Alaska's Mary Peltola Running For US Senate. The Odds For 2026 Just Got Happier!
Dems need to flip four seats. How about Alaska?
Get ready to hear this a lot this year: Democrats need to flip four seats to retake the US Senate, and the math this Senate cycle isn’t going to make it easy. The only GOP-held seat in a blue state is Susan Collins’s in Maine, and despite her very concerning record of talking moderate while voting with Trump, we can’t be sure that people in Maine have learned their lesson. Good thing for Dems that Donald Trump is historically unpopular, and is likely to be despised even more before the midterms. But given the small-state advantages built into our strange system, the Senate advantage remains with Republicans.
Fortunately, the chances of Democrats taking back the Senate just improved a bit yesterday with Mary Peltola’s announcement that she’ll be running against incumbent Republican Dan Sullivan. Peltola is the most popular Democrat in Alaska, and had been considering running for governor because current Alaska Gov. Mike Dunleavy (R) is term limited. Despite Trump winning Alaska by 13 points in 2024, Peltola has a pretty good chance of beating Sullivan and becoming the first Alaska Native — though not the first, second, third, or fourth Native American — elected to the US Senate while she’s at it. (She already gained that distinction in the House when she won the special election to replace Rep. Don Young, who died in office.)
Peltola knows that she’s running in a super-red state, but she also knows that Alaskans love being mavericks, at the risk of reminding you of the turd whose political comeback Peltola foiled in the 2022 general election. Her announcement video puts such a distinctly Alaska spin on the old “running against Washington insiders” trope that she actually pulls it off, a rare achievement considering what a cliché it is. Heck, we even like her slogan: “TO HELL WITH POLITICS … PUT ALASKA FIRST.” (She’s also revived her 2022 slogan, “fish, family and freedom.”)
And if anyone can lean into the argument that Donald Trump hasn’t done diddly to bring down high prices, it’s an Alaskan. Even in the best of times, some parts of the state have Gold Rush-style inflation, because The Groceries must be brought in by boat or bush plane. In the video, Peltola says, “It’s not just that politicians in DC don’t care that we’re paying $17 for a gallon of milk in rural Alaska. They don’t even believe us.” Dear readers, I had to fact check that myself, and it is pants-frozen-off TRUE, or at least it was in the peak inflation of 2021, when that was the price of a half-gallon.
It’s a darn good ad for what it aims to do: Remind Alaskans of their independent image by invoking Republicans who are fondly remembered there, like Young and the late Sen. Ted Stevens, even if both names make Yr Wonkette start growling. The bit about the $17 milk is prefaced by a very effective note of nostalgia, with the line (over archival footage of fishing boats with huge catches), “Growing up, Alaska was a place of abundance. Now we have scarcity. The salmon, large game and migratory birds that used to fill our freezers are harder to find. So we buy more groceries, with crushing prices.”
Peltola points out that in the good old days, pols like Stevens and Young defended funding for public broadcasting (Alaska’s remote areas often have no other source of local news and emergency alerts) and for disaster relief, an increasingly important concern even if she doesn’t say the dread words “climate change” or “sea level.” Alaskans know all too well, and they know Trump doesn’t give a rat’s ass. Then she seals the reminder by turning Trump’s own slogan on its head: “It’s about time Alaskans teach the rest of the country what Alaska First and, really, America First looks like.”
That’s damn good.
Sullivan, now running for his third term, won’t be a pushover, but in an election year when people are looking for change, his incumbency and his closeness to Trump may not be as much of an advantage as in the past. He has assloads of money, with $4.7 million in his campaign fund as of the most recent reporting quarter. The National Republican Senatorial Committee is already throwing the expected culture-war crap at Peltola’s announcement with the familiar scares of “open borders” and “men in women’s sports.” (Maybe Peltola should point out that those arguments are tailored for Texas, not Alaska?)
Peltola also had an advantage in 2022 that she can’t look forward to this year: Republicans that year were split between the obnoxious Sarah Palin and the conventionally awful but not insane Mark Begich, and even with ranked-choice voting not enough people chose Palin as their second choice. This year, Sullivan has no serious GOP challenges.
With the state’s Republican leanings, it’s definitely not going to be easy, but Peltola remains very popular even after losing by just two points to Begich in their 2024 rematch — a far smaller margin than Trump’s 13-point win over Kamala Harris. Peltola is likely to sew up the Native Alaskan vote, a small but crucial voting bloc, and Sullivan’s “R” may not count for as much as it might in a year when independence from Trump could be a selling point. It may depend a lot on whether Alaskans want to send their sons and daughters to fight in Greenland.
Peltola also won the endorsement of her friend Lisa Murkowski in both 2022 and ‘24, but shortly after Peltola announced, Murkowski endorsed Sullivan, saying she wanted to preserve the Republican majority in the Senate. She told Alaska Public Media, “We've had a pretty solid team here in the Senate for the past 12 years, so we want to figure out how we're going to keep in the majority. And Dan delivers that.”
Pointing out that Sullivan’s best feature is the R after his name isn’t exactly the most enthusiastic endorsement possible, but that should put to rest any fantasies about Murk ever switching parties. (You three or four people who thought it might happen were fooling yourselves and you knew it.) But if that’s the most Murkowski can say on Sullivan’s behalf, she may not be too enthusiastic campaigning for him.
Peltola is hoping that her image as a good-for-Alaska common-sense moderate will put her over the top, and if that sometimes annoys some of us libs in the lower 48 who wish she was a bit less enthusiastic about keeping the state’s oil industry alive, we’re fine with that, because she’s a hell of a lot better than Sullivan, and because flipping the Senate would be so much better for America than just flipping the House. If you want to send some of your flippin’ Ameros to Peltola, here’s the place!
[New York / NYT / Politico / AP / Mary Peltola for Senate]
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OT but it's appalling.
https://bsky.app/profile/gregsargent.bsky.social/post/3mcd7jzvnbc2t
The DOJ wants to investigate Good's widow.
OT: ICE beat up the president of the Minneapolis City Council. He called it a military occupation.