The gun-loving Democrat using fish to take Alaska from Trump
Mary Peltola is defying the Democratic establishment on issues like hunting and oil drilling in her Senate campaign against Republican incumbent Dan Sullivan
In most battleground states, Democratic candidates are talking about petrol prices. Or artificial intelligence. Or President Trump. In Alaska, Mary Peltola talks about all of these things. But mostly, she talks about fish.
An enthusiastic gun owner with a collection of 176 rifles and shotguns, the 53-year-old is not your typical Democrat. Yet by championing rural Alaskan concerns — in particular the decline of the wild salmon population — she appears on course to flip Alaska from red to blue, significantly improving the Democrats’ chances of retaking control of the US Senate.
A recent New York Times/Siena University poll put Peltola seven points ahead of Dan Sullivan, the incumbent Republican senator in Alaska, a state which last voted for a Democratic president when Lyndon B Johnson defeated Barry Goldwater in 1964. Its last Democratic senator was elected in 2009.
“Alaska, we can win this,” she wrote on X in response to the poll.
Peltola’s slogan is “Fish, family, freedom” and her proposed solution to high grocery prices is ensuring that Alaskans can keep shooting and fishing for their supper.
“It’s pretty unusual around the world to harvest wild food for your sustenance,” says Tyson Fick, 53, Peltola’s former chief of staff, using a crane to lift vacuum-packed moose meat from his boat on to the quay in Juneau, the state capital. “I know right where this burger came from. It’s gonna make the spaghetti taste better this whole winter.”
Talk to an Alaskan during autumn and the conversation will likely turn quickly to whether they have stocked their freezer for the winter. Supermarkets in rural Alaska have some of the highest prices in America — a gallon of milk can cost $10. Hunting for your own food is a way of keeping costs down. Near Juneau, Admiralty Island has a higher population of grizzly bears than the entire rest of the United States and hunters profit from sausages made from the meat.
Usually in autumn, Fick, a commercial fisherman, would still be fishing for coho salmon. But the season has been declared over because of declining stocks, so instead he has gone on a five-day hunt through the fjords of southeast Alaska. “In the lore of Alaska and the Pacific northwest, everything is all about the salmon,” says Fick.
In Texas, it is beef. In Iowa, it is corn. In Alaska, it is salmon.
For thousands of years — and some archaeologists believe ever since humans first crossed across the Bering land bridge from Asia into North America — Native Alaskans have fished for salmon.
Peltola grew up on the Kuskokwim river, the daughter of a white Nebraskan bush pilot and his Yup’ik wife. Using gillnets, every summer she would fish for salmon.
“I’m a Yup’ik eskimo. Yup’ik people have traditionally eaten about 80 per cent of their diet as fish, and then half of that is salmon. The generic word for fish is the generic word for food: neqa,” she told the Bulwark podcast.
However, the salmon runs have been dwindling in recent years and subsistence fishermen on the Yukon river now face restrictions on their annual catch, jeopardising their way of life.
Wildlife campaigners blame industrial trawling in the nutrient-rich waters off Alaska for the decline. The boats hoover up pollock, an essentially tasteless but versatile whitefish that can be used to mass produce fast-food fish sandwiches or be refined into a paste. The bycatch includes salmon.
In Alaska, bottom trawling is already restricted, but ecologists believe that pelagic trawlers, which are meant to fish in middling depths, also end up dragging their nets along the sea floor. Sometimes, these trawlers have been known to kill orcas.
“It’s a bummer,” says Fick. “Orcas are the coolest whales. But I’m more concerned about the small stuff, the baby fish. The trawlers are not gonna kill off the orca population if they accidentally kill a few. But there’s not a lot of salmon left in the world and we’re one of the few strongholds left. If we don’t follow through with regulation, we’re gonna follow everyone else.”
Peltola’s proposal to ban factory trawling is the central pillar of her Senate campaign. However, the salty language of rural Alaskan fishing communities does not always appear to match the refined manners of Washington.
Peltola appears to have struggled to adapt when she was elected the state’s sole congresswoman in 2022, defeating Sarah Palin, the former governor.
An investigation by The New York Times last month claimed that Peltola used profane language with staff, allegedly shoved one aide during an argument (which was denied by the campaign, who said it was a bump). She also allegedly asked aides to feed crickets to Meatball, her family’s pet chameleon. Her office had a high turnover of staff.
In Juneau, one former colleague told The Times they remembered her “screaming” in a meeting about fish, but said although her behaviour was unusual it was evidence of her determination to protect Alaskan waters. “She gives a shit,” they said.
