Alaska’s Senate Race Could Be Decided by Salmon

Perhaps the most important thing to know about Alaska’s Senate race, a close contest between the Republican incumbent, Dan Sullivan, and the former congresswoman Mary Peltola, is that salmon are pretty amazing fish. There’s the swimming upstream, the spawning, and the dying. Bears love salmon. Orcas love salmon. People love salmon. Without salmon, the first Alaskans, crossing the Bering land bridge some fifteen thousand years ago, could not have survived. On a recent trip to Alaska, I was, at various points, fed salmon for dinner, offered salmon as a gift, and given salmon for barter. Directly or indirectly, salmon feeds almost everything in the state, including its politics. Alaska’s bid for statehood, in the late nineteen-fifties, was in part a matter of keeping the hands of Seattle businessmen off local salmon stocks. Business deals are hammered out at fishing retreats. In 2010, a seaplane carrying Ted Stevens, likely the most powerful politician ever to come out of Alaska, crashed en route to a salmon lodge near Bristol Bay. He died wearing his waders.

People in the Lower Forty-eight care a lot about Alaska’s Senate race. This cycle, it has been twice as expensive, per capita, as Michigan’s, and eight times Texas’s. The attention is unusual. In federal elections, Alaska reliably votes Republican; every time Donald Trump has been on the ballot, Alaska has voted for him by ten points or more. But, amid historically low approval ratings for the President, the Democrats are hoping to flip the seat, an essential part of any attempt to wrest back control of both houses of Congress. Trump, meanwhile, is clearly nervous about holding the seat. He recently headlined a rally for Sullivan in Wasilla, a small city north of Anchorage. “This is worth the eight hours on a plane,” Trump said. “And don’t forget, I got eight hours going back, too.”

In January, Chuck Schumer recruited Peltola to run, calling her the “last piece to the puzzle” of his midterms plan. Peltola, the state’s former at-large House member, launched her campaign with the slogan “Fish, Family, Freedom.” To most outsiders, this read as folksy branding for a race that would inevitably be dominated by Donald Trump. But Peltola really wants to talk about fish. Recently, I saw her speak at the elementary school in Utqiagvik, an Arctic town at the state’s northern tip. It was a very unusual stump speech. She apologized for the “super negative, toxic ads” flooding the state, including her own. She mentioned her opponent just once: a flattering anecdote about his advocacy for an oil project she supports. She didn’t mention Trump at all. And even though, compared with the rest of the state, salmon is not so big in Utqiagvik, Peltola still mostly talked about fish.

This piscine primacy is relatively new in Alaska’s politics. In past election cycles, fish have always been one issue among many. But Alaska’s fish are in crisis. In recent years, runs of Chinook, or king salmon, the biggest and most revered species on the Yukon River, have been down as much as eighty per cent from average levels, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. Chum salmon, a more ordinary variety, have had an O.K. year, but they’ve been down as much as ninety per cent. Some species and some areas are worse off than others, but the general trend is bad, including for the state’s other two iconic seafood catches, halibut and crab. As I travelled around the state, I was surprised to find that virtually everyone I talked to was upset about the fish situation. One political consultant explained, “A lot of people come into the state, and they’re, like, ‘Why the hell is Mary Peltola “fish, family, freedom”?’ I’m a white guy who lives in Anchorage, and my freezer is currently full of rockfish, halibut, and salmon that I’ve caught because that’s just what we all do.”

The crisis is worst up rivers such as the Yukon and the Kuskokwim. For many thousands of years, entire Athabascan and Yup’ik villages have subsisted on salmon. Indigenous residents have been delivering emotional testimony at meetings of the North Pacific Fishery Management Council (N.P.F.M.C.), which was created by Congress to oversee the region’s federal fisheries. “I got nine grandkids. My two youngest ones haven’t even tasted fish,” Robert Albert, a local from Tanana, said at a meeting in February. Life and social structures in remote river villages are rooted in summer fish camps, where the community catches, processes, and preserves the salmon that feeds them through the winter. But stocks have got so low that, in 2024, the Alaska government, in conjunction with Canada, shut down fishing for king salmon on the Yukon River and its Canadian tributaries for seven years—one complete king-salmon life cycle. The fish camps stand empty. “I wish I could express to you what it feels like for a man who provided for multiple families to become a beggar,” Carrie Stevens, who testified to the N.P.F.M.C. as a representative of the Council of Athabascan Tribal Governments, told me. Janessa Newman, from Rampart, told the council, “My immediate concern is whether I can morally bring my own children into this world without fishing on the Yukon River.”

