Alaska News

State Senate candidate cites praise from a United Way official, then changes her mind

An Anchorage candidate for state Senate removed a United Way employee's words of support from her campaign website this week at the request of the organization, which is barred by law from participating in political campaigns.

Natasha Von Imhof said she didn't know it would be a problem to post the quote from June Sobocinski, a United Way of Anchorage vice president, endorsing Von Imhof's work on an initiative to boost graduation rates.

"Truly, I would never have done it if I had known it was going to be a problem," Von Imhof said in a brief phone interview on Thursday. "I love the United Way -- that's the last thing I want to do."

Von Imhof, a Rasmuson Foundation board member and former Anchorage School Board member, is running in next year's Republican Party primary for the South Anchorage seat currently held by GOP Sen. Lesil McGuire.

McGuire announced Monday that she would not seek re-election and would instead support Von Imhof, who officially launched her campaign Tuesday, though she's been talking about running for more than a year. Von Imhof will face a second Republican candidate, Jeff Landfield, in next August's primary, while the Democratic field so far includes two candidates as well, Forrest McDonald and Roselynn Cacy.

The quote Von Imhof placed on her newly launched website attested to her work on the leadership team of United Way's 90 percent by 2020 campaign, which seeks to raise Anchorage's high school graduation rate.

"I can say that Natasha has a deep and genuine passion for our community, she always comes to the meetings prepared, and is willing to do the hard work necessary to move an initiative forward," Sobocinski was quoted as saying.

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A self-described concerned citizen, Steve Pratt, said he noticed the quote and highlighted it in his own Facebook post late Wednesday. Noting that Alaska residents would receive their Permanent Fund dividends Thursday, he wrote that there would be "no more Pick, Click and Give or charitable contributions of any kind" to the United Way, citing the popular program that allows dividend recipients to earmark portions of their checks to nonprofits.

"It's time to shut down United Way (of Anchorage) and start over as a non-partisan, non-political-endorsement agency," Pratt wrote. "Too bad. They have done good work until corruption took over."

Pratt, an Anchorage resident who lives in a different Senate district, said in a phone interview on Thursday that he was surprised any nonprofit group would offer an endorsement or lend its name to a political candidate. Both Sobocinski, as a United Way executive, and Von Imhof, as a former school board member, should have known better, he added.

Von Imhof, Pratt said, is "not a rookie."

"She's been through political battles. She knows what the rules are. This isn't somebody who's coming off the street," said Pratt, who ran against Rep. Bob Lynn in the 2010 Republican primary. "As far as I'm concerned, she has no excuse for not following the rules -- not just the formal rules but common sense."

United Way of Anchorage responded to a similar post Pratt made to its own Facebook page by telling him that it had asked Von Imhof to remove the quote. In a phone interview Thursday, Michele Brown, United Way of Anchorage's president, said: "We do not endorse candidates, ever. Period."

"Natasha has been working on the 90 percent by 2020 leadership team for a couple of years and she asked for a statement about her work, and that's what she used on the web page," Brown said. "It has been misconstrued as an endorsement, but it was not an endorsement -- it was neither a personal endorsement or an organizational endorsement."

Brown said United Way commonly receives requests from people asking "for their work to be acknowledged," and she added that no one at her organization felt that Von Imhof had misled them about how the quote would be used.

Brown also emailed a two-page, 700-word draft organizational policy on personal political activity. It instructs employees to "maintain a high degree of clarity in fact and appearance about, and a clear separation between, an employee's personal political activities and United Way of Anchorage's positions."

"We have a very clear policy," Brown said. "We're neutral."

Von Imhof downplayed the incident, telling a reporter that it didn't merit a story.

"I work with June and she said something nice, I put it on my website and that was it," she said. "You put a lot of things on your website, and then sometimes you take them down."

Von Imhof's website still includes a description of the 90 percent by 2020 program. But Sobocinski's quote is gone.

Nathaniel Herz

Anchorage-based independent journalist Nathaniel Herz has been a reporter in Alaska for nearly a decade, with stints at the Anchorage Daily News and Alaska Public Media. Read his newsletter, Northern Journal, at natherz.substack.com

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