Andrew Halcro

Early life

Halcro was born in San Francisco, California to the owners of a car rental agency in Anchorage, Alaska. He attended East Anchorage High School and received degrees from Willamette University and the University of Alaska Anchorage before taking over the family business, which is now an affiliate of Avis.

Political career

In 1998, he ran for the Alaska House of Representatives as a Republican, winning both the primary and the general election. In 2000, he won the Republican primary by a two-to-one margin and was unopposed in the general election. During his term in office, he earned a reputation as a maverick who sometimes put his foot in his mouth, as when his comments on what he saw as Bush Alaska's dependency on government funding earned him criticism from across the political spectrum. On another occasion, he publicly criticized other Republican legislators for taking too many junkets at taxpayer expense, which resulted in the loss of his position as chair of the House Transportation Committee.

In 2002, he chose not to seek re-election. He returned to Anchorage to run his company and serve on Democratic Mayor Mark Begich's transition team.

Gubernatorial race

Halcro announced his candidacy for the 2006 Alaska gubernatorial election on January 24, 2006. Although he was a registered, lifelong Republican, he ran as an Independent because he did not believe that he could win a party nomination in the Alaska Republican Party's closed primary system given his prior demotion in the Republican Party at the national level and his closer associations with the state Democratic Party since 2002.

His platform included fiscal responsibility, cutting legislators' salaries, increasing the number of trade agreements between Alaska and foreign nations, constructing a pipeline for natural gas, enacting strict campaign finance reform laws, and enacting "equitable taxation."

Although he had originally selected former Republican state legislator and Soldotna mayor Ken Lancaster as his running mate, Lancaster left the race in mid-September, citing health issues. He was replaced with former Anchorage Assemblywoman Fay Von Gemmingen. Halcro's slogan was "ThinkHalcroGovernor", and he aired television advertisements that used humor to emphasize what he said was the presumably nonpartisan nature of his candidacy (although he generally [went] easier on the former Democratic governor Tony Knowles as reported in the Anchorage Press), his availability to ordinary Alaskans, and his stances on the issues. He was, at first, widely regarded as the winner of the several debates in which he participated with Republican Sarah Palin and Knowles.

On Election Day, Halcro received 22,443 votes, or about 10% of the total. Palin won the election with 114,697 votes, or about 48%.

Subsequent career

Since losing his gubernatorial bid, Halcro has used his blog site to discuss Alaska political issues including the Palin's administration, the State Legislature, Anchorage politics, State of Alaska politics and state and national election issues.

In a blog post titled "Why Walt Monegan got fired: Palin's abuse of power", Halcro criticized Palin for firing the state's Public Safety Commissioner, Walt Monegan, after Monegan declined a position as executive director of the state Alcoholic Beverage Control Board. Halcro was the first person to suggest the connection between the firing and Palin's ex-brother-in-law.

He claimed that Monegan went into the meeting with Governor Palin's Chief of Staff to discuss security for the Governor's picnic. That is putting a polite face on the issue. In reality, the Chief of Staff called him into the meeting to terminate his services because of this issue and others.

During the previous week, on July 11, Bill Cockerell, the Security Detail Coordinator for the Governor had met with Audie Holloway to request one additional trooper to help him with security for the picnics. Holloway turned his request down because it would incur three additional hours of overtime. Branchflower Report page 161-171 Cockerell was also upset because he was now being required to go through the chain of command and not go directly to the troopers he needed.

The meeting ended on a 'sour note' according to Holloway. Cockerell complained to the Chief of Staff. Within a week Monegan's services were terminated.

At the meeting between Nizich and Monegan, there was allegedly no demand made to fire trooper Wooten.

In 2015 he headed up Ethan Berkowtiz's transition team following Berkowtiz's election as Anchorage mayor