FAIRBANKS, Alaska - A gleaming $23 million complex of office buildings, dormitories and workshops has risen from the boreal forest just outside town over the last decade, aimed at training workers for a natural gas pipeline that was supposed to snake from the Arctic to serve energy markets around the world and make Alaska rich all over again.
But the pipeline was never built, the victim of a worldwide glut of natural gas that has reduced demand for Alaska's supply. On a recent weekday afternoon, the meeting rooms and dorms were empty, with just one welding class breaking the silence on the Fairbanks Pipeline Training Center Trust's sprawling 63-acre campus.
To make matters worse, the government tax dollars that built and sustained the complex are also in danger, amid pressure to cut spending in both Juneau, the state capital, and Washington. Not surprisingly, fears over what comes next are rising for residents, who saw the training center as the embodiment of their hopes for high-paying pipeline jobs.
"There's a lot of uncertainty out there," said Jim Sampson, a former borough mayor and labor leader who is director of the training center. "You can feel it in the community and see it in the for-sale signs on the houses."
Economic anxiety in Alaska is roiling an already sharp-edged political season here, focused on one of the most competitive Senate races in the country: an endangered Democratic incumbent, Mark Begich, against a hard-charging Republican challenger, Dan Sullivan, a former state attorney general and natural resources commissioner.
The worries start with energy extraction, for decades a pillar of the state's economy that provides about a quarter of its gross state product. These days, Alaska is producing and shipping less natural gas because of market forces, and pumping less oil from the aging wells in Prudhoe Bay on the North Slope, reducing jobs and tax revenues.
In 2012, North Dakota surpassed Alaska in crude oil production, providing a psychological shock to Alaskans long accustomed to thinking of their state as second only to Texas on the energy frontier.
At the same time, federal spending has tightened in the aftermath of the recession, a military drawdown and budget-cutting fervor in Washington. Despite its image of feisty independence, Alaska has long relied heavily on those dollars: It led the nation in per capita federal aid to state and local governments in 2010, the most recent data shows.
That aid helped build roads, buildings and tiny rural airstrips across the state's vast expanses, while also providing well-paying jobs at 20 national parks, preserves and monuments, in numerous wildlife management programs and at nine major military bases.
But bit by bit, economists, politicians and residents say, the realities of the decline of oil here and federal retrenchment are being felt as a kind of economic lethargy: Alaska was the only state where the total number of nonfarm jobs and gross domestic product both fell last year, even as the national economic recovery gained steam, according to the most recent federal figures.
"Things look pretty good, if you're just kind of looking superficially," said Jonathan King, an economist in Anchorage. "It's when you peel back and look at the guy behind the curtain you realize that you're not where you think you are. There's an unsettled feeling up here - when is the party over?"
Those difficult questions about the future are shaping the Senate contest. In a state long dominated by Republicans, Begich, a former Anchorage mayor who won his Senate seat in a tight three-way race in 2008, is widely regarded as an underdog against Sullivan, though many analysts also say the race is very close.
Both men are evoking, in different ways, the rough seas ahead that each insists could imperil Alaska. Begich, a son of Alaskan schoolteachers, asserts that Senate seniority and carefully built relationships will enable him to work across partisan barricades to ensure the state gets its fair share of federal spending.
Sullivan argues that he will protect the next wave of resource development in oil, gas or minerals from meddlesome regulators, the Obama administration and the Democratic leadership in the Senate that he says Begich is beholden to.
Nick Melambianakis, 60, who came to Alaska from Greece during an earlier energy boom that led to construction of the 800-mile Trans-Alaska Pipeline in the 1970s, is among those uncertain about the best way forward.
As Anchorage's Greek festival surrounded him with a syncopated dance beat from the stage and the smell of frying onions, Melambianakis described himself as a Republican, but one who has voted for Begich in the past and is undecided about his vote in November.
"Alaska is a great state, we have a lot of resources, but we need new figures and providers," he said. "But then again, when you're choosing new people, you're not sure. I want to take a risk, but I'm scared."
