Alaska’s Senate Race Could Be Decided by Salmon
Perhaps the most important thing to know about Alaska’s Senate race, a close contest between the Republican incumbent,
Dan Sullivan, and the former congresswoman
Mary Peltola, is that salmon are pretty amazing fish. There’s the swimming upstream, the spawning, and the dying. Bears love salmon. Orcas love salmon. People love salmon. Without salmon, the first Alaskans, crossing the Bering land bridge some fifteen thousand years ago, could not have survived. On a recent trip to Alaska, I was, at various points, fed salmon for dinner, offered salmon as a gift, and given salmon for barter. Directly or indirectly, salmon feeds almost everything in the state, including its politics. Alaska’s bid for statehood, in the late nineteen-fifties, was in part a matter of keeping the hands of Seattle businessmen off local salmon stocks. Business deals are hammered out at fishing retreats. In 2010, a seaplane carrying Ted Stevens, likely the most powerful politician ever to come out of Alaska, crashed en route to a salmon lodge near Bristol Bay. He died wearing his waders.
People in the Lower Forty-eight care a lot about Alaska’s Senate race. This cycle, it has been twice as expensive, per capita, as Michigan’s, and eight times Texas’s. The attention is unusual. In federal elections, Alaska reliably votes Republican; every time Donald Trump has been on the ballot, Alaska has voted for him by ten points or more. But, amid historically low approval ratings for the President, the Democrats are hoping to flip the seat, an essential part of any attempt to wrest back control of both houses of Congress. Trump, meanwhile, is clearly nervous about holding the seat. He recently headlined a rally for Sullivan in Wasilla, a small city north of Anchorage. “This is worth the eight hours on a plane,” Trump said. “And don’t forget, I got eight hours going back, too.”
In January, Chuck Schumer recruited Peltola to run, calling her the “last piece to the puzzle” of his midterms plan. Peltola, the state’s former at-large House member, launched her campaign with the slogan “Fish, Family, Freedom.” To most outsiders, this read as folksy branding for a race that would inevitably be dominated by Donald Trump. But Peltola really wants to talk about fish. Recently, I saw her speak at the elementary school in Utqiagvik, an Arctic town at the state’s northern tip. It was a very unusual stump speech. She apologized for the “super negative, toxic ads” flooding the state, including her own. She mentioned her opponent just once: a flattering anecdote about his advocacy for an oil project she supports. She didn’t mention Trump at all. And even though, compared with the rest of the state, salmon is not so big in Utqiagvik, Peltola still mostly talked about fish.
This piscine primacy is relatively new in Alaska’s politics. In past election cycles, fish have always been one issue among many. But Alaska’s fish are in crisis. In recent years, runs of Chinook, or king salmon, the biggest and most revered species on the Yukon River, have been down as much as eighty per cent from average levels, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. Chum salmon, a more ordinary variety, have had an O.K. year, but they’ve been down as much as ninety per cent. Some species and some areas are worse off than others, but the general trend is bad, including for the state’s other two iconic seafood catches, halibut and crab. As I travelled around the state, I was surprised to find that virtually everyone I talked to was upset about the fish situation. One political consultant explained, “A lot of people come into the state, and they’re, like, ‘Why the hell is Mary Peltola “fish, family, freedom”?’ I’m a white guy who lives in Anchorage, and my freezer is currently full of rockfish, halibut, and salmon that I’ve caught because that’s just what we all do.”
The crisis is worst up rivers such as the Yukon and the Kuskokwim. For many thousands of years, entire Athabascan and Yup’ik villages have subsisted on salmon. ... But stocks have got so low that, in 2024, the Alaska government, in conjunction with Canada, shut down fishing for king salmon on the Yukon River and its Canadian tributaries for seven years—one complete king-salmon life cycle. The fish camps stand empty. [...]
