ANCHORAGE, Alaska — Mary Peltola is widely perceived — at least in Washington — to have a real chance at winning her marquee U.S. Senate race here because of her talent as a politician and a brutal national political climate for Republicans.
But there’s an overlooked factor boosting her campaign ahead of November’s election.
After being a firmly Republican state for most of its existence, Alaska has slowly but steadily moved left in recent elections, becoming more supportive of Democratic candidates at every level of elected office. By 2024, the state was more politically similar to right-of-center battlegrounds like Ohio and Iowa, where Democrats are often at least competitive statewide, than to the conservative strongholds like Wyoming and Idaho it used to resemble.
And unlike Ohio and Iowa, Alaska is continuing to move left: A Washington Sun analysis of presidential results found that from the 2000 election to 2024 election, Alaska shifted 20 points to the left relative to the national popular vote. That’s the fourth most of any state, trailing only Vermont, Colorado and Utah, according to the analysis.
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From 2008 to 2024, it moved further toward Democrats than any other state, a 17-point shift. (The GOP performed especially well in Alaska in 2008 thanks in part to former Gov. Sarah Palin’s presence on the GOP ticket.)
The change is evident on the ground. In interviews with The Sun, more than a dozen party leaders, elected officials and political strategists described a state whose cities have become more progressive, whose state legislative battlegrounds have swung toward Democrats and whose top elected jobs — including one senator and governor — might soon be under the party’s control.
Democrats, cautiously optimistic about Peltola’s chances against Republican Sen. Dan Sullivan, are even more bullish about the prospects of the party’s de facto gubernatorial nominee Jonathan Kreiss-Tomkins.
It all leads to a conclusion that even some die-hard Democrats in Alaska are squeamish to admit after years and years of Republican dominance: Alaska might be becoming a genuine swing state.
“I believe it is turning purple. I can feel it,” said Mark Begich, a former Democratic senator. “It’ll probably take two more cycles to prove it.”
The state’s political evolution has big implications for its Senate race this year, which some party strategists are counting on to help Democrats gain the four seats they need for majority control of the chamber in 2027.
But, just as importantly, the transformation might offer a long-term lifeline for a Democratic Party with few viable targets in Senate races in the coming years, boxed in by a map filled with red states. And even though the state only carries three votes in the electoral college, its tiny sliver of votes could make the difference in tight presidential races when so many states are otherwise noncompetitive. The state’s White House result in 2024 was the 29th most friendly to Democrats, just behind Florida and Iowa, two states trending the wrong direction for the party.
Competing in Alaska might not be a question of something the party wants to do, but something the party has to do.
“If Democrats can’t consistently keep Alaska on the political battlefield, where else can they make that up?” said David de la Fuente, a political analyst with the Democratic think tank Third Way. “And it’s hard to make an argument for anywhere else.”
Initially, after being admitted as the 49th state in 1959, Alaska was seen as a state that would reliably vote for Democrats. But an oil boom in the 1960s on the state’s north slope transformed Alaska’s economy and its politics, bringing with it immense wealth and a wariness of the Democratic Party’s environmental agenda. Alaska last voted for a Democratic presidential nominee in 1964, when it backed Lyndon B. Johnson.
Trump won Alaska by 13 points in 2024, well short of the 25-point-plus victories George W. Bush racked up in the 2000s, but a double-digit victory nonetheless.
Alaska Republicans maintain that even if the margins are smaller than they used to be, the state remains reliably conservative at the federal level, in large part because of the incompatibility of the national Democratic Party’s environmental policies and the state’s economic needs.
“Alaska’s future is heavily dependent upon our ability to effectively advocate for resource development in our state,” Republican Rep. Nick Begich said in an interview. “And the Democrat Party, for whatever reason, has not been supportive of resource development in Alaska for many years. And they’ve proven that as a core component of their national platform, they are not willing to support resource development in our state.”
Nick Begich, who also faces a competitive race this year against the Democratic-backed independent candidate Bill Hill, pointed out that Democrats like former senator Mark Begich and Peltola had won statewide general elections in Alaska before (in 2008 and 2022, respectively) only to lose their next election. It’s a sign, he said, that even if voters here are willing to give Democrats a chance, they’re rarely willing to stick with them after they’ve been in office.
Even the most bullish Democrats say that even if the state is trending their way, it will always retain a distinct political independence. Alaska’s unique characteristics — its oil and fishing industries, native Alaskan population and rugged arctic climate — mean its politics are unlike any other state’s, often less ideologically driven and more focused on demanding basic material support for communities that would suffer without it.
It’s why the state elected an independent governor last decade and why the state legislature for years has had an unusual power-sharing agreement between Democrats and moderate Republicans, designed to exclude extreme voices in either party. It also explains how Republican Sen. Lisa Murkowski won a write-in reelection campaign in 2010 after losing her primary to a tea party-backed candidate, drawing support from across the political spectrum.