Research scientists with the N.P.F.M.C. and N.O.A.A. attribute the die-off, primarily, to climate change. But activists in Alaska have mostly focussed their ire on a type of fishing known as trawling. In the Bering Sea and the Gulf of Alaska, the main target of commercial fishing boats is pollock, a medium-sized, mild fish that swims in fantastically vast schools. Trawlers catch pollock by dragging enormous nets; some open wide enough to swallow a thousand M.T.A. buses. Any net you put in the water will incidentally catch other, non-targeted fish. This is known as bycatch. Every year, the Alaskan pollock industry brings up around twenty thousand king salmon and around a quarter million pounds of halibut as bycatch. Recently, anger at this collateral damage, heightened by the fish shortage, has evolved into a political movement.

On Facebook, the group Stop Alaskan Trawler Bycatch, launched in early 2020, has close to sixty thousand members, almost a tenth the population of Alaska itself. It calls for a ban on trawling. “You know how ‘Tiger King’ came out during lockdown and got big? The Facebook group was the same thing,” David Bayes, who moderates it, told me. Peltola, who is Yup’ik and grew up along the Kuskokwim, joined the group in its early days. At the time, she was the head of the Kuskokwim River Inter-Tribal Fish Commission, a nonprofit that co-manages fishing resources with the government. Two years later, in a special election in 2022, she emerged out of a crowded top-four primary to defeat Sarah Palin, becoming the first Democrat since 1970 to win Alaska’s sole House seat. That campaign’s defining issue was trawl bycatch. This year, she is campaigning on a call to ban out-of-state factory trawlers. This anti-trawl sentiment has caught on, politically, around the state. It has become a marquee issue in races for governor, the state legislature, and even in municipal elections. “There was one guy running for school board talking about trawl,” Bayes told me.

I’d assumed that pollock people—businesspeople—would lean Republican, and the salmon people—the conservation-oriented—would lean Democratic, but that’s not really the case. “There’s nothing partisan about it,” Peltola told me recently. “When you ask folks who are MAGA why they’re splitting the ticket and voting for me, it’s largely because of trawling.” (The campaign later pointed out that a lot of those voters are also animated by high fuel prices.) Politics in Alaska are idiosyncratic. They rarely map onto a national partisan model. Republicans outnumber Democrats two to one, but independent voters outnumber both. “Partisan politics doesn’t work that well for a candidate,” Tony Knowles, the last Democrat to serve as governor, told me. A government staffer in a remote region put it to me, “Locally, no one gives a shit about the parties.”

One oddity of Alaska politics is that, though only twelve per cent of voters identify as Democrats, both the State Senate and the State House of Representatives are currently controlled by coalitions made up mostly of Democrats and independents, with some Republicans. Coalition governments are not uncommon in the state, where politicians are fond of saying that pragmatism trumps partisanship. Sometimes it’s more about vibes. “Somebody is a magnificent pain in the ass, and we don’t want them in our caucus so we build a caucus to exclude them,” Joelle Hall, a longtime union leader, told me. Imagine a congressional coalition formed by kicking out the lawmakers, on either side, who are annoying—the Ted Cruzes and the John Fettermans. Peltola tried to explain this unique approach by telling me that the current coalition “took the hardest people to work with and just put them to the side, and then everybody else joined as a majority to move forward and solve problems. And that is a model I am hoping we can export to every state in the nation.”

Peltola knows that relationships can be just as important as parties. She has been friendly with Palin since they ran against each other in 2022. At one debate during that race, they wore matching earrings; Peltola had given them to Palin as a gift. (“It’s an Alaska-chick thing,” Palin said.) Peltola is even closer with Lisa Murkowski, Alaska’s other incumbent senator, a Republican who, despite supporting Sullivan in this race, had endorsed Peltola during her previous campaigns. After Peltola won her first election, Murkowski offered to let her stay at her place in Washington. “That’s the thing about Alaska: there’s only seven hundred thirty-five thousand of us,” Peltola told me. “We’re all stuck with each other until we die.”

