Talking a Lot About Fish

Why an Alaskan Talking a Lot About Fish Could Win Democrats Back the House

In 2022, Mary Peltola won a House race in Alaska against Sarah Palin on “Fish, Family, and Freedom.” Can she win another tough race?

Sophie Hurwitz

This year, America’s largest state is primed to play a key role in deciding who controls the House of Representatives.

Incumbent Mary Peltola (D-Alaska)—the state’s first Native woman elected to Congress and the first Democratic representative in 50 years—will defend her seat in a close race against challenger Nick Begich III. Begich is a software developer, part-owner of a conspiracy-theory publishing company, and the surprise Republican heir to a several-generation Democratic political lineage.

Peltola’s win was a surprise upset in 2022. She beat former vice presidential nominee Sarah Palin on a campaign of “fish, family, and freedom,” promising to “ignore Lower 48 partisanship” and focus on solutions. In Congress, she has been a member of the new “Blue Dog Democrats,” a loose group of 11 Democratic members who push centrist policies.

Alaska uses ranked-choice voting. So, while the winner will almost certainly be Peltola or Begich, the secondary selections of voters who chose minor-candidate voters will matter, too. (The process will also slow down ballot tabulation, meaning we may not know the outcome on Election Day itself.)

In Alaska, rural areas tend to hew to the Democratic Party line, while cities vote red. It’s a place where the top issues aren’t the “culture wars you’ll see downstate,” as Michelle Sparck, director of the nonprofit Get Out The Native Vote, put it. “60 percent of Alaskans do not identify for one party or another.” Instead, the things people are likely to hinge their vote on are much more concrete: fisheries regulation, oil policy, and electric subsidies. 

Overall, Peltola has anchored her campaign on keeping the issues local. At an October 10th debate, she turned a question about immigration into an answer about “outmigration.” For the past 12 years, more Alaskans have left the state than moved there—pushed out by high prices and limited job opportunities. 

“We do need immigration reform,” she said, but “I don’t think that this is necessarily an Alaskan problem. This is definitely a lower 48 problem…Alaska is desperate for workers and we have an outmigration problem in Alaska.”

Peltola has spent most of her time in Congress working on issues immediately relevant to her base: the funding of broadband internet in Alaska’s rural areas, and, of course, fish. Throughout much of the state, subsistence hunters are facing “salmon scarcity” in warming waters, and the state’s fishing industry is losing billions per year.  

And while abortion wasn’t always an issue that could be tackled from the center-leaning position Peltola occupies, she’s made it a cornerstone of her re-election campaign. “Being pregnant and delivering a baby is one of the most lethal things a woman can do in her lifetime,” she said recently. “Myriad things can go wrong, and it is not anyone’s place in DC or in the state legislature to get between a woman and her doctor.” 

Nick Begich and Peltola have a lot in common: they both support military spending in Alaska, the development of a trans-Alaska natural gas pipeline, and Second Amendment rights.

Begich, however, has also said he will not support federal funding for abortions, and has, like many Republican candidates, spent time during debates criticizing the size of the federal budget. The longest paragraph on Begich’s policy-positions webpage is about cryptocurrency’s importance to the future of Alaska. While he talks a lot about the Second Amendment, Peltola is the candidate who’s been endorsed by the National Rifle Association.

John Howe of the Alaskan Independence Party, whose platform includes abolishing all taxation, will likely receive some small percentage of Alaska’s 600,000 votes. And Eric Hafner, who is currently imprisoned in New Jersey for bomb threats, is also running as a Democrat in Alaska, though he has never been there. (Hafner also ran for Congress in Hawaii in 2016 and Oregon in 2018, the latter campaign while on the run from the law.)

Neither the taxation abolisher nor the imprisoned man have much likelihood of winning the race. They might, however, be part of tipping the scales towards Begich, as Republican consultant Matt Shuckerow speculated to the New York Times recently. “The chances of Eric Hafner having an impact on this election are legitimate and real,” he said. “This is an extremely tight race and every vote will count.” If voters pick Howe first and Begich second, for example, their second-place vote would count for more than their first-place one. 

Begich is loyal to his party, and in a state that is technically majority-Republican, that might be enough to win. That technical majority, however, doesn’t tell the whole story. In the 86 percent of Alaska communities that aren’t connected by roads—generally, majority-Native —residents aren’t likely to declare a party affiliation. “Long-term investment in party politics is really the privilege of a road-system people.” Michelle Sparck of Get Out The Native Vote says. Those communities, too, could sway the election. 

But disinvestment in the infrastructure of voting in rural, majority-Indigenous districts can mean low turnout. In 2020, the Northwest Arctic Borough, where 83.8 percent of voting-age residents are Indigenous, had a turnout of only 38 percent. In many cases, counting those votes requires flying ballots into the cities from small, isolated villages in bush planes. “Even if weather wasn’t a barrier, there’s all kinds of systemic barriers that are at play that create a chronic polling problem for a lot of our rural villages,” Sparck said. In Bethel, Peltola’s hometown, 56 percent of voters turned out in 2022. It is a town of 6,000 with only one polling location.  

Alaska’s race is one of only a few that will determine control of the House of Representatives. Since the state only has one House seat, it can’t be gerrymandered—making it a true toss-up in a way few other House districts can be. 

On the final day before the election, Peltola’s social media posts were less focused on Democratic control of the house, though, and more on, once again, fish. “Tomorrow, we choose the future of our fisheries,” Peltola wrote. “Do we work to get back to abundance and keep our communities food secure for generations to come, or do we see our fisheries collapse?”

“When Mary and I were kids, our rivers were lousy with fish,” Sparck, of Get Out The Native Vote, remembered.  “We don’t have that anymore. If we had crickets in Alaska, all you’d hear is crickets out there. And it’s a crying shame that we don’t even have enough fish coming up our rivers anymore for reliable subsistence.  It’s literally under our feet, what is happening with the world.”