Yukon Party
Nordling was first elected to the legislature in a by-election on February 10, 1986. He sat as a member of the Yukon Progressive Conservative Party until 1991, when he was one of two MLAs, along with Bea Firth, who quit the caucus in protest against the party's change of name to the Yukon Party. Firth and Nordling thereafter sat as the only members of the Independent Alliance. Nordling later rejoined the Yukon Party and ran in the 1996 election as a Yukon Party candidate, but was defeated by Yukon Liberal Party candidate Pat Duncan.