The Sway of Practicality
Alaska might appear politically conservative, and measured by election results, especially on the presidential level, it is. It is the only state that has supported a Republican for president in every election since statehood except President Lyndon B. Johnson's landslide in 1964.
But many Alaskans say that ideology is in fact a shallow measure of things here, and that hard-nosed practicality - what does Alaska need from the outside world and who is best at getting it - can often hold as much sway.
The late Sen. Ted Stevens, a Republican who lost to Begich in 2008 after 40 years in the Senate, defined the model of rainmaker, many Alaskans say. As his ability to slip federal dollars for highway projects, hospitals and bridges into legislation became legend, he helped fortify Republican dominance at both the state and federal level. In rural areas where jobs, not to mention roads, were few, pork meant progress.
"He knew how to take care of us," said John Penayah, 50, an unemployed construction worker and truck driver, who was born on a remote Alaskan island and came to Anchorage as a child. Penayah, sitting in an Anchorage soup kitchen called Bean's Café as a television blared on the wall, said that compared with leaders like Stevens and former President Ronald Reagan, all politicians seem small to him, and he does not plan to vote in November.
For people like Penayah, the deeper Alaskan political brand is prickly independence and resistance to labels. Registered Republicans and Democrats are both only about half as big a percentage of the electorate here as in the rest of the nation, with independents in the majority. And the Tea Party, for all the panache that former Gov. Sarah Palin gave it in recent years on the national stage, is also less dominant here than in many other Republican-controlled states.
Alaskan voters in 2010 rejected a Tea Party-backed candidate for the Senate who had won the Republican nomination, Joe Miller, electing instead the more mainstream Republican incumbent, Lisa Murkowski, in a write-in campaign. Sullivan easily beat Miller in August's primary, as well.
The candidates for Senate are thus at least partly battling in the arena Stevens created, over questions he would likely ask: Which candidate can best provide? And who has the sharpest elbows to protect Alaska's interests?
A frequently repeated line by Begich on the campaign trail, and a nod perhaps to Stevens, is that the money train of grants and payroll from Washington has barely slowed over the last six years on his watch.
"I'm going to work with whoever can help Alaska - I don't care who they are, where they come from, who their party is," Begich said in an interview. Voters, he added, "recognize what Sen. Stevens did, but they also recognize where we are today."
Sullivan frames his role in a sharply different way, focusing not on bringing federal aid to Alaska, but on protecting the state from what he calls an obstructionist federal bureaucracy led by President Barack Obama, Sen. Harry Reid, the majority leader, and Begich himself.
"The country clearly is going in the wrong direction," Sullivan said in an interview. "The federal government does not try to look at ways to partner with us, but they're trying to put more obstacles and delays in terms of opportunity - so that is an anxiety."
But it is not a fear of too much government that makes for a frequent buzz of conversation at Busy Beans Coffee in Anchorage, near the entrance to Joint Base Elmendorf-Richardson, but rather the opposite - how much might the government shrink, and where?
The total number of active-duty military personnel has declined statewide by about 1,500 from a peak of 24,449 in 2009, according to state figures, and Elmendorf-Richardson is expected to lose hundreds more soldiers next year. But the Pentagon has also announced its intent to base two squadrons of F-35 fighter jets at Eielson Air Force Base near Fairbanks, a move that could bring hundreds of jobs and that Begich trumpets as proof of his prowess.
"It's hanging over our heads," said M.K. Reeder, 23, a barista at Busy Beans whose husband is a second lieutenant in the Army, about the talk of further cuts.
The troubled trajectory of oil haunts Eric Weatherby, 38, a tech worker for an Anchorage company that supplies communications systems to the industry.
Weatherby said he has seen a recent uptick in investment by oil companies on the North Slope oil fields, where he commutes for weeks of work at a time, more than 600 miles from home. But he worries that the improvement could be short-circuited by politics.
He was particularly spooked by a state referendum in August - narrowly defeated by voters - that would have repealed a tax overhaul for oil companies. The overhaul was passed by the Republican-controlled Legislature last year and championed by Gov. Sean Parnell, a Republican, as a way to encourage new production. Critics who pushed for its repeal, led by Democrats, said the plan was far too generous in its tax breaks and incentives for the oil companies.
