The race for Alaska’s Senate seat has incumbent Republican Dan Sullivan behind the proverbial eight ball, largely thanks to Democrat shenanigans, a dubious election system, and high fuel prices.
With just over two weeks to go, polls show the Senate race as a toss-up in a red state that last elected a Democrat to the Senate nearly two decades ago.
Democrats, desperate to gain control of the Senate, have dipped to new lows in an underhanded effort to win in a state where, if things were on the up and up, they wouldn’t have a prayer.
The first issue Democrats have pushed in several states as a more “fair” election system is ranked-choice voting. This system has given otherwise improbable Democrat candidates a leg up by adding second-choice votes from voters whose first-choice candidates fail to reach the top two vote tallies.
As a result, incumbent Sullivan must fend off a field of second-choice votes, many of which are likely to go to Democrat challenger Mary Peltola.
Speaking of Peltola, she has tried to portray herself as a DC outsider, an Alaskan simply looking out for her fellow Alaskans. Never mind that she served as the state’s representative from 2022 through 2025, with a voting record that showed little concern for Alaskans’ economic needs.
When then-President Joe Biden aggressively implemented his egregious, economically disastrous green energy policies, Peltola voted for Biden’s agenda over 90% of the time instead of standing against him. As The Wall Street Journal reports, “She voted against a bill to mandate more oil and gas leases offshore and in the National Petroleum Reserve. She voted against loan guarantees for the LNG project. In 2024, when a bill she co-sponsored to reverse the Biden administration’s oil lockup in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge and the National Petroleum Reserve finally came up, she bowed to pressure and voted ‘present.’”
Sullivan has been trying to remind Alaskans who Peltola is truly committed to, and it ain’t Alaskans.
Further complicating Sullivan’s path to reelection is another, even more underhanded effort by Democrats: the running of an “independent” candidate who happens to share Sullivan’s name.
“We are looking, I can’t say federal, but we are looking into it,” President Donald Trump observed at a rally for Sullivan in Alaska last week. “It’s a disgrace. We have, I call him the real Dan Sullivan, a great senator from Alaska. And in the race, they put somebody named Dan Sullivan who knows nothing about politics. His name happens to be Dan Sullivan. They even wanted to change his middle initial, which was different. They wanted to make it an S so that it could be exactly correct. I think it’s just terrible that they did it.”
Indeed, it is terrible and a classic example of disingenuous political play meant solely to deceive voters. The second Sullivan has no chance of winning the election, but due to Alaska’s ranked-choice voting, it creates an opportunity to confuse enough voters to throw the election to Peltola.
Finally, there is the economic issue that has been dragging down Republicans’ electoral chances across the nation, and that is the high cost of fuel, largely because of Trump’s action against Iran.
Democrats like Peltola have been harping on this cost-of-living issue, but the irony is that the policies Democrats support would do nothing to counter the higher cost of living. Indeed, they would only ensure this continues, as their anti-fossil-fuel agenda would further limit Americans’ access to low-cost energy and fuel.
Hopefully, Sullivan cuts through all the Democrat subterfuge and disinformation campaign and helps Alaskans see who truly has their best interests at heart, and Alaskans put him back in office for another term. It is not only in their best interests, but in the best interests of the rest of the country.
