Democrat Mary Peltola wins Alaska House race: What can the party learn from her success in a red state?

Mary Peltola, who won Alaska’s only House seat on Wednesday, started her race as an underdog. “Everybody seems to like Mary Peltola.” A June report from Alaska Public Media came to a similar conclusion: “If she’s pulled herself out of statewide obscurity, it’s likely due to her dominant personality trait: niceness.” In the second round of the special election, Peltola was up against two extremely well-funded Republicans: Palin, whose campaign was sustained by Donald Trump’s Save America PAC and Rand Paul’s Protect Freedom PAC, and businessman Nick Begich, who had the endorsement of the Alaska GOP and lent his campaign $650,000 of his own money. “On the flip side,” he said, “this felt like a very hard year for Democrats to say, ‘Yeah, let’s go to Alaska!’ when they had so much defense to play.” But then, Peltola won. “And so, when she proved that she could win once, I think that just created a huge amount of momentum.” To some, Peltola’s victory in the special election looked less like a straightforward win for her and more like a failure of the Republican Party, whose base had failed to either rally behind a single candidate or properly use Alaska’s ranked-choice voting system to elect either of the two conservatives in the race. “It felt like such a deviation from the national standard that I was sort of like, ‘It sounds like this could happen, but I’ll believe it when I see it.’ ” In an era of increasing division between political parties—and expectations of loyalty so strict that the Alaska GOP excommunicated Murkowski in 2021 for her votes against Trump—both candidates ended up banking on the notion that, in a state whose electorate is one of least partisan in the country, voters would gravitate toward legislators who aren’t faithful party agents, either.