"All the companies I work for were extremely worried," Weatherby said of the referendum. "We really need to get a hint and go, 'Hey, there's other states and other countries that are charging less taxes and making it easier.'"
Sullivan opposed repealing the tax overhaul, while Begich declined to take a stance, saying the decision should be left up to voters. Yet Weatherby said his vote in the Senate race remained undecided.
A Wave of Newcomers
The long list of things that make Alaska different starts with two: the Arctic Circle, which belly-cinches the state and defines the stark seasons of darkness and light, and the immense stretches of roadless tundra and mountainscape that make human presence seem paltry.
Difficulty in predicting elections is just another part of the terrain, with few reliable polls. But by some measures the historical differences between Alaska and the rest of the nation are also shrinking, amid economic changes and an influx of newcomers, especially young people who are ethnically more diverse, and more likely to want a townhouse apartment in Anchorage than a backwoods cabin.
The Great Recession did not cause widespread pain in Alaska, but it did produce a demographic tide, bringing newcomers like Shanna Zuspan, 37, and her husband, Jarrett, 40. After Zuspan lost his job as a home inspector in Sacramento, California, the couple drove north in 2010 with their son, Jack, who is now 5, looking for a new start in Alaska and to reconnect with family already here. The Zuspans brought their Democratic leanings, and their wounds, with them in relocating to Anchorage.
"We still feel vulnerable because of what we experienced down there," said Zuspan, who works for a small consulting firm, helping organizations plan and apply for grants.
In 2009 and 2010, as hard times bit across much of the nation, more Americans came to Alaska and stayed than at any time since the mid-1980s, according to state figures, along with the most foreign-born new residents in a decade. The political implications of this wave are uncertain, because not all of the newcomers are Democrats like the Zuspans, others may not vote at all, and some are likely to go home after a hard winter or two. But the trend, demographers said, bolsters a deeper shift that is making Alaska more diverse and more urban.
The Hispanic population, which tends to vote Democratic, is growing faster here than in the nation as a whole. In a nod to the new reality, a Mexican consulate opened in Anchorage in 2008. A state report last month said Alaska now has 110,000 people in their 20s, more than at any time since the early 1980s, and that they are more ethnically diverse than older residents, suggesting further demographic shifts.
Alaskan natives, generally supportive of Democrats, are also growing as a percentage of the population, as are women, who also tend to vote more for Democrats than men do. The Anchorage area, which already has more than half the state's population, and which twice elected Begich as mayor, is expected to be the fastest growing part of Alaska over the next 30 years, according to state estimates.
"Both Alaska and Anchorage within it are evolving," said Eddie Hunsinger, the state demographer. "I can't really say whether they're becoming closer or farther apart because they are integrated."
But an echo of Alaska's past is reverberating, too, in ways that could help Sullivan.
Alaska's greatest years of net in-migration coincided with the building of the Trans-Alaska Pipeline in the 1970s - a vast engineering project that required highways, housing for thousands of workers and, of course, the skilled builders themselves, many of whom came from the oil patch states of Arkansas, Oklahoma and Texas.
Between 1974 and 1976, more newcomers arrived than in any two years between the end of World War II and 2012, according to state figures. And as with the Zuspans, the wave of newcomers brought their politics with them - in this case, a more conservative outlook that pushed Alaska further to the right in the 1980s and especially since the 1990s.
Now the children of the pipeline cohort are of voting age, and may be keeping to the conservative values they grew up with, some political experts say. A yearlong survey by Ivan Moore Research, an Anchorage group that works with Democrats and Republicans, found in 2004 that younger voters in Alaska described themselves as conservative in higher proportions than elsewhere in the country. That suggests the political legacy of the pipeline era, said the firm's owner, Moore.
But whether the new or the old Alaska determines next month's election remains far from clear. Either way, Shanna Zuspan, a representative of the new, wants greater stability in the rocky present.
"We just have this economy based on one industry, oil, and it's declining," said Zuspan, who worries she may have to move again if jobs continue to disappear. "I think this could be the first election that people have recognized the uncertainty out there, and are thinking about it."