The Democrat Mary Peltola has led in every public poll since she declared for the U.S. Senate election this year in Alaska, a state that Donald Trump won by double digits in 2024. A former U.S representative, Peltola is a culturally moderate mother of seven whose top issue is fish. Unlike the candidates dominating national headlines, she’s neither a social-media sensation nor a charismatic progressive. Most people outside Alaska have never heard of her. That’s a problem from a fundraising perspective—but an asset from an electoral one. If Peltola is a little boring, that’s exactly why she’s the Democrat most likely to flip a red-state Senate seat this year.
Peltola does not resemble a stereotypical Democratic politician. Both her biography and her political positions suggest someone attuned to the importance of environmental preservation—and to the simultaneous economic value of resource extraction. She has worked as a commercial fisher and a spokesperson for a gold-mining company, a job she quit after the company spilled toxic waste into local waters. Peltola, who is Yup’ik on her mother’s side, then became a tribal lobbyist and worked at a tribal fishing commission. Fishing is a huge part of her political brand. Her campaign slogan in every federal race she has run in has been “Fish, family, freedom,” and one of her top policy goals is to enact stricter regulations, favored by small-scale fishers, on the use of dragnets by industrial fishing companies. At a time when even local races can easily get subsumed by national politics, this approach has helped Peltola come across as singularly focused on Alaska-specific issues—as she puts it, “Alaska first.”
In 2022, Peltola won two statewide elections: first in a special election to become Alaska’s at-large House representative, and then again by a larger margin that November, even as Republicans gained seats in the House. In 2024, when Kamala Harris lost Alaska by 13 points, Peltola lost her seat by fewer than three points.
During her two years in office, she followed a middle lane on mining and drilling. She pushed for the Biden administration to approve the Willow oil-drilling project in 2023, and when the same administration canceled oil and gas leases in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, she became the only Democratic sponsor of a bill to overturn the decision. But she opposed a Republican move to use the bill to remove environmental protections from part of the Bering Sea. She also urged the EPA to block a locally unpopular copper-mine-development project.
This middle lane has not satisfied everyone. After she signed an amicus brief endorsing a local gold-mine development, a tribal group opposed to the mine declared, “We elected Representative Peltola to represent us, and by signing this amicus brief, she is going against us.” The League of Conservation Voters, a powerful environmentalist group, maintains a list of her 14 “anti-environment votes” during her two years in Congress.
Peltola, who declined to be interviewed for this article, has taken moderate positions on other cultural issues. She has said she owns 176 long guns, and in her 2024 run, she became the first Democrat in four years to secure an NRA endorsement. (No Democrat has gotten one since.) And she was one of six Democrats to vote to condemn Joe Biden’s immigration policies.
Her independent image has, however, won the admiration of Alaska Republicans. When Don Young, the longtime Republican Alaska congressman, died in 2022, some of his staffers endorsed Peltola to replace him over former Governor Sarah Palin. So did Republican Senator Lisa Murkowski. (Peltola returned the favor, supporting Murkowski in that year’s Senate race.) John-Henry Heckendorn, an Alaska political consultant who helped recruit Peltola for federal office, told me that those are “the kind of odd-couple endorsements that really catch people’s attention.” When Palin lost the congressional race, even she couldn’t help being charmed by the experience, texting Peltola in the days after the election that she was “a real Alaskan chick. Beautiful and smart and tough.”
The caricature of a bipartisan centrist is someone who avoids controversy and bold ideas, standing helplessly athwart the people’s will for change. Peltola is not that. This cycle, her two campaign pillars are affordability and “fixing the rigged system.” In the latter category, she’s proposing term limits, a ban on members of Congress trading stocks, and a crackdown on waste and foreign influence. On the affordability side, she offers some ideas generally beloved by centrist intellectuals (permitting reform, a larger child tax credit, “right to repair” laws) alongside other, more economically irresponsible proposals that they’d dismiss as “slopulism,” such as eliminating taxes on Social Security and the first $92,000 of income. This combination—economic populism and cultural moderation—comes across to many voters as sensible. It also distinguishes Peltola from most would-be Democratic populists, who are reluctant to give an inch on progressive social-policy commitments.
All of these traits—her bipartisanship, her cultural moderation, her focus on local issues—come at a cost: Peltola gets less attention and fewer donations than other similarly situated Democratic Senate candidates. By Alaska standards, the nearly $9 million Peltola raised from January to March is a huge haul. But it’s minimal compared with the $40 million war chest that Texas’s James Talarico has built up, or with the more than $16 million that Maine’s Graham Platner has raised. Even Alexander Vindman, the star witness in Trump’s 2019 impeachment trial, has significantly outraised Peltola in small donations for his much unlikelier Senate candidacy in Florida.
Donors are different from the average voter, Raymond La Raja, a political scientist and co-author of a book about small-dollar donors, told me. “First and foremost, they’re partisans,” he said. Their ideal candidate is a doctrinaire progressive in a high-profile race who seems to “have a chance of beating Darth Vader.” Dan Sullivan, the incumbent Republican whom Peltola is challenging, has one of the lowest in-state approval ratings of any senator, but he’s basically unknown outside Alaska. And Peltola is anything but doctrinaire. “You don’t see people who are more moderate, or people who tend to just focus on policy, getting a lot of small donations,” La Raja said.
But Peltola’s relative fundraising disadvantage is really a symptom of her success at being the type of candidate who appeals to Alaska voters more than to national Democrats. She looks poised to pull off the upset. Public polls released in the past few months show her leading Sullivan by five to seven percentage points. Bettors on Kalshi and Polymarket believe that she has a higher than 60 percent chance of winning, better odds than Talarico in Texas, Sherrod Brown in Ohio, Joshua Turek in Iowa, and Vindman in Florida.
Alaska has some quirks that make a candidate like Peltola especially viable. Since 2022, the state has had open, nonpartisan primaries. The top four candidates advance to the general, which features ranked-choice voting. This design benefits a candidate with cross-partisan support. Because there is no partisan primary, Peltola doesn’t have to worry about being outflanked by a more left-wing candidate who appeals to the Democratic base. And the ranked-choice system is designed to benefit candidates who are acceptable to a majority of the electorate. In the 2022 general election that sent Peltola to Congress, the two Republican candidates combined for 59 percent of the first-choice vote, but so many voters ranked Peltola second that she still prevailed.
Still, Peltola’s past overperformance and current lead in the polls suggest that the big mystery of how to win over Trump voters is not such a mystery at all. Peltola is succeeding by catering to the deeply held views of the citizens of her state—not just the ones in her party.