By Delcenia Cosman

Reporter, Homer Independent Press

In the highly-contested race for Alaska’s sole seat in the U.S. House of Representatives, Democratic candidate Matt Schultz’s eyes are squarely focused on incumbent Republican Nick Begich III.

Schultz made a campaign trail stop in Homer on Tuesday and sat down for an interview with the Homer Independent Press. Later that afternoon, he held a meet-and-greet with members of the community at the new Team Moderate location in Kachemak Center on Pioneer Avenue. 

Team Moderate is not a local organization endorsing certain candidates in the upcoming election races; rather, it is a cooperative local campaign headquarters that allows candidates to share office space and volunteer resources. 

Serving a growing community

Schultz was the second candidate to register as Begich III’s opponent in the 2026 U.S. House race, according to reporting by the Alaska Beacon. He’s served as the pastor of Anchorage’s First Presbyterian Church for about 15 years.

“I got into the work of ministry because I wanted to be of service to my community, and that community has grown and grown and grown, and the scope of what I hope to do in my service has expanded,” he said. “That’s why I’m jumping into the race — I want to be of service to the whole state and to the country.”

Schultz said his interest in public office grew as, through his ministry and serving people in need, he saw that much of that need was caused by certain public policies that had been put into place. 

The straw that broke the camel’s back, he said, was the passage of the One Big Beautiful Bill Act.

“Nick Begich sent out self-congratulatory emails, crowing and boasting about it. Meanwhile, people in my church were coming to me — not just the church, the whole neighborhood — saying ‘I now have lost my health care and my ability to feed my family because of what this bill is going to do to us,’” Schultz said. 

“People, including my own family members, were coming up to me in tears and saying, ‘Why won’t somebody protect us?’ And I felt the duty to raise my hand and say, ‘I will.’”

Campaign issues

Schultz lists a number of issues on his campaign platform, including lowering the cost of living in Alaska; protecting health care access; protecting Constitutional rights and limiting government overreach; protecting Alaska’s environment and access to subsistence; supporting Alaska’s job market and creating opportunities to allow young people and young families to stay in-state and thrive. 

The two biggest pieces of that puzzle, for Schultz, are affordability and health care.

“Going toward the goal of absolutely everybody is covered, we have to be willing to have Congresspeople that are not pre-purchased by the health care industry, to be willing to … look at this issue not as a business issue … but rather, how do we make sure this health care industry serves the people?” he said. “If we can shift that, that makes a lot of these other things (related to affordability) start to fall into place.”

Schultz’s campaign website also reflects ideas like “let’s build a fairer Alaska together.” He said Tuesday that that phrase is “really important” to him and creates a great opportunity for bipartisan cooperation.

“I think a lot of people who identify as Republicans would agree that we need taxes, we just want to make sure they’re collected and spent fairly. They would probably agree with me that we need some type of social safety net — we just want to make sure that it’s constructed and applied fairly. And we all agree that we need election reform, but we want to make sure it’s done in a fair way,” he said. 

“The hard part comes in, what do we mean by ‘fair?’ I think when we actually sit down and talk to people across the aisle of what it means to be fair, it’s a great opportunity — because it gets thrown around as a sound bite — to ask them what they actually mean and how it impacts people.”

He referred to Begich III’s co-sponsorship and support of the SAVE Act, which if implemented would make it drastically more difficult for Alaska residents to vote by mail. 

“That seems to be something he thinks is a fair thing to do, but I would really encourage Nick to go to rural Alaska, where they depend on mail-in voting in a way that people on the road system don’t, and ask if they think it’s fair to remove their opportunity to vote,” he said. 

For these and other issues that Alaska continues to grapple with, including the Alaska LNG project or the tug of war over renewable energy sources versus reliance on oil, Schultz said he frequently falls back on criteria established by former Gov. Jay Hammond.

“It’s a four-part formula: number one, is it environmentally sound? Number two, does it pay for itself? Number three, do most Alaskans want this? And number four, does it benefit all Alaskans? That last one is where we are really falling short these days,” Schultz said. 

“For most of the projects out there, I think it’s really important we run it through that criteria, and if we truly want it to benefit all Alaskans, we make sure that from the very beginning of day one, there is a representative seat at the table for all Alaskans.”