Still, some Democrats have quietly touted Alaska’s emerging importance for years, especially after Peltola’s 2022 victory in the state’s at-large House seat. De la Fuente, the Third Way official, wrote an analysis in 2023 urging then-President Joe Biden to consider competing in the state during the next presidential election.
The state’s demographic profile — including a low share of white voters, relatively high union participation and low religiosity — aligned with the modern Democratic Party, he wrote at the time, and was a major reason the state had shifted to the left over the previous two decades. In his view, Alaska represented a much better bet for Democrats than states like Florida, Ohio and Iowa, which received considerably more attention as potential battlegrounds.
“I feel like the political data is telling a very strong story here, of this not being a fluke,” de la Fuente told The Sun.
Why Alaska has shifted politically is a subject of debate. The state’s electorate, on the surface, has not changed significantly since 2000, according to Census data.
Some political strategists point to the declining number of oil and gas jobs, which started last decade and intensified after the 2020 pandemic and proliferation of remote work. Others say Alaska’s unusual open primary system, implemented in 2022 in which the top four vote getting candidates move on to the general election, has contributed, helping Democrats nominate more moderate candidates they consider better aligned with the state.
But locally, Democrats point to two main factors: the evolution of politics in Anchorage and the priority local Democrats place on political pragmatism.
Anchorage, at a population of nearly 300,000 people, holds about 40% of the state’s total population. And at a local level, its politics have shifted left.
Mark Begich recounted that as a young Democrat running for a seat on the city assembly here in the 1980s, every level of elected office in the town’s eastern half — from governor down to local legislator — was represented by a conservative or Republican (the city’s assembly seats are nonpartisan). Now, east Anchorage is represented at every level of state government by liberals or Democrats.
Across the city, local politicos say a 12-member assembly that used to be evenly split ideologically is now almost uniformly liberal, save for one or two members.
“Anchorage growing up is part of the story,” said Eric Croft, chair of the state Democratic Party. “Anchorage is getting to be a medium-sized city that, like a lot of them, is getting more and more progressive.”
Anchorage, in other words, is following the same political path of a lot of cities across the country.
“People that are living in Anchorage want good schools for their kids and actually want parks and amenities,” said Jim Lottsfeldt, an independent political strategist. “And there’s sort of been a maturation process of what we expect from our government and what we want as far as public facilities.”
To other Democrats, it’s hard to miss how the state’s leftward drift over the past 20 years corresponded with the rise of the tea party movement and, later, Trump — two ideologically driven movements they argue are at odds with the state’s pragmatic bent.
“I think Alaskans, given their druthers, would vote for a nice Chamber of Commerce Republican,” said Joelle Hall, emeritus president of the Alaska AFL-CIO. “A banker. A nice guy. A civically minded, slightly conservative guy. That’s their drug of choice.”
“That’s not what’s been offered to them lately,” Hall said.
In 2000, with George W. Bush on the ballot, Alaska voted 31.5 percentage points to the right of the country (Bush won Alaska by 31 points while losing the national popular vote by one-half of a point). In 2024, with Trump again leading the GOP ticket, the state voted just 11.5 percentage points to the right of the nation (Trump won Alaska by 13 points while winning the national popular vote by 1.5 points).
Democrats are emphatic that the quality of the individual candidate on the ballot is hugely important in Alaska. It’s why they don’t think that Murkowski, who has done more to separate herself from Trump than perhaps any other Senate Republican, will face a serious challenge from Democrats when she’s up for reelection in 2028.
It’s also why in-state Democrats are most skeptical about the party’s presidential chances in Alaska anytime soon. The party’s White House nominee usually has a different, more ideological profile than the types of candidates Democrats run in the state. Peltola’s views on energy development, for instance, would likely draw a fierce backlash from national Democrats’ progressive base.
Even progressives in the state say that Democrats run a different kind of campaign in Alaska than elsewhere.
“Those of us who are progressive have embraced bipartisanship,” said Zack Fields, a Democratic state representative who represents part of Anchorage. “And rather than talk about whatever crazy identity politics that has seized the national Democratic Party, we talk about bread-and-butter issues that affect families every single day. We talk about class size, we talk about energy security, we are just relentlessly pro-jobs.”
Fields said that if Democrats nationally embraced the approach he and his colleagues have taken in Alaska, they “would have 85% of the seats in Congress.”
But, he added, the state is often overlooked by the national party. It’s why its shift to the left this century has been largely ignored, even if it could help the party win a Senate majority this November.
“People in the Lower 48 are not aware of it,” Fields said. “If Alaska were the geographic distance to D.C. of West Virginia or another state nearby, there’d be all kinds of stories about it because it’s super interesting.”
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