Chuck Schumer, the Senate Democratic leader, has been on a rough ride for the past year. His team is out of power in Washington, its brand is feeble and his popularity among his own party’s voters is at subbasement levels. But during a phone interview Monday, Mr. Schumer sounded downright giddy.
“We’re on our front foot! We’re on offense!” he told me. “We have a good, solid path to the majority. We have strong candidates across the country in battleground states. And on the dominant issue that is facing the public — affordability — Americans know that Dems are on their side and fighting for them.”
There are plenty of reasons for skepticism about Mr. Schumer’s bubbly prognosis. To claim the Senate majority, Democrats need to pick up four seats while holding tight to vulnerable ones on a map that is downright ugly for them. Still, this was more than boilerplate boosterism. (I realize it can be hard to tell.) Earlier in the day, Senate Democrats had welcomed one of their most sought-after recruits to the fight: Mary Peltola, a former House member from Alaska, who announced her run to unseat the Republican Dan Sullivan.
Widely considered the only Democrat with a prayer of making that race competitive, Ms. Peltola is a big get for Schumer & Company. She is the last building block in a precarious electoral strategy the party has been working on for months, as it coaxed top-tier contenders into races in North Carolina, Ohio, Maine (where a hot primary rages) and now Alaska. She has given the party a shot of hope — and a boost that extends beyond the ultimate outcome of her race.
Mr. Schumer isn’t the only Democratic player excited about his new Alaska recruit. Blue Dog Action, a group that supports centrist Democrats, with a focus on “empowering working people and rural communities,” quickly came out cheering. “Fish, family and freedom are on their way to the U.S. Senate, where Mary Peltola will always put Alaska first and Lower 48 partisanship last,” the group said in a statement, referencing the alliterative slogan Ms. Peltola used in her House race and is re-upping this year.
Keeping her distance from “Lower 48” nonsense is central to Ms. Peltola’s run. Her announcement video has an unsubtle Alaska-versus-everyone-else message. She accuses politicians in Washington of working to “feather their own nest” rather than to address her state’s “crushing prices.”
They don’t care or even believe that a gallon of milk can cost $17 in rural Alaska, she charges. She decries “the rigged system in D.C.” and gets salty boasting that officials there “will be pissed” that she’s targeting their self-dealing. “No one from the Lower 48 is coming to save us,” she warns and calls on Alaskans to “teach the rest of the country what Alaska first, and really America first, looks like.”
Even as Ms. Peltola is stiff-arming the rest of the political world, her campaign echoes the Democratic Party’s core themes for this cycle.
“Cost is our No. 1 issue,” said Mr. Schumer, who, starting this week, will give a series of speeches laying out the party’s plans to lower the costs of housing, child care, groceries and, of course, health care. The Democrats have worked to make President Trump’s assault on health care coverage, including killing the Affordable Care Act enhanced subsidies and slashing Medicaid, a hot issue. (See: last year’s government shutdown.) This could wind up resonating in Alaska, which relies heavily on Medicaid.
But the Dems’ umbrella message goes beyond affordability. “Our focus is on three issues,” said Mr. Schumer, “cost, chaos, corruption.” (Politicians do love alliteration.) “And they’re all tied into each other.”
Ms. Peltola charges that “multinational companies are trawling our waters and decimating our fish stocks” and that Washington self-dealers are letting them do it. Such criticism speaks to Alaska’s particular challenges but also fits the Democrats’ broad push to redefine the party not as defending government but as defending government against corrupting influences, both internal and external. Ms. Peltola is far from the only Democrat out there vowing to take on a status quo that is dysfunctional and poorly serving the average American.
However Ms. Peltola fine-tunes her campaign, her candidacy sends an important signal to voters well beyond her state. It telegraphs that Democrats are serious about showing up and competing everywhere. Juicing the base is vital. But to really get their mojo back, Democrats also need to reconnect with rural America — or at least shed the reputation that they cannot relate to and don’t much care about areas beyond their urban and coastal comfort zones.
As for the Democratic base, voters are hungry, make that ravenous, for reassurances that their party is taking the fight to Mr. Trump. “People want to make sure we’re fighting and that we’re doing it every day, every week, every month,” Mr. Schumer said. And, yes, perhaps no one has more to prove in this area than the Senate minority leader, who has been repeatedly pilloried by his base for his anemic opposition to Trumpian excesses.
If you really want to dig into the electoral nitty-gritty, forcing the G.O.P. to bleed money in red states helps the entire blue team. Every $5 million that Republicans must spend trying to protect Dan Sullivan in Alaska is $5 million that cannot go toward unseating, say, the Democratic senator Jon Ossoff in Georgia.
Any Democratic talk of a path to the Senate majority running through Alaska should be taken with a barrel of salt. Ms. Peltola could be the reincarnation of John F. Kennedy, and she’d still be the underdog in a state that has sent only two Democrats to Washington in the last 40 years. Then again, one of those Democrats was her, in 2022. She lost re-election by only two points in 2024, and if Mr. Trump’s approval numbers keep sliding and a big blue wave hits in November, who’s to say what will happen?
At the very least, the embattled Mr. Schumer is entitled to a few chipper moments.
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