“Alaskans consider themselves more Alaskan than Republican, and more Alaskan, quite honestly, than they are American,” Scott Kendall, an attorney and longtime G.O.P. political consultant in the state, told me. “We like each other. To me, it’s kind of a beautiful thing. And I’ve been back to D.C. and elsewhere enough to know how good we’ve got it.” I told him that many of my political assumptions from the Lower Forty-eight didn’t quite translate to the state. “Most of my Democratic friends have guns,” Kendall said. “A lot of my conservative Republican friends grow weed.” Many political ads in the current race—the ones Peltola had apologized for—have resorted to partisan rage bait (trans fearmongering, Epstein) or personal attacks. These tend to be produced by out-of-state super PACs not connected to either campaign. “I actually don’t think they’re very effective,” Kendall said. “We all know each other. People see Mary or Dan in the airport all the time.”

The fact that subsistence fishing has become important to the campaign is good for Peltola, who once wrote of herself, “I am made of fish,” and less good for Sullivan, who is originally from Ohio and not a notable angler. On a walk in Anchorage, I saw a sidewalk chalked with the words “DAN EATS FARMED FISH WITH KETCHUP.” But he, too, has been forced to weigh in on the issue. In June, back in D.C., he introduced a trawling bill that offered wonkish, incremental changes to fishing practices in Alaska. The bill never made it off the Senate floor, but it did give him something to run on. In Anchorage, Arthur Hackney, who runs a Sullivan-aligned PAC called We Stand with Dan, showed me an ad he’d recently cut. On the screen, the text read “This Election is About Fish, Family, Freedom,” Peltola’s exact campaign motto. Then it said, “On all of these, Senator Dan Sullivan actually delivers results.” Hackney explained, “People don’t understand how easy it is to just take the other person’s thing and you claim it for your own.” A strategist working with the Democrats told me it was surreal to see Sullivan trying to co-opt fishing. “He’s a marine, good-looking guy. There’s a lot of good things you could say about him. He’s not a commercial fisherman.”

As I spoke with Peltola voters across Alaska, I noticed a split between those who think she is talking too much about fishing, when a stronger message would be the war in Iran or gas prices, and those who worry that the outside strategists urging the Peltola campaign to focus on national topics will drown out her winning message. Alaska’s core constituency is composed of Natives, fishermen, rural legislators, and unions, with some chamber-of-commerce types mixed in. Peltola is a gun-owning, fish-catching Alaska-bush native, who has worked for mines and supports oil drilling, and is allied with the state’s largest labor unions. “You’ve got a once-in-a-generation candidate who is all the pieces of that coalition as one person,” the strategist told me. “You worry that the federal PACs will come in and fuck all that up. What’s actually somewhat surprising to me is that we’re here in October, and the dominant issue of the race is still trawl bycatch and local fisheries, which says they didn’t fuck it up that bad.”

Kodiak Island, in the Gulf of Alaska, is home to a fishing community with a large mom-and-pop fleet and a lot of big trawlers. The evening after I arrived, around sunset, I saw a mother Kodiak bear and her cub scavenging along the shore. Nearby, I noticed a convocation of bald eagles. They were all feasting on pink salmon carcasses, which had floated downriver after spawning days earlier. A local fisherman pointed out that you can find salmon DNA everywhere on the island, even atop the big mountains that run along its interior—bear scat, bird poop. “Salmon is fertilizing the entire goddam system,” he told me. In the Karluk River, on the island’s southwest, king salmon used to be everywhere. By 2024, scientists counted only seventy-six in the entire run.

The next day, I met Jake Everich and Mike Helligso, trawling captains who’d docked their boat, a seventy-three-footer called the Alaskan, next to a cannery. They were in town to deliver a load of pollock for processing. They pointed out to me that death threats had been posted on the anti-trawling Facebook group. (“I bet sinking their boats would work real good.”) Everich added that a trawler friend in town had recently had his tires slashed. He suspected it was anti-trawlers. They invited me aboard, where there was a wall of screens: radar and sonar that help monitor which fish are going into the net. “I spend as much time avoiding the fish we don’t want to catch as catching the fish I do want to catch,” Everich told me. “You make mistakes. But sometimes it’s pretty damn clean.” Alaskan pollock trawlers catch more than three billion pounds of fish annually. Ninety-seven per cent of that is pollock. The majority of the industry’s bycatch is jellyfish, pacific cod, and squid. Sam Murphy, the spokesperson for the Alaska Pollock Fishery Alliance, said that the twenty thousand king salmon they catch annually has averaged .0086 per cent of the total bycatch by weight over the past five years. The N.P.F.M.C. also conducts genetic testing on the salmon bycatch, which shows that most of it consists of not Alaskan salmon but salmon from hatcheries in Russia and Asia. “We’re not even catching that fish that you’re trying to catch,” Helligso said. “That’s, like, a whole different fish.”

