The Alaska Democratic Party and Democratic National Committee are set to host an emergency virtual town hall Wednesday targeting Alaska Republicans — particularly Sen. Lisa Murkowski — for helping to pass President Donald Trump’s sweeping domestic policy bill.
“Following Murkowski selling out the people of Alaska to give billionaires another tax break, Democrats are holding vulnerable House Republicans and Senate Republicans accountable for supporting Trump/Murkowski’s dangerous budget proposal,” an advisory first shared with NOTUS reads. The “People’s Town Hall” is slated to be held on July 2 at 5:30 p.m. Alaska Standard Time.
Murkowski cast the deciding vote to pass the reconciliation bill, after three other Republican senators voted against it. The moderate Republican has historically been willing to diverge from her party, and even voted to impeach Trump at his second impeachment trial.
But of the four Senate Republican holdouts on the bill this time around, she was seen as the most malleable. In the end, she was the only holdout to vote in favor.
She changed her mind after negotiating with Senate leadership for Alaska-specific carve outs, including on the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program’s state cost-share provisions, a tax break for Alaskan whaling captains and a $50 billion rural hospital fund. Despite her vote to greenlight the bill, she later called it “one of the hardest votes I have taken during my time in the Senate.”
“Let’s not kid ourselves. This has been an awful process — a frantic rush to meet an artificial deadline that has tested every limit of this institution,” Murkowski wrote in a statement posted on X where she also expressed her preference for the House to alter it further and send it back to the Senate for another vote. “While we have worked to improve the present bill for Alaska, it is not good enough for the rest of our nation — and we all know it.”
The bill extends the GOP’s 2017 tax cuts, which are set to expire at the end of the year. To help pay for it, Republicans are offsetting federal pay into SNAP with state cost-share and making substantial changes to Medicaid.
While Republicans have argued the changes to these social services don’t qualify as cuts, experts have suggested millions of Americans will lose benefits. The Congressional Budget Office estimated 11.8 million people could lose their health insurance over the next decade and almost 3 million could lose their food benefits.
Eric Croft, the chair of the Alaska Democratic Party, said in a statement that Murkowski, GOP Sen. Dan Sullivan and Rep. Nick Begich are all invited to the town hall “to explain their actions and hear from Alaskans. If they show, we will ask them to defend their votes. If they do not, we will talk about the impacts of this bill on all of us.”
The town hall is another instance of Democrats using the legislation to criticize Republicans, particularly ahead of the 2026 midterms. Both Begich and Sullivan are up for reelection next year.
Democrats have been loudly trumpeting that the bill cuts social safety net benefits and taxes in a way that disproportionately helps the wealthy — points that are all likely to be made at Wednesday’s town hall.
Democrats will “throw everything we have into the fight for affordable health care and access to food assistance programs nationwide and against tax giveaways to billionaires,” Croft said.
“Donald Trump, Lisa Murkowski, and Dan Sullivan sent a clear message to the American people today: Your kids, your job, and your elderly relatives don’t matter. This is one of the worst bills in the history of Congress. It’s a massive scheme to steal from working folks, struggling families, and hell, even from nursing homes — all to enrich the already rich with a tax jackpot,” Ken Martin, the chair of the Democratic National Committee, said in a statement.
“That’s why the Alaska Dems are now convening an emergency town hall to let the people of Alaska know exactly how Murkowski and Sullivan sold them out. Billionaires don’t need a break — working Alaska families do,” he wrote.
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Nuha Dolby is a NOTUS reporter and an Allbritton Journalism Institute fellow.