Future Caucus, a left-leaning political activist organization, announced Jan. 17 that it has selected Alaska State Senators David Wilson (R-Wasilla) and Löki Tobin (D-Anchorage) to participate in a nationwide fellowship program tailored for Gen Z and millennial state legislators who demonstrate a willingness to “build bipartisan coalitions.”
While Future Caucus’ website says it exists to “activate young leaders to bridge the partisan divide and transform American politics,” the organization supports radical, hard-leftist political goals, including extreme elements of the LGBTQ agenda.
Formerly known as the Millennial Action Project, the group recently rebranded its name.
Influence Watch, however, notes that while the group claims to be nonpartisan, it “is funded by left-of-center nonprofit groups and promotes many left-of-center policy goals, especially liberal expansionist immigration policy, government job training programs, environmentalist regulations, and gun control. MAP has organized legislators in Congress and at the state-level to form voting blocs to pass targeted bills.”
While Sen. Tobin is a far-left Democrat, Sen. Wilson is a Republican who hails from the conservative Mat-Su Borough.
In 2022, Republican Party leaders in the Mat-Su unanimously passed a strongly worded resolution condemning Wilson for abandoning GOP values and choosing to help form a left-leaning Democratic controlled bipartisan majority in the Alaska State Senate.
Wilson is one of eight Republicans who rejected efforts to form a GOP majority despite the fact that Alaskans elected 11 Republicans to the 20-member Senate.
Thanks to Republican defectors, Democrats have since controlled key leadership posts and powerful committee assignments, which have effectively undermined and marginalized conservative Republicans.
“David Wilson has betrayed the voters of (Senate) District N after running for office as a Republican,” the November 2022 resolution stated. “David Wilson abandoned the Republican Caucus without warning to the voters in his district who would have urged him to keep faith with them and with the other Republican Senators from the Mat-Su.”
The resolution went on to blast Wilson for joining a “leftist-controlled coalition that is fundamentally at odds with the interests of residents of the Mat-Su Valley.”
Wilson was one of just seven Republicans selected for the Future Caucus fellowship. The other 22 fellows were all Democrats.
In choosing Tobin and Wilson, Future Caucus praised the lawmakers for “their willingness to work across the aisle and their commitment to prioritizing legislative results over scoring personal political points.”
Over the course of the next year, both Tobin and Wilson will have access to trainings aimed at giving them skills to “apply forward-looking approaches to complex policy challenges.”
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“Last year, the average surface temperatures for the Arctic were the sixth warmest since 1900 and summer surface temperatures were the warmest on record,” Tobin said upon being announced as a Future Caucus fellow. “The normalizing of 100-year storms and dying fisheries are only the tip of the melting icebergs. It’s time for bold bipartisan legislation that gets us quickly onto a pathway for a just transition. We can’t afford to not act.”
Wilson was less specific about his goals, saying he was “looking forward to working with other legislators from around the country to find creative solutions to healthcare issues.” He’s also excited about networking and collaborating to “address policy solutions that will lead to positive community outcomes.”
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