Former Representative Mary Peltola of Alaska, a Democrat, announced on Monday that she was running for the state’s Senate seat, giving Democrats a big boost as they fight an uphill battle to win back the Senate in the midterm elections.
Ms. Peltola, who was Alaska’s sole House member from 2022 until her defeat in 2024, is one of her red state’s few prominent Democrats. She has been considered perhaps the only person who could pose a threat to Senator Dan Sullivan, a Republican who is up for re-election this year.
In her announcement video, Ms. Peltola made clear that she planned to position herself as a political outsider fixated on state and local issues like Alaska’s fishing industry and rising cost of living. She resurrected a slogan she used during her House campaigns — “fish, family and freedom” — and said she would propose term limits for members of Congress.
“It’s not just that politicians in D.C. don’t care that we’re paying $17 a gallon for milk in rural Alaska — they don’t even believe us,” Ms. Peltola said.
Her entry is the final puzzle piece of the Senate recruitment map for Democrats, who need to flip four seats this fall to take a majority. The party has picked up top recruits to take on Republicans in Ohio, North Carolina and now Alaska, but faces intense primary contests in Maine, Iowa and Texas.
Ms. Peltola had been heavily coveted as a candidate by top Senate Democrats, led by Chuck Schumer of New York, the minority leader, as the party’s best chance to make Alaska competitive.
Republicans dismissed Ms. Peltola as “a defeated career politician-turned-lobbyist,” in the words of Alex Latcham, the executive director of the Senate Leadership Fund, the leading super PAC for Senate Republicans.
“Democrats are desperately trying to revive a far-left politician, but Alaskans know why they fired Mary Peltola in the first place,” he said.
It had been an open question in the state whether Ms. Peltola would opt to join the Senate race, seek to regain her House seat or run for governor, a seat that will be open because Gov. Mike Dunleavy, a Republican, is term-limited.
Ms. Peltola is considered a star of Democratic politics in Alaska, with others in the party suggesting they would step aside from the governor’s race if she had instead entered that field. She will be a heavy favorite to advance out of the state’s nonpartisan primary system, in which the top four vote-getters move onto the general election.
Despite her popularity in the state, she is likely to be an underdog in a general election against Mr. Sullivan, because of the state’s longtime conservative lean. But Alaska has an independent streak, and its voters have repeatedly re-elected Senator Lisa Murkowski, one of the most moderate Republicans in Congress, over more conservative challengers.
Ms. Peltola pointedly praised two Alaska Republicans in her kickoff video and even borrowed a tagline from President Trump, saying that Alaskans needed to “teach the rest of the country what Alaska First and, really, America First looks like.”
Ms. Peltola, the first Alaska Native elected to Congress and a former state legislator, beat former Gov. Sarah Palin in a 2022 special election to fill the seat of Don Young, a longtime congressman who died that year. It was an upset win that flipped the seat blue for the first time since the 1970s. She then won a full term that fall, with Alaska’s ranked-choice voting system vaulting her past Ms. Palin and Nick Begich III, another Republican.
But Mr. Begich won a rematch in 2024, ousting Ms. Peltola by two percentage points. Ms. Peltola, who in Congress sometimes bucked her party to back oil drilling projects, joined a law and lobbying firm last year that specializes in energy and mining issues.
Democrats face a tough Senate map this year: Not only must they flip four Republican-held seats — including some in states that Mr. Trump won in 2024 — but they also need to defend vulnerable seats of their own in Michigan and Georgia.
Their best pickup opportunities are in Maine — where Senator Susan Collins is the only Republican senator in a blue state — and in North Carolina, a battleground state where Senator Thom Tillis, also a Republican, is retiring. But Democrats will have to venture into red territory, with states like Ohio, Iowa, Texas and Alaska offering narrow but possible paths to retake a majority.
Mr. Schumer has now secured several top-tier Senate recruits, including former Gov. Roy Cooper in North Carolina and former Senator Sherrod Brown in Ohio.
Kellen Browning is a Times political reporter based in San Francisco.
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