Everich’s boat was holding three hundred thousand pounds of pollock, the legal limit for a twenty-four hour period. He did it with a single drag, which he said took about ninety minutes. At the dock, a fish pump, which works like a giant vacuum tube, was sucking the fish out of the hold. We could see a small amount of bycatch, which, as far as I could tell, was all rockfish. Helligso grabbed one to show me. He held it by hooking his thumb underneath an eyeball, which was protruding out of its head. Trawling can be brutal. Fish die by being crushed, by asphyxiation, or by barotrauma—when fish surface quickly, things sometimes go pop. Helligso also showed me a pollock. It weighed two pounds or so and looked unremarkable. Pollock generally becomes fish sticks or processed fish products—Filet-O-Fish fish. No one’s putting pollock on a postage stamp. But it’s good, cheap food. This season, pollock sells to canneries for sixteen cents a pound. “There’s the thought, ‘It’s a garbage fish,’ ” Everich said. “It’s a stable source of protein that the majority of the world can eat.”

Trawling is a wedge issue in Kodiak. Many people rely on trawling, directly or indirectly, for work, but small seiners, long-liners, and crab fishermen have major issues with it. (“There’s five different fisheries groups, and they all basically think the others are stealing fish from them,” Hackney, the G.O.P. political consultant, told me.) Kodiak went for Trump by nineteen points in 2024. In the open primary, in August, Peltola won Kodiak by ten points. “This is the only reason a lot of the sons of bitches will vote against Trump,” one left-leaning fisherman told me. Last year, a poll found that almost three-quarters of Alaskans supported a trawl ban. There was virtually no difference in the level of support between Democrats, Republicans, and independents. “They’re making decisions based on emotion and something that sounds good when in fact it’s not true,” Bruce Schactler, a local fisherman who worked for Alaska Seafood Marketing Institute for two decades, told me. “I can’t stand it. Look, it’s a big deal. You have the crash of the king salmon. But it’s everywhere. And it has nothing to do with fishing.” We were at the brewery in town with the mayor, Terry Haines, who is also a retired fisherman, and the host of the Alaska Fisheries Report on KMXT, the local radio station. (He also d.j.s a half-hour spot of soul music every week.) “Bycatch is not the driver of our stock crashes,” he said. “It is simply the only lever that we have to pull. So that makes it a valid reason to look at pulling that lever. But you have to realize that you can pull that lever all the way down to the floor, and you’re still not going to change the environment that’s causing the fishery collapses.”

Peltola insists on what is called “rural preference”: in times of shortage, subsistence fishing must come first. Carrie Stevens, the representative for the Council of Athabascan Tribes, told me, “If people on the rivers have a moratorium to stand down, why is it so obscene to ask others to bear any brunt of conservation?” The tribes contend that the government’s scientists are underestimating the effect of trawling. One argument is that it’s not just the bycatch but the catch itself. Salmon eat juvenile pollock—or would, if they didn’t become fish sticks. Jim Balsiger, who retired as NOAA’s top fisheries official in Alaska in 2021, said recently, “Removing three to four billion pounds of fish from the Bering Sea every year for four decades is not a benign activity.”

One morning, I visited a local fisherman named Dave Kubiak in the wheelhouse of his boat, the Lara Lee. He catches salmon, halibut, and crab. He was joined by his dog, Corky, whom he fed bits of muffin and occasionally bantered with. (“You spilled it on the floor, buddy. That’s why I don’t want to give you any more, you dirty little hound dog.”) Kubiak and his peers argue that the trawlers diminish their fish stocks and also cause broader damage to the seafloor. Some trawlers, such as those targeting arrowtooth flounder, are bottom draggers. They crush crabs and tear up vegetation. Pollock trawling is supposed to be midwater. But the nets get so big and heavy that they sometimes drag. “We’re taking huge bites out of the universe without any knowledge of what the hell that means,” Kubiak said.

Kubiak taught high-school English for many years. (“Half of the adults in town had him as a teacher,” Haines, the mayor, told me.) In the fall and winter, he’d teach Thoreau and Emerson. In the summer, he’d be on the water. “It completely renews you,” he told me. Most fishermen I talked to told me that they loved their jobs. It pays well. It’s performed outside. There’s a satisfaction in the work: you catch it, people eat it. “Fishing ruins you for an actual job,” Haines told me.

