ANCHORAGE, Alaska — President Donald Trump will campaign in Alaska on Tuesday, hoping to boost Republican candidates in a state he won by 13 percentage points in 2024. He has said — repeatedly — that voters should “pretend” he’s on the ballot.
But some Alaska Republicans are happy to remind the public that, actually, Trump isn’t up for reelection this year.
“The president is not on the ballot,” Republican Rep. Nick Begich told The Washington Sun in an interview here last week. “I am. Sen. Sullivan is.”
Asked about the president’s request that GOP voters act like he’s on the ballot, the congressman demurred.
Trending
“Republicans should act like he is,” Begich said. “But at the end of the day, his name does not literally appear on the ballot.”
Trump’s visit this week underscores how much is now at stake in Alaska for both the president’s political legacy and his party’s chances of holding onto control of the Senate. Democrats need to gain a net of four Senate seats this year to win a majority, and strategists in both parties view Alaska as a potential tipping-point state in that battle.
Interviews on the ground here make clear just how competitive the state has become, showcasing the vulnerabilities Republicans have in seats they’ve long controlled.
Begich said in the interview that he thought no president had done more for Alaska than Trump thanks to his administration’s priority on natural resource development. And he said he thought the popularity of the administration’s policies was evident in the fact that, although Trump’s approval rating is low, Republicans were performing much better on the generic congressional ballot.
Still, as he is across the map this election, Trump is a drag on Republican candidates in Alaska. The average cost of gasoline is above $5 a gallon and the cost of diesel — which many rural communities purchase before winter as heating fuel — is through the roof.
The president’s tariffs on many foreign goods are also seen as especially harmful, in part because of the state’s long border with Canada.
“People are exhausted by Trump’s shenanigans,” said Joelle Hall, emeritus president of the Alaska AFL-CIO. “They’re exhausted by this war. They’re exhausted by all the things that are running down upon them, and they just want to change. This feels like a change election.”
Don’t Believe the Polls?
Republicans and Democrats each dismiss recent public polling that shows Democratic candidate Mary Peltola, Alaska’s former at-large House member, vaulting ahead of Republican Sen. Dan Sullivan, insisting the race is neck and neck.
“I don’t think she is 7 points ahead,” former Democratic Sen. Mark Begich told The Sun. “I think it’s more like she’s a couple of points ahead. And the thing about Alaska — if you’re a Democratic candidate and you’re going into the final days and you’re two points ahead, you’re probably tied.”
A New York Times/Siena University survey conducted mostly in September found Peltola with a 7-point lead over Sullivan. It was the second such survey that month to find Peltola with a significant edge, following one from the AARP.
Other surveys have found a tighter race, with the former Democratic congresswoman still holding a small lead.
But Republicans and even some Democrats say they believe Sullivan has made up ground in recent weeks thanks to increased engagement from conservative voters, who had previously expressed little interest in the upcoming election. Republican voters, in other words, are starting to come home.
“We’re seeing rising levels of enthusiasm showing up in both internal and publicly released polling data among the Republican and conservative independent base in Alaska,” Nick Begich said in the interview.
One senior Sullivan campaign official, granted anonymity to speak candidly, said they believed that had the election been held at the start of October, the senator would have lost. But the official believed that the last two weeks had bolstered Sullivan enough that if the election were held now, he would win.
Most Alaska Democrats are still confident that Peltola has a small but real edge in the race. A new survey released this week showed the Democratic candidate with a 2-point edge over Sullivan in the fourth round of tabulation.
Ballot Issues
One reason Democrats still think the former congresswoman will win: Alaska’s unusual ranked-choice, top-four ballot system.
It’s not an exaggeration to say that the victor of this Senate race could come down to how a few thousand Republican voters navigate the ballot — something they have not traditionally been very adept at doing.
November’s ballot will include four names. And in a blow to the incumbent senator, one of the other listed candidates is also a Republican, Gerald Heikes, while a second shares the senator’s first and last name, Daniel J. Sullivan.
In a ranked-choice system, Republican voters could either rank the other Sullivan or Heikes first and still list the senator as a second option, which would effectively be the same as ranking him as their top choice in the second or third rounds of tabulation. (Votes are reallocated each round until one candidate obtains a majority.)
But the problem — one that Sen. Dan Sullivan’s campaign is keenly aware of — is that many GOP-aligned voters only rank their top candidate and leave the rest of the ballot blank, even if they would prefer Sullivan to a Democrat like Peltola.
That could cost the senator thousands of votes and swing the election to Peltola — an outcome Republicans bluntly acknowledge is possible.
“That’s frustrating, right?” the incumbent Republican told The Sun in an interview last week, pointing in particular to the other Dan Sullivan. “If he gets 2 or 3% of the vote because people make mistakes, in a close race that could be the difference.”
The senator, speaking from a local Veterans of Foreign Wars hall here at a campaign event, said he was especially frustrated after speaking at a senior center earlier in the day, where he found continued uncertainty about the ballot situation with less than a month to go before Election Day.
“The seniors are confused,” he said.
Sullivan called the presence of the other Sullivan a plot by Democrats to deceive Alaska voters (Daniel J. Sullivan has said he did not coordinate with Democrats and was simply frustrated with the incumbent.)
But other Republicans say they are as much or more concerned about Heikes, who is best known for his strong opposition to abortion rights.
One Republican strategist called the situation “really challenging for Dan.”
“There’s just nothing that can be done about the high rate of ballot exhaustion,” said the strategist, who was granted anonymity to speak candidly.
Peltola has benefitted from the ranked-choice system before, the strategist added, noting her 2022 special House election victory against two Republican opponents.
Sullivan campaign officials and their allies dispute that they can’t affect the rate at which Republican voters exhaust their ballots and have launched an education effort through mail, phone banks, text messages and door-to-door canvassing that one senior Sullivan official characterized as a $10 million investment. Their efforts are now likely to intensify with the election weeks away.
Ad Wars
Peltola and Sullivan have both complained about campaign ads that were relentless and, in their telling, untrue.
Strategists for both parties say they’ve rarely seen anything like what’s happened in Alaska this election cycle. Both parties are on track to spend more than $115 million combined by November on ads alone, according to AdImpact — even though the number of voters able to be swayed by advertising in a small state like Alaska might be as few as 30,000 (an estimate provided by multiple strategists).
Republicans, unsurprisingly, are launching a wave of attacks on Peltola focused on her alleged ties to “lower 48” Democratic leaders and the suspicion that she holds progressive political views.
Among the attacks, however, are direct references to a report from The New York Times last month that alleged Peltola mistreated people who worked for her. The story sparked outrage among Democrats in Washington, who said it was proof not that Peltola was unfit for public service but that her staffers needed to toughen up and recognize the stakes of the election they were working on.
Republicans continue to run with the allegations. At least one Sullivan-aligned super PAC, Last Frontier PAC, was using the allegation in an attack ad last week.
And the senator himself has referenced the report on the stump, saying at an event last week that it proved the Democratic candidate was “unfit to serve.”
Peltola has tried to keep the focus more on the economy. The state had been bashed economically because of the president’s policies, the former congresswoman said during a town hall at a senior center here last week, while many of the state’s residents were in jeopardy of losing health care coverage because of a Republican law backed by Sullivan.
“I feel like Alaskans have had it up to here,” she said. “I feel like Americans have had it up to here, and there is an appetite to correct what has been done even in the last few years.”
Author
