Mary Peltola, an Alaska Native and moderate former congresswoman running on a platform she describes as “fish, family and freedom,” is the leading Democrat in Alaska’s nonpartisan primary election on Tuesday.
The top four finishers regardless of party will advance to the general election in November. To have a shot at taking back control of the Senate, Democrats almost certainly will need Ms. Peltola to beat Dan Sullivan, the Republican incumbent.
Here are five things to know about Ms. Peltola.
She is Yup’ik.
Ms. Peltola’s father, Ward Sattler, a teacher and bush pilot, moved to Alaska from Nebraska. Her mother, LizAnn Piicigaq Williams, was a member of the Yup’ik group of Indigenous peoples of western Alaska. Ms. Peltola grew up along the Kuskokwim River near the Bering Sea, fishing for salmon, picking berries and eating seal and moose meat. In 1995, she won the Miss National Congress of American Indians pageant, a competition in which she wore a squirrel skin parka and a wolf hair headdress.
She has been in and around politics for years.
Ms. Peltola, 52, grew up going to events for Don Young, the longtime Republican congressman, because her father was friends with him. After attending four different colleges — she never graduated — she ran for the State House in 1996 and lost. She ran again in 1998 and won. Representing Bethel, 400 miles from Anchorage and nearly 1,000 miles from the capital of Juneau, she spent a decade in the state legislature. She was elected to Congress in a special election in 2022 to replace Mr. Young after his death and was elected later that year to a full term. She was the first Democrat to hold the seat in a half-century, the first woman to represent Alaska in the U.S. House and the first Alaska Native ever elected to Congress. She lost her seat in 2024.
She lost her husband in a plane crash.
Ms. Peltola, has been married three times. Her third husband, Eugene “Buzzy” Peltola Jr., was killed in 2023 when a small Piper PA 18-150 Super Cub he was piloting crashed in the mountains of southwestern Alaska. The cause, according to the accident report: an overload of moose meat and antlers attached to the side of the plane.
She is known as a less partisan bridge builder.
When Ms. Peltola was in the Alaska Legislature, she started “Fish Fridays” — weekly get-togethers in her office at which she fed her colleagues salmon. She helped with grass-roots outreach during Republican Senator Lisa Murkowski’s write-in campaign in 2010. And when Ms. Peltola got to Congress, she hired several of Mr. Young’s staffers — Republicans — including his chief of staff. She is friends with Sarah Palin, the former Alaska governor and Republican vice-presidential nominee, who once called Ms. Peltola a “real Alaskan chick.” During her time on Capitol Hill, Ms. Peltola was the co-chair of the Blue Dog Coalition for Policy, the caucus of centrist Democrats. “I certainly wouldn’t call myself a liberal,” she once said.
She calls herself “Alaska first.”
Ms. Peltola is one of the top recruits of Chuck Schumer, the Senate minority leader, who has called her “the final piece of the puzzle” in the Democrats’ efforts to regain control the chamber — but Ms. Peltola is running against Washington as much as she is any of her opponents.
In her campaign pitch, she targeted “the rigged system in D.C. that’s shutting down Alaska while politicians feather their own nest.”
“No one from the Lower 48 is coming to save us,” she said.