Fishing jobs like these are essential to Alaskan identity and have been declining across the state. Gunnar Knapp, a professor emeritus at the University of Alaska Anchorage and a prominent fishery economist, told me that the trawling issue has become about more than just fishing regulations. “A lot of this is symbolic. There is a vision that the world economy has been moving inexorably toward this dystopia controlled by large corporations, capitalism, and global enterprises, where the individual is marginalized and means nothing,” Knapp said. “If you’ve ever seen a trawl net when it comes in, it seems so appalling. You think, ‘You won’t have any fish left in the ocean!’ Well, it actually is sustainable, for pollock. But it’s not noble like a guy holding up one subsistence salmon.” The choice for Alaskans is difficult: crack down significantly on trawl, and you’ll limit global food supply and inflict significant damage to the state economy. In return, you’ll possibly get small gains upriver. “It’s less economic than moral or ethical,” Knapp said. “What costs are worth it for even a marginal improvement to the salmon runs? I think some people would say anything is worth it.” As a friend in Anchorage put it, “Trawling is our version of data centers.”

The problem in Alaska isn’t finding persuadable voters. It’s reaching them. Campaign staffers pack sleeping bags and pads, in case they get socked in at a remote village. This year, in the election precinct of Nuiqsut, an Iñupiat Eskimo area, only ten people voted in the primary election. It’s about three times the size of New Jersey. On St. George Island, way out in the Bering Sea, Peltola won the primary by a ratio of two to one—two votes total, to one.

This election season, candidates have hit the campaign trail in bush planes, boats, and dog sleds. (When Peltola’s mother was pregnant with her, she was a volunteer on a congressional campaign; she canvassed for votes on a snowmobile.) During Peltola’s recent Arctic swing, she took flights with the sole purpose of visiting towns with total populations of four hundred and forty-seven, eight hundred and nine, and six hundred and ninety-four.

After the stump speech at the elementary school in Utquagvik, which is roughly as far from Anchorage as New York City is from Charleston, and following a celebration featuring Iñupiaq drumming and dancing, I met with Peltola. So many of her positions—on guns, on oil—are either centrist or defy partisan categorization, as with the fish. I’d asked one political consultant to name some issues where Peltola differed from, say, Lisa Murkowski, who is a moderate, pro-choice Republican. He thought for a while and said, “I’m struggling to think of a good example.” Murkowski is admired by independents and some Democrats in Alaska, while being largely scorned by the MAGA right. It’s not difficult to foresee an inverse dynamic with Peltola and the national left. Peltola’s father was a Republican, and her mother was a supporter of the longtime Republican congressman Don Young. I asked her what made her a Democrat. “The region that I’m from, they’re almost all Democrats,” she told me. “It’s a curiosity to me because the region is very conservative, extremely, extremely conservative. We are very much interested in preserving our Second Amendment rights. We’re into local control. A lot of the things that are part of the Republican platform. But I don’t think anybody’s reading platforms.”

Everywhere I visited around the state, I was surprised by how trawling manifested politically. Everich, the trawling captain, said that he used to be “a very strong Republican,” but fish politics had scrambled everything, and he was presently undecided. Although Sullivan is widely viewed by trawlers as less antagonistic, the industry has also been squeezed by rising costs from tariffs, insurance, and fuel. I encountered some MAGA flags along the docks, but this year, Everich said, “Trump supporters have changed their perspectives. To pay seven dollars a gallon for diesel because of a foreign war and then be, like, ‘Go Trump’? That would be difficult.” Kubiak, the retired English teacher and fisherman, was voting for Peltola, but he actually didn’t like her trawling ban. “Too easy,” he said. “She’s painting with a broad brush, and it’s really dangerous to do that.”

I asked Peltola if she saw any parallels between the fish battles and fights elsewhere: against climate change, A.I. monopolization, or against the bankers after the Great Recession. (Kubiak told me that he was worried the pollock industry had become “too big to fail.”) She said no. Salmon is uniquely important. “I have not figured out a way to teach my kids Yup’ik values unless we’re hunting and fishing,” she said. As a political issue, its utility is that everyone likes salmon. Peltola told me she has some connections to Utqiagvik, where the big food is muktuk—bowhead-whale blubber and skin. Her late husband liked it. He had a friend in town, and, every year, the man would give him some muktuk. In return, he gave the man some salmon. ♦