Mary Peltola made a mistake. But her Republican opponent would be a disaster for Alaska | Kim Heacox

Donald Trump’s trip to Alaska earlier this month was a real doozy.Should I be surprised? The previous time he visited my home state, in August 2025, he ordered the US military to roll out a red carpet for Russia’s Vladimir Putin. The two billionaire oligarchs chummed it up and posed for cameras, then talked about the war in Ukraine and achieved no formal ceasefire and no peace agreement.I was curious to see what Trump would do this time. If our economy is so good, as he says it is, and if Republicans are so superior to Democrats, as he says they are, then why fly 3,400 miles to hold a rally for Dan Sullivan, Alaska’s junior Republican senator running for his third term?Sullivan is in a tight race with his democratic challenger, Mary Peltola. That’s why. Control of the US Senate for the next two years could come down to Alaska.A week ago, Trump made a desperate move. He directed the US Department of Justice to file a lawsuit against the state of Alaska because a second Dan Sullivan, a retired schoolteacher from the coastal fishing town of Petersburg, is also on the ballot.On Wednesday, the plot thickened when the New York Times reported that back in the summer of 2025, Democratic operatives began to engineer ways to get a spoiler on the Alaska ballot, according to interviews with Peltola’s former campaign manager and longtime aide, Elisa Rios, who was fired in a staff shake-up in August. Other sources included texts.Rios said Peltola was not directly involved in the operation but was aware of it. Last week, Rios contacted the Times and retracted all statements “made regarding the 2026 Alaska Senate Race.” She added: “I am not willing to be a source for any story in any capacity.”A spokesperson for the Democratic Senate campaign arm told the Guardian: “Republicans have a long history of recruiting and propping up candidates in an attempt to boost their own campaigns.”Trump’s justice department lawsuit, however, is unprecedented. It seeks to block a Peltola win “pending an investigation to determine whether votes cast for Daniel J. Sullivan were meant to be cast for Senator Sullivan”. Meanwhile, the justice department has reportedly issued subpoenas over the matter.Four months ago, the Alaska supreme court approved both Sullivans on the ballot. The Alaska division of elections lists the Petersburg candidate as “Sullivan, Daniel J Jr” without a party affiliation, and the senator, Dan S Sullivan, as the incumbent Republican.Criticism of the lawsuit has been deep and wide. “Attention Alaska,” wrote Libby Bakalar, the municipal attorney for Bethel and a former assistant attorney general. “Donald Trump is abusing the judicial system in an attempt to personally appoint your next United States senator. Don’t let him.” (Following the Times story, she told KTOO: “Not a single illegal thing happened here.”)Which brings us back to the rally on 13 October. The Wasilla sports center – not so large but easy to fill – thrummed with excitement as Trump and Sullivan shared the stage and appeared to have a good time, playing to all the flags and phones and red hats.Sullivan said nothing about Alaska’s federal employees who lost their jobs due to government cuts, many of them highly educated scientists. He also made no appeal to the many Alaskans in remote villages who struggle with some of the highest prices in the state’s history: home heating fuel at $7-$9/gallon, milk at $25-$30/gallon.And if that weren’t enough, he said nothing about the estimated 30,000 Alaskans who have lost, or will soon lose, their medical coverage.Instead, Sullivan stood with the man responsible for those problems and told the crowd what he had said to Trump privately: “Mr President, I just really want to thank you for all that you’re doing for Alaska.”Really?Was I missing something? I’ve lived in Alaska for nearly 50 years – have been charged by bears, surrounded by caribou, charmed by whales and inspired by glaciers.I can’t imagine my heart and soul thriving anywhere else. A young ranger with the US National Park Service back in the 1970s, I came north for adventure and beauty and found both. The wild America I was born too late to see down south, awaited me up north. For that, I will always be grateful.Blame it on Henry David Thoreau, Edward Abbey and Rachel Carson, American authors who convinced me that nothing is more valuable than wildness, curiosity and a sense of wonder.As such, it’s not bears that frighten me. It’s men like Sullivan and Trump who can hear a dollar bill fall on the tundra. Men who get excited by 1) drilling for oil in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge 2) reducing the western Brooks Range to a massive mining district and reaching those mines by slicing a cut-and-fill road through Gates of the Arctic national park, and 3) repealing the US Forest Service’s Roadless Rule that will enable clearcut logging in the Tongass national forest – a temperate rainforest, one of the rarest biomes on Earth – where massive, ancient trees and a thick understory store more carbon than any other national forest in the country. Of the roughly 1.6 million responses, more than 99% opposed the repeal. Americans appreciate the life-giving value of their trees.What a travesty then, to witness Alaska on the chopping block.Trump and Sullivan make a destructive bromance. Sullivan has voted with Trump’s stated positions more than 95% of the time, including, more recently, 14 votes against resolutions aimed at curtailing the president’s military authority or against removing US forces from Iran. No wonder Trump wants to keep him around. Drill, dig, fill and kill.And where was Mary Peltola during this rally?Off the road system, listening to village Alaskans express their concerns about, well … everything. The cost of fuel and food, their warming world and declining numbers of caribou and fish; the northern rivers turning rustic orange-yellow, laced with toxic metals leached from thawing permafrost. Their homes sinking into swamps or falling into the sea that no longer freezes in autumn, which allows ocean storms to tear down protective bluffs and eat away their villages.Trump took a jab at Peltola but saved his best for other matters.“Bring on the pardons,” he announced, and the beneficiaries stepped forward: two Anchorage mechanics who had pleaded guilty to violating the Clean Air Act through a business that disabled pollution control devices on diesel engines. “They want to put them in jail for 10 years because they fixed an engine,” Trump told the crowd. “How sick.” He proceeded to talk about trucking and “all of the environmental crap” that makes vehicles expensive and inefficient.This is where we find ourselves. In a landscape and ecosystem butcher shop run by Trump and Sullivan and other Republicans doing their best to defeat “environmental crap.”And Mary Peltola? She needs to do what Trump has never done: apologize.Come clean with the people she seeks to represent. Stand strong and promise to take the high ground. She’s a lifelong Alaskan who knows how to listen and who understands what she calls “kitchen table issues”.Sullivan, by stark contrast, is a corporate shill. If re-elected, he will continue to bend the knee to our wannabe king. The choice is clear.Can Peltola unseat Sullivan on 3 November? Yes. Alaska will be counted last, but don’t count us out. My forecast from the land of caribou, whales and bears: cloudy with a chance of better days ahead. Kim Heacox is the author of many books, including The Only Kayak and Jimmy Bluefeather, both winners of the National Outdoor Book Award. He is a former ranger at Alaska’s Glacier Bay, Denali and Katmai national parks