Mary Peltola decision to run for U.S. Senate was a mistake. Despite her popularity, she is likely to lose her race against Sen. Dan Sullivan, and would have been better off running for governor, a race she was favored to win. This isn’t just a personal opinion; a poll conducted earlier this month showed Peltola neck and neck in the Senate race, but leading the governor’s race by 31%.
Against Sullivan, she faces serious challenges. She is running against an incumbent, is starting with less campaign funds and is a weaker candidate than initial polling indicates. Also, Alaskans have figured out the ranked-choice voting system. Peltola won’t be able to take advantage of it as she did in 2022.
Incumbents have a natural advantage when running for reelection. Sullivan has made no major mistakes and will point out that he has worked with President Trump to open ANWR and other areas for oil exploration while protecting funding for the military bases in Alaska. He isn’t immune to criticism, but he’s done enough for Alaska to win reelection.
She is not the political savior of the Democratic party in Alaska, no matter what the campaign ads will try to tell us for the next 9 months.
Peltola can’t make the same claims. When she ran for Congress in 2022, she was a political blank slate, but that is different now. She will have to defend her lack of accomplishments as a one-term Congresswoman who voted with Joe Biden and Nancy Pelosi most of the time. Her association with these two unpopular Democrats will be used against her, as was done by Nick Begich when he defeated her in 2024.
Then there is the financial issue. In Alaska’s last two senatorial elections, the winning candidates both spent over 10 million dollars. The most current FEC reports show that Peltola has only $48,093.05 on hand, while Dan Sullivan has almost ten times as much at $4,760.088.63. They will both need to raise significantly more money, but Senator Sullivan has a ~ 4-million dollar head start. While contributions to Peltola’s campaign have probably increased dramatically since she announced her candidacy, money has a huge impact on how elections are run, and Peltola is trailing.
Then there is the fact that Peltola is a weak candidate. Her political career started in the State House, where she represented Bethel from 1999-2009. She left statewide politics in 2009 to become a member of the Bethel city council and work as a lobbyist – hardly the resume of a political heavyweight. After 15 years, she came out of retirement to run for Congress in 2022, and was able to use RCV to steal an undeserved win from two more popular Republicans.
That was a neat trick, and it allowed her to sneak into Congress, but it is her only accomplishment of note, and she has been talking about it ever since, like one of those one-hit wonder rock bands that write one good song but are unable to ever do so a second time.
The table below shows how Democrats in Alaska have performed against Republicans when running for national office for the past three election cycles, including two conducted with RCV.
Looking at the results, you can see that Alaska tends to favor Republicans for national office. The only Democrat victory in the past three cycles was Peltola’s 2022 race. People remember her victory, but forget that in the first round, she got fewer votes than the combined total of the two Republicans, and Peltola needed the screwy RCV automatic runoff to win the election. In 2024, when she had to defend her seat against only one Republican opponent, Peltola lost. She faces one serious Republican in this year’s Senate race, and Peltola is likely to again lose.
However, this year’s governor’s race is a different story and would have allowed her to strategically use RCV again. There are currently 14 people running for governor in Alaska: 12 Republicans and two no-name Democrats. Mary Peltola is popular enough to win the Democratic primary election in August. Republicans are running 12 candidates, and in Alaska’s open primary, the top four vote-getters advance to the general election. This means that there will likely be three Republicans and 1 Democrat on the general election ballot, creating the ideal conditions for a Peltola RCV-assisted victory.
Given her big potential advantage in the governor’s race, we have to question why Peltola decided to run for the US Senate. Maybe that was the advice of her hired political consultants. Maybe Peltola likes the lifestyle back in Washington D.C. better than in Juneau. Whatever the reasons, the odds are not in Peltola’s favor. Should she lose this Senate race, Alaskans will finally recognize that Mary Peltola is just what she appears to be. She is a nice person, but no Joan of Arc. She is not the political savior of the Democratic party in Alaska, no matter what the campaign ads will try to tell us for the next 9 months.
The views expressed here are those of Greg Sarber. Read more Sarber posts at his Seward’s Folly substack.
