News Beat
Why the potential return of a popular Alaska congresswoman could spell doom for Senate Republicans
A popular Alaska congresswoman who narrowly lost re-election last year is expected to jump into the race for Sen. Dan Sullivan’s seat later this month, tossing a firecracker into the already chaotic scramble for control of the upper chamber set to play out in 2026.
Mary Peltola was defeated in her bid to represent Alaska’s at-large congressional district for a second term in 2024, with her Republican opponent winning by slightly more than two percentage points. That defeat came amid a wave election year that devastated the Democratic caucuses in the House and Senate, and showed the congresswoman’s formidable electoral strength relative to her party’s national brand.
Now, Axios reports that Peltola is in the early stages of launching a bid for Senate and is expected to formally do so later in January. Her entrance into the race would firmly place Sullivan’s Republican-held seat into play and give the Democratic Party one more avenue to obtain control of the upper chamber in a midterm sweep — the party is already slightly favored to take the House of Representatives as President Donald Trump’s polling has slipped and Americans remain frustrated by high prices.
Peltola’s strength as a candidate comes partly due to Alaska’s unique electoral landscape. Whereas most House members do not have experience winning statewide races, Peltola’s representation of the at-large district gives her the unique accolade of being one of the few Democrats to achieve significant success in the state, a typically red bastion with an independent streak. She also represents the first Alaska Native to ever hold a seat in Congress.
The Senate currently sits in the hands of Republicans, who have a 53-47 majority in the chamber. Democrats need to win four seats in the chamber to hold a comfortable majority, given Vice President JD Vance’s ability to cast tiebreaker votes for the GOP.
Already, the opposition party’s path to victory is boosted by potential pickup opportunities presented by retiring Republicans in two states: Iowa and North Carolina.
In Ohio, former senator Sherrod Brown is mounting a comeback bid against Sen. Jon Husted, a Republican, while Maine’s Senate race is being closely watched as well due to the grassroots excitement in many progressive circles around Graham Platner, who along with the state’s Democratic governor, Janet Mills, is hoping to unseat the Republican incumbent, Susan Collins.
There’s also a potential pickup opportunity for Democrats in Texas should John Cornyn continue trailing his Republican challenger Ken Paxton into the March 3 primary. Cornyn, a four-term Republican senator who has represented the state since 2002, is tied with another GOP challenger, Rep. Wesley Hunt, in the Republican primary as he faces complaints of insufficient loyalty to the MAGA brand from its adherents.
Democrats are optimistic that Cornyn’s downfall in the primary could make winning the seat in November a real possibility.
In a “blue wave” year, Democrats could conceivably win all or most of these races — though that’s far from guaranteed, and would require a major galvanization of the party’s base.
But a number of issues are trending in their favor, including the continued economic woes presented by inflation and the high cost of living in many parts of the country. Expired federal subsidies for health care plans on the public Affordable Care Act (Obamacare) exchanges are also a major issue for the GOP, which refused to negotiate with Democrats on their expiration in the fall and blew past a deadline to address the issue before Americans began seeing premium costs spike with the beginning of the new year.
Democrats face problems of their own, however, including continued dissatisfaction with a party leadership cohort in Washington, particularly coming from younger Democrats. Though recent electoral successes suggest that the party is getting over the malaise that caused its own voters to stay home or flip to Trump after the withdrawal of Joe Biden in 2024, there’s still a risk that Democrats haven’t sufficiently repaired their image.
DNC chair Ken Martin was sharply criticized last month after he reversed plans to publish an obituary analyzing former vice president Kamala Harris’s defeat in the 2024 election, drawing criticism that Democrats refuse to deal with questions around why the party’s efforts were so disorganized after Biden exited the race.
Peltola’s possible entrance into the race is reverberating around Republican circles, according to Axios, which reports that the GOP’s Senate campaign arm has been preparing for it for months.
Sullivan was also one of three GOP senators, alongside fellow Alaskan Lisa Murkowski, who voted in December for a Democratic bill that would have extended the federal subsidies for Affordable Care Act plans for three years.
Sullivan, like Murkowski, has his own independent tendencies, though they are notably more muted. In 2021, he incurred the president’s ire when he declined to break with Murkowski and endorsed her bid for re-election, rebuking a MAGA Republican bid to replace her with a Trump loyalist the following year.
“We don’t agree on everything, but we make a good team for Alaska,” Sullivan said of Murkowski at the time.
Peltola quickly developed her own alliance with Murkowski after winning a special election for a House seat in 2022 and a second race to serve full term weeks later. They endorsed each other’s respective bids for Congress, and according to the senator have been friends for more than 20 years. It’s unclear how Murkowski’s endorsement will play out this year; in 2024, she endorsed Peltola for re-election while Sullivan endorsed Peltola’s GOP challenger.
