We need someone who’s going to block all those Biden nominees that are harmful for Alaska, instead of having a senator who has confirmed nearly all the radical nominees, including those leftist environmentalists who are working to shut down our state and pursue the energy annihilating agenda that’s killing our fossil fuel industry and driving up gas prices.

Number two, we need a senator who isn’t bought and paid for by dark money from D.C. insiders and radical environmentalists and Big Tech and instead have a senator who represents our Alaska voices and won’t be bullied, silenced, and controlled by the D.C. insiders.

Future generations of Alaskans should not have to pay the price for reckless spending. As your next Senator, I will be committed to protecting and restoring Alaskans’ freedom by fighting to cut unnecessary spending. pic.twitter.com/R7KjYXJ9AQ

— Kelly Tshibaka – Text KELLY to 20903 (@KellyForAlaska) August 15, 2022

And I’d say number three, we need a senator who doesn’t say one thing in Alaska and do the opposite in D.C. and instead votes for what’s in the best interests of Alaska, like now Senator Murkowski says she supports our Second Amendment interests but then she goes back to D.C. and works with Joe Biden and the Democrats to vote for red flag laws, and she loses her NRA endorsement and votes for gun control. We love our guns up here. We have to look both ways when we walk outside our door because grizzly bears coming. So, we need a senator who just talks straight.

BUCK: Clay, I told you about the grizzly bears, man.

CLAY: Yeah, I know.

BUCK: They’re everywhere.

CLAY: They really are everywhere. We’re talking to Kelly Tshibaka. She is a candidate for Alaska Senate. All right. So explain. Buck and I were trying to make sense of this ranked choice voting system. And obviously we are, you know, borderline intelligent on this issue, and that’s probably an exaggeration. We don’t really understand it that well. So today, is it right that there will be four people who advance to the general election? And if people are listening to us right now and they are big supporters of yours, what’s the best way to vote, both now and in November, from a ranked choice perspective?

TSHIBAKA: I can break it all down super simple. Today, vote Kelly. And in November vote Kelly number 1. Leave the rest of your ballot blank. The ballot will not be disqualified. You won’t lose your vote. And this is what’s actually happened. Project Veritas just exposed undercover videos that Lisa Murkowski colluded with her campaign staff to deceive Alaskans and manipulate this change in our election system so she’d have some kind of limited chance of being able to maintain the 41-year Murkowski monarchy. They hand down our Senate seat like a birthright. But it doesn’t belong to the Murkowskis. It belongs to Alaska.

So what we’re doing is we’re fighting to get our Senate seat back in the hands of Alaskans. She wouldn’t win this primary if it was a party primary. Her career would be done today. But instead she wants to drag it on to November, and I’m confident we’re gonna retire here. The way that we do that is very vote Kelly number one in November. If we get 50 percent on round one, we win. Otherwise what happens is number four drops off, number three drops off. Here subsequent votes go and get resorted into person one and person two. It will be head-to-head between me and Lisa Murkowski. But I’ll tell you, I’ve talked to thousands of Alaskans, even common-sense Democrats are supporting us because they can’t line up with Joe Biden and Lisa Murkowski. So I think we’re gonna win this. We just have to wait to November to do it.

CLAY: Okay, Kelly, that’s important because a lot of people out there listening to us right now are used to Republican primaries and Democrat primaries. If you were running against Lisa Murkowski today for the Republican nomination in Alaska, you would trounce her, right?

TSHIBAKA: That’s absolutely correct. She knows it; I know it; the data shows it. That’s why she had to manipulate a change in the election system so she would survive.

BUCK: We’re speaking to Kelly Tshibaka. The primary is today in Alaska. She’s running for Senate there. And, campaign, I see you’re a Harvard Law grad from 2002, very impressive, by the way. The decision by Murkowski to vote to impeach Donald Trump and to maintain that she is a Republican who did this, what do you think her calculation was? Like, who was she trying to please with that one? What game was she playing?

TSHIBAKA: So when you look at her rhetoric and the things she’s done, I think she has a personal vendetta against Donald J. president whether he’s president or whether he’s just a citizen. The fact is, it’s not constitutional to impeach somebody who’s no longer holding office as president or in any position in the government. It’s just a personal vendetta for her.

But Lisa Murkowski can’t really hold herself out as a Republican when she’s voting with Chuck Schumer 20% more often than she votes with Ted Cruz and when she’s voting with Joe Biden 70% or more of the time, she’s often that tie-breaking vote on nominees or on legislation for Joe Biden, just saving Kamala the walk down Pennsylvania Avenue. We all know up here in Alaska that she’s not a Republican. Our Republican Party has actually censured her and removed her from membership 37 the only people who are still pretending she’s Republican really is Mitch McConnell. We can’t figure out why. Because up here in Alaska she looks like a Democrat, she talks like a Democrat, she walks by a Democrat, her campaign is run by Democrats and you noticed by Democrats. That makes you a… that’s right. A Democrat.

BUCK: Wondering, Kelly —

TSHIBAKA: — gonna classify it, that’s what it is.

BUCK: Sarah Palin’s running in a congressional rate up there. Any thoughts on that one? Just, you know, she’s somebody who really put Alaska on the national political map some years ago. Any thoughts at all?

TSHIBAKA: That one’s gonna be a tight race. That is to close and finish or vacant congressional seat from when our congressman passed away earlier this year, and that one’s gonna be decided today. And she has a very tight race with another Republican who’s been endorsed by our Republican Party. So we’ll see what happens up here. They’re splitting the vote and then there’s a Democrat in that race. And that’s the ranked choice election. So we’re gonna see how that plays out. Today she’s got a lot of support, but so does her challenger, her Republican challenger. We’ll see what happens.

CLAY: Kelly, you’ve got a law degree, as Buck just mentioned. I do, too, and we’ve talked a ton about this Mar-a-Lago raid by the FBI. What was your reaction when you heard it happened?

TSHIBAKA: You know, it’s something that Buck and I share in common is our background in national security. I spent over a decade doing oversight of FBI. I come from the watchdog world. So not only from my past as a recovering lawyer, my past as doing oversight of the FBI. This is very disturbing. We’re seeing that there’s violation of the equal treatment of law and we’re seeing a concern here, at least we need to ask questions why they didn’t use least intrusive means. That’s a Fourth Amendment protection. We need to ask why didn’t they just endorse their subpoena to ask for documents instead of going in with a warrant and invading a home and flipping over things and looking in safes and people’s clothes.

These are the kind of questions we need to ask because it looks like a politicization and weaponization of law enforcement against political enemies and opponents. And they’re not doing that against other people who are political friends and allies. And that’s concerning. So it’s time for Congress to ask some hard questions. It’s time to hold DOJ and FBI officials accountable. And there’s lots of ways to do that.

CLAY: Kelly, good luck today. Good luck in November. I’m sure we’ll talk to you again. She is Kelly Tshibaka. She is running for the Alaskan Senate seat that is currently occupied by Lisa Murkowski. Thank you for the time.

TSHIBAKA: Thanks. And I’m at KellyforAK.com if people want to learn more. Have a great day.

BUCK: Thank you.