Mary Peltola is putting the “fish” back in kitchen table issues
Other Senate candidates this year are focusing on gas prices or health care costs. But to Peltola and many other Alaskans, fish are a crucial and overlooked policy issue touching everything from affordability to labor to the role of money in politics. Ahead of the primary on Tuesday, August 18, she’s been traveling around the state making her case. The top four candidates in the nonpartisan ranked-choice voting primary will advance to the November general election. Peltola is all but guaranteed to advance to the general.
Recent polls show a competitive race. An early August Alaska Survey Research poll showed Peltola with 50.8 percent compared to Sullivan’s 49.2 percent in the final round of ranked-choice. A late June poll from The New York Times and Siena University has Sullivan with a two point lead in the initial round of ranked-choice, with five percent of respondents undecided. Both the Cook Political Report and Sabato’s Crystal Ball classify the race as a toss-up.
“As someone who grew up salmon fishing on the Kuskokwim River with my father, I know firsthand that fish is more than food—it’s central to Alaskans’ way of life,” Peltola said in a statement. “That’s why I will fight tooth and nail to restore our fisheries to abundance, and that means doing whatever it takes to ban factory trawling and reduce bycatch, deliver relief for Alaska fishermen and communities that are suffering the fallout of fishery collapse, and save our fish. I will stand up to anyone—including the factory trawling lobby and Lower 48 special interests—to fix the rigged system in D.C. and put Alaska first.”
“Alaska is actually well known for having some of the best managed fisheries,” said Liz Nussbaumer, a program officer in the Seafood, Public Health, and Food Systems Project at Johns Hopkins University. Despite that, she said, Peltola’s proposed fisheries policies are welcomed by many, particularly in the deregulatory environment of the Trump administration.
Sullivan, meanwhile, has received nearly $280,000 from the trawling industry. One of his largest contributors is Trident Seafoods, which has a history of environmental violations. In 2011, the Department of Justice announced that the company would pay $2.5 million to resolve Clean Water Act violations. In 2018, Trident Seafoods was fined $300,000 for underwater piles of fish by-product near its processing facilities. This June, Sullivan introduced a bill to reduce bycatch, but experts say it was similar to a bill Peltola introduced during her time in the House, which Sullivan did not support.
—Emma Janssen
Outside Washington
DeBoyer’s statement accompanying James’s announcement naming him to the lieutenant governor spot, Bridge Michigan reports, said that “Michiganders face a clear choice between socialism and a bold new direction rooted in freedom, opportunity, and prosperity.” Given that Benson is pretty moderate, this “socialism” reference may indicate that DeBoyer will try to use Democrat Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed (who also does not identify as a socialist, but is considerably more progressive than Benson) to argue that all Democrats are radicals.
A new report from State Futures, a nonprofit focused on state policy in response to “federal authoritarian overreach,” paints a vivid picture of life in the Trump era: So far in 2026, the report finds, lawmakers have introduced 242 bills in 32 states to try to protect residents in response to the administration’s immigration policies. Of these, 53 have passed. Two, notably, have been vetoed—one by Virginia Democratic Governor Abigail Spanberger, who said banning ICE from courthouses, schools, and hospitals “would effectively require security guards and, in some cases, local law enforcement be placed in the untenable position of choosing between violating state law or federal law.” The other veto came from Democratic Governor of Colorado Jared Polis, who said a bill allowing people to sue ICE agents for violating their rights contained overly narrow language.
Data for Progress released a new poll finding that “voters think they are more likely to become homeless than a millionaire or billionaire, and reject the idea that billionaires obtain their wealth through innovation and hard work, instead seeing them as exploitative and a sign of a dysfunctional, anti-working-class economy.” There’s impressive cross-party agreement on that: Not just 67 percent of Democrats, but 65 percent of Republicans say they’re more likely to become homeless than become a billionaire—interestingly, only 54 percent of independents or third-party respondents agree with that. They’re more likely than either Democrats or Republicans to say they “don’t know” or are “more likely to become a billionaire.”
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