Rocked by these allegations, the Peltola campaign has put the behaviour within the context of the death of her third husband, Eugene “Buzzy” Peltola, in a bush plane accident in 2023, while she was serving in Congress.
“Mary suddenly and tragically lost both her mother and her husband in the span of a few months in 2023,” said Harry Child, a spokesman for the Peltola campaign.
“At the time of their passing, Mary was parenting kids through their own grief, serving full-time in the US House of Representatives thousands of miles from home, and running a competitive re-election campaign — all while shouldering the enormous burden of grief.
“Like any person who has gone through multiple personal tragedies in the span of a few months, Mary sometimes struggled to deal with her grief. But she treats her staff with respect and care, and she maintains close positive relationships with her staff spanning her nearly 30 years in public service.
“Exaggerating and outright lying about moments from the hardest period of her life, and falsely presenting them as a pattern of behaviour, is wrong.”
When Peltola asked Fick for his advice on whether she should run for Senate, her old friend advised her not to because of “all the lies, all the bullshit” in Washington DC. “I care about her so much. She’s not wealthy and it’s expensive to be there living in a basement apartment,” he says.
Since returning to the White House, Trump has prioritised resource extraction from Alaska. Such moves are generally popular in a state where citizens receive a $1,000 cheque every year from the state’s sovereign wealth fund, which was first established when oil began flowing from the North Slope field in the 1970s.
Trump has allowed construction of the 211-mile Ambler Road through the Alaskan wilderness, opening up new parts of the Arctic for gold, cobalt, copper and zinc mines.
He has also approved a pipeline to move natural gas from the Arctic to an ice-free port — although his recent claim that South Korea would invest $50 billion in the project was met with bemusement by Seoul.
Meanwhile, Trump’s decision last year to rename Mount McKinley after one of his favourite ex-presidents, reversing Barack Obama’s federal recognition of America’s tallest mountain as “Denali”, is unpopular in Alaska, where the native name is used regardless of political allegiance. Both Republican Senators, Sullivan and Lisa Murkowski, have rejected Trump’s name change.
Faced with poor polling in Alaska, Trump has blamed the faltering Republican campaign on a rogue independent — who is also called Dan Sullivan — appearing on the ballot. Under Alaska’s electoral system, four candidates will be running for Senate on November 3. “They put up a fake. It’s a fake Sullivan,” Trump complained in the White House last month.
Peltola’s campaign has denied allegations she collaborated with Daniel J Sullivan Jr, the independent with the same name as the Republican incumbent. Sullivan Jr, who is from the remote town of Petersburg, has also denied colluding with Peltola.
Republicans are unconvinced.
“Anybody who says Decoy Dan in Petersburg won’t really matter are wrong. It could change the election,” says Joe Geldhof, 75, a Juneau-based lawyer and Republican strategist, speaking over a dinner of Alaskan king crab ravioli. “He’s a good guy but he’s being used.”
For now, all the momentum appears to be with Peltola. Republicans may have created a nickname for “Decoy Dan” to differentiate their candidate from the retired schoolteacher, but Democrats have retorted by calling the incumbent Senator “Ohio Dan”. Born in Fairview Park, Ohio, the Harvard-educated lawyer has a promotional video for his campaign in which a hunting guide says the Republican Senator killed a Kodiak brown bear with a single shot — a boast that appears slightly inauthentic to rural Alaskans.
“I don’t think going out with a bear hunting guide and killing a bear makes him a good representative for Alaska,” says Fick. “He’s been larping as an Alaskan ever since he showed up.”
In a state with the highest proportion of Native Americans, some Alaskan communities see Peltola’s campaign as a historic moment — and putting fish at the heart of her pitch is a way of tugging on the heartstrings.
“If I’m not weaving, I’m fishing,” says Rick Tagaban, 36, a Tlingit artist, who has created ceremonial outfits for Peltola’s children. “I love her. She’s a really good person.”
Alaskan voters tend to be less partisan than those in the “Lower 48”, and Murkowski has carved a niche for herself as a Republican who regularly defies Trump. For independents, Sullivan’s main problem is that he is close to the president. By contrast, Peltola has shown she is willing to defy the Democratic establishment on issues like gun ownership and oil drilling.
“I believe gay married couples with adopted children should be able to defend their home with guns,” says Jake Kent, 50, summarising his hodge-podge beliefs in his antique store selling samovars and other trinkets from the state’s Russian past in Juneau.
A delegate for Bernie Sanders in 2016, Kent nevertheless votes for Murkowski because he views her as more independent-minded. Sullivan, on the other hand, he says he cannot vote for.
“This Maga strand has got to go,” he says.