Faith, politics and finding common ground

Schultz said he has “a lot of familiarity with politics,” having previously been involved with policy writing, other campaigns and having served at the local level on community councils. 

When asked about how his background influences his Congressional aspirations, he said he’s a strong supporter of the separation of church and state.

“I will never vote for something just because my faith directs one way or the other — it would always be based on what is legal and what is supporting people’s rights,” he said.

“However, my faith background is heavily steeped in the shared ethics that just about every religion and all the agnostics and atheists I know have of, we want to take for each other and we want to love our neighbor as ourselves.”

Schultz said he looks forward to mending relationships both across the political aisle and with America’s allies if he is elected. 

“I’m really proud that, within my church, we have people of every political stripe and we work together on things that truly, deeply matter,” he said. “I do it in my neighborhood, I do it in local politics and I will certainly be doing it in Congress as well.”

Schultz said he finds joy in discovering common ground with people who disagree with him or his politics.

“Not only do I have experiences and skills at building bridges … I also truly love to do that,” he said. “By the end of a conversation or two, we realize there’s a little bit of overlap, and we can build on that. We can plant some seeds in this little strip of land that we both share together and work on something truly meaningful.”

During the COVID-19 pandemic, Schultz was part of a major project to convert an Anchorage hotel into long-term housing for workforce-ready people who were experiencing homelessness. Agencies involved included the Rasmuson Foundation, the Municipality of Anchorage, the State of Alaska and “lots of businesses and nonprofits … from all sorts of political backgrounds.” The project was completed in 2022.

“It took a lot of coordinating and building these relationships across the aisle,” Schultz said, adding that he worked with neighboring residents, Anchorage voters and municipal representatives to understand the potential impacts of the project on surrounding neighborhoods, as well as why and how municipal funding was being used for the project.  

“The heart of it is there are in the ballpark of 130 rooms in that hotel that are now homes for people who were living on the street and wanted to and were able to work,” he said. “The one hurdle for these folks was a simple, decent, safe place to live.

“It’s good for the economy …  for public safety … for tourism. But more than any of those things, it’s simply the ethical and the right thing to do, because it is helping people have a life where they can thrive.”

Schultz said he would bring that same energy to the House.

“Day one, I’m going to find people who disagree with me and reach out to them intentionally and say, let’s demonstrate to the country that this is the time to be healing and cooperating,” he said. 

Running against hopelessness

He also intends to work to restore stability to international relations with Europe and Canada that he said have been damaged by the actions of the Trump Administration. 

“They didn’t move away from these relationships, they were shoved away. It was due to the actions of an unstable president, and instability does not lend itself very well to ongoing allyship with another nation … to cooperation … (or) to good business, whether it’s international or local,” he said.

Schultz said that some of the ways that Congress can provide stability is to utilize the War Powers Act to prevent the president from freely starting wars and to use the constitutional checks and balances in place “to make sure that all of his actions are legal.”

“I believe it’s certainly important that Congress act within the boundaries of the Constitution, but the Constitution has built into it the responsibility to check the executive office’s power,” he said. “Nick Begich has just been absent from that job.”

A generic ballot organized by FiftyPlusOne, an online platform that gathers and processes data from “every poll released in the U.S.,” shows that as of Wednesday, Democrats hold a nearly 6% approval rating over Republicans. When asked whether he saw Begich III as being vulnerable in Alaska, Schultz answered, “100%, absolutely.”

Citing increasing issues with health care and food security, as well as “skyrocketing” prices, he continued, “It’s absolutely because of what President Trump has chosen to do, and Nick Begich stood silently by while this harm has been done. So yeah, he’s very vulnerable at the moment, and is only going to become more vulnerable as time goes on.”

There are 15 candidates running in the U.S. House race, but Schultz said he doesn’t feel pressured by the volume of competition.

“My eyes are squarely focused on Nick Begich and preventing him from doing any more harm,” he said. “He is my primary opponent, and my secondary opponent is hopelessness itself.

“When young people, especially, come up to me and say, ‘Does it even matter who we send to Washington? Is there any hope of changing all this?’ — I’m running against that hopelessness to show them, yeah, we can come together and build a beautiful future.”

Learn more about Schultz’s campaign platform at www.mattschultzforalaska.com/.