FISH WILL NOT decide the midterm elections in November, but they aren’t irrelevant either. Whether Democrats win back the Senate depends in no small part on the race in Alaska, which depends in no small part on fish. The state’s first big Senate debate, on Kodiak Island on September 12th, was devoted to fisheries. Dan Sullivan, the Republican incumbent, suggested that dwindling salmon is “probably the most important issue facing Alaska”. Mary Peltola, the Democratic challenger and an Alaska Native,
FISH WILL NOT decide the midterm elections in November, but they aren’t irrelevant either. Whether Democrats win back the Senate depends in no small part on the race in Alaska, which depends in no small part on fish. The state’s first big Senate debate, on Kodiak Island on September 12th, was devoted to fisheries. Dan Sullivan, the Republican incumbent, suggested that dwindling salmon is “probably the most important issue facing Alaska”. Mary Peltola, the Democratic challenger and an Alaska Native, debated Mr Sullivan while wearing rubber boots. “Fish is in my blood,” she proclaimed.
Alaska is an unusual state, with nearly 740,000 living in a territory more than twice the size of Texas, and it has unusual politics. Mr Trump won Alaska by 13 points in the most recent presidential election, yet the Senate race is a tossup, with The Economist’s electoral model giving Ms Peltola a 54% chance of victory. That is in part thanks to the state’s unique political culture and Ms Peltola’s particular appeal. It is also because Alaska is experiencing an outsized impact from White House policies. Democrats hope that combination will lift them to victory.
America’s 49th state has long favoured moderates and cross-party collaboration. In 2010 Lisa Murkowski, Alaska’s other Republican senator and a centrist, lost to a Tea Party candidate in the primary, then won the first write-in Senate campaign in more than 50 years. The ruling majority in the statehouse is a “tri-partisan” coalition of Democrats, Republicans and non-partisans. Alaska is the only state that combines a non-partisan primary with ranked-choice voting. “When it comes down to it, parties really don’t play an important role,” says Gary Stevens, the state Senate president who worked alongside Ms Peltola in the legislature in the early aughts.
Ms Peltola is a product of this environment. She first won statewide in 2022, when she beat Sarah Palin, a former governor and Republican vice-presidential nominee, to represent Alaska in the House of Representatives. Ms Peltola and Ms Murkowski endorsed each other that year. Mr Sullivan’s campaign ads try to portray Ms Peltola as a puppet for “Lower 48 liberals”, but she often bucks her party—the National Rifle Association supported her in 2024. And in a country so eager for authenticity that Democrats swooned, temporarily, for Graham Platner, an oysterman in Maine, Ms Peltola has a surfeit of it. She captained her first fishing boat at 14 and lost her husband when he crashed flying a bush plane bearing too much moose meat.
It helps that Ms Peltola is sometimes happy to side with the president. Mr Sullivan, who was first elected in 2014, argues that Ms Peltola and a Democratic Senate majority would restrict leasing and drilling in the Arctic. “My opponent would ally herself with the anti-Alaska energy groups in Congress, who will do what they always do: shut down Alaska energy,” he said in Kodiak. Ms Peltola has released a pro-oil ad in which she promises to “work with Donald Trump to unlock more land and more development”.
But on other issues, Ms Peltola criticises the effect of Mr Trump’s policies on Alaska, if not Mr Trump himself. Despite the state’s oil riches, Alaskans are particularly affected by pricey fuel, which raises the cost of heating rural villages, transporting goods and people over long distances and, of course, fishing. Fuel “is the number one cost for all fishermen”, Ms Peltola told the crowd in Kodiak. “We are being priced out of petroleum, and we’re being priced out of our lives in Alaska because of the war in Iran.” In the state’s survey of Alaska’s rural communities this summer, average petrol costs were $7.56, almost twice the national average.
Alaskans have also been disproportionately affected by the Department of Government Efficiency’s dismantling of the federal bureaucracy. The Alaska Department of Labour and Workforce Development reckons the state lost nearly 5% of its federal workforce in 2025, a higher share than any state other than Maryland and New Mexico. Federal employment in Alaska is now at its lowest level in more than 35 years.
Take fishing, again. Officials and fishermen rely on data from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) to set seasonal fishing quotas, track fish stocks and monitor the weather. NOAA’s lab on the Kodiak Archipelago, which surveys crab in the Bering Sea, lost a third of its scientists last year to firings, buyouts or early retirements, according to Mike Litzow, its former director. The administration’s hostility towards the federal bureaucracy also, ironically, increased the lab’s administrative burdens. To survey crab “people have to travel to Dutch Harbour to get on the boat,” explains Mr Litzow. “That requires something like 12 layers of approval.” Every purchase made with a government credit card was scrutinised. “Someone who worked for me had a credit card packet with 15 purchases for the month, and the packet was 385 pages of documentation,” he recalls.
Ms Peltola has so far raised about twice as much money as Mr Sullivan and is spending heavily, presenting herself not as a Democrat but a local. “For Mary Peltola,” one campaign ad declares, “no party, no politics gets in the way of what Alaska needs.” In such a big state, with many remote communities, Kodiak’s fishermen were pleased to see their candidates show up to compete for their votes. Several fishermen at the debate who identified as Republican said they view her as one of them.
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