[laughs] I guess, yeah, how, how, how do you sort of see the ranked choice voting dimension playing into this on the Senate side?

Yeah.

It, uh, since the first ranked choice election, general election in 2022, what we've seen is a pretty high percentage of voters bullet voting a- and not ranking.

They'll only choose one or maybe two candidates, and so we don't see a lot of transfer, particularly in when there's multiple candidates of a, um, of a single party.

So we don't see complete transfer and, and f- there is some vote loss on that.

Um, with, in the Senate race you have Senator Dan, who's the incumbent on the ballot.

He's listed as incumbent Republican.

... what could be the fallout from that?

Of both sides

...

Mary Peltola are, who Mary and Dan are.

Um, that's not the issue.

And, and really the divide...

I, I mean, it's a close race, I should say.

Like right now polling has them very close together, Peltola with a small lead even, but it's within the margin of error of the polls, so it's pretty much neck and neck.

So, so, uh, and what are the, I mean, what are the m- m- motivate, if there are motivating issues up there?

And like what style of politics would you say that engenders? Like, is it a moderate state or would that be over interpreting that coalition? Because it doesn't seem to only necessarily elect moderates.

No, and what's interesting is that there's real regional divides in the state.

You actually, it feels a lot of times like there's multiple states within Alaska itself.

So you flip the lower 48, lower 49s normal in Alaska to a large degree because in Alaska, rural Alaska votes Democratic.

There's a few exceptions, mainly on the North Slope, where...

Residents rely heavily on the oil and gas industry, and so there's more of a Republican presence on there.

But by and large, rural Alaska votes Democratic.

What does campaigning for political office in Alaska look like? From what I understand, you can't just do a bus tour of the state.

What are you hearing about this investigation, James?

Yes, I've been working on following up on that reporting all this week, and I haven't been able to verify it.

I talked with Dan J. Sullivan, or Petersburg Dan, as he's known for the town that he lives in.

Um, he says he has not received a subpoena.

I talked with the woman who helped him set up his campaign.

She said she hasn't received a subpoena.

I talked with Mary Peltola's campaign, with the Alaska Democratic Party, with the Alaska Division of Elections.

What do you think Mary Peltola's chances are here? Because we still think of, and maybe we're wrong to think this way, of Alaska as a red state.

So how does that work? How do you bring together the fire services and other parties and communities in ways that can make a difference?

Well, so there's a couple of things that is really until very recently, the wildfire models actually treated the built environment usually as unburnable.

Right.

There was two that there was no way to model what happens when fire hits the urban area.

Right.

And this is changing.

And this is a good illustration of that, which I'll talk to in a minute.

So maybe take us through whether there's an actual case study or a hypothetical case story of how this works in a practical sense when you're there in California or somewhere else.

...101 version of the, the gas pipeline?

Yeah.

So, so right now the pipeline has all its permits.

They could start construction assuming they got financing for it.

If they find loans, investors, that kind of thing, there's nothing that's keeping them from going ahead with it right now.

The trick is, in order to make that project pencil out, in order to get investors, you've gotta sell the gas at the bottom of the pipeline for a price that people are willing to buy.

And people in this case is Japan, South Korea, Thailand, et cetera, countries in Asia that need natural gas.

Anything else gonna be on the ballot this, uh, this fall that you're looking at?