Alaska gubernatorial election, 1998

The 1998 Alaska gubernatorial general election took place on November 3, 1998. The election resulted in a landslide for the Democratic incumbent, Tony Knowles, who had won the 1994 gubernatorial election by only 536 votes. [http://www.cnn.com/ALLPOLITICS/1998/08/17/ap/alaska/index.html?eref=sitesearch] [http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9C01E0D7113FF937A35752C1A96E958260] Knowles was the first incumbent governor to attain re-election since 1978. [http://www.cnn.com/ALLPOLITICS/stories/1998/11/03/election/governors/alaska/index.html]

Knowles won re-election with 51% of the popular vote, while the official Republican candidate, John Lindauer, only received 17% of the vote. Lindauer’s campaign faltered late into the race as a result of his failure to disclose that his wife, a wealthy Chicago lawyer, had financed the bulk of his campaign. [http://www.cnn.com/ALLPOLITICS/stories/1998/11/03/election/governors/alaska/index.html] As a result of this revelation, the Republicans withdrew their support of Lindauer [http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9C01E0D7113FF937A35752C1A96E958260] and backed Robin Taylor, the runner-up of the Republican primary, as a write-in candidate. Taylor received 21% of the vote. Due to the lateness of this change, the Republicans unsuccessfully attempted to obtain a court order to delay the election. [http://www.cnn.com/ALLPOLITICS/stories/1998/10/30/alaska.delay.ap/]