Research scientists with the N.P.F.M.C. and N.O.A.A. attribute the die-off, primarily, to climate change. But activists in Alaska have mostly focussed their ire on a type of fishing known as trawling. In the Bering Sea and the Gulf of Alaska, the main target of commercial fishing boats is pollock, a medium-sized, mild fish that swims in fantastically vast schools. Trawlers catch pollock by dragging enormous nets; some open wide enough to swallow a thousand M.T.A. buses. Any net you put in the water will incidentally catch other, non-targeted fish. This is known as bycatch. Every year, the Alaskan pollock industry brings up around twenty thousand king salmon and around a quarter million pounds of halibut as bycatch. Recently, anger at this collateral damage, heightened by the fish shortage, has evolved into a political movement. [...]
I’d assumed that pollock people—businesspeople—would lean Republican, and the salmon people—the conservation-oriented—would lean Democratic, but that’s not really the case. “There’s nothing partisan about it,” Peltola told me recently. “When you ask folks who are MAGA why they’re splitting the ticket and voting for me, it’s largely because of trawling.” (The campaign later pointed out that a lot of those voters are also animated by high fuel prices.) Politics in Alaska are idiosyncratic. They rarely map onto a national partisan model. Republicans outnumber Democrats two to one, but independent voters outnumber both. “Partisan politics doesn’t work that well for a candidate,” Tony Knowles, the last Democrat to serve as governor, told me. A government staffer in a remote region put it to me, “Locally, no one gives a shit about the parties.”
One oddity of Alaska politics is that, though only twelve per cent of voters identify as Democrats, both the State Senate and the State House of Representatives are currently controlled by coalitions made up mostly of Democrats and independents, with some Republicans. Coalition governments are not uncommon in the state, where politicians are fond of saying that pragmatism trumps partisanship. Sometimes it’s more about vibes. “Somebody is a magnificent pain in the ass, and we don’t want them in our caucus so we build a caucus to exclude them,” Joelle Hall, a longtime union leader, told me. Imagine a congressional coalition formed by kicking out the lawmakers, on either side, who are annoying—the Ted Cruzes and the
John Fettermans. Peltola tried to explain this unique approach by telling me that the current coalition “took the hardest people to work with and just put them to the side, and then everybody else joined as a majority to move forward and solve problems. And that is a model I am hoping we can export to every state in the nation.” [...]
“Alaskans consider themselves more Alaskan than Republican, and more Alaskan, quite honestly, than they are American,” Scott Kendall, an attorney and longtime G.O.P. political consultant in the state, told me. “We like each other. To me, it’s kind of a beautiful thing. And I’ve been back to D.C. and elsewhere enough to know how good we’ve got it.”...
As I spoke with Peltola voters across Alaska, I noticed a split between those who think she is talking too much about fishing, when a stronger message would be the war in Iran or gas prices, and those who worry that the outside strategists urging the Peltola campaign to focus on national topics will drown out her winning message. Alaska’s core constituency is composed of Natives, fishermen, rural legislators, and unions, with some chamber-of-commerce types mixed in. Peltola is a gun-owning, fish-catching Alaska-bush native, who has worked for mines and supports oil drilling, and is allied with the state’s largest labor unions. “You’ve got a once-in-a-generation candidate who is all the pieces of that coalition as one person,” the strategist told me. “You worry that the federal PACs will come in and fuck all that up. What’s actually somewhat surprising to me is that we’re here in October, and the dominant issue of the race is still trawl bycatch and local fisheries, which says they didn’t fuck it up that bad.” [...]
Trawling is a wedge issue in Kodiak. Many people rely on trawling, directly or indirectly, for work, but small seiners, long-liners, and crab fishermen have major issues with it. (“There’s five different fisheries groups, and they all basically think the others are stealing fish from them,” Hackney, the G.O.P. political consultant, told me.) ... We were at the brewery in town with the mayor, Terry Haines, who is also a retired fisherman, and the host of the Alaska Fisheries Report on KMXT, the local radio station. (He also d.j.s a half-hour spot of soul music every week.) “Bycatch is not the driver of our stock crashes,” he said. “It is simply the only lever that we have to pull. So that makes it a valid reason to look at pulling that lever. But you have to realize that you can pull that lever all the way down to the floor, and you’re still not going to change the environment that’s causing the fishery collapses.”
Peltola insists on what is called “rural preference”: in times of shortage, subsistence fishing must come first. Carrie Stevens, the representative for the Council of Athabascan Tribes, told me, “If people on the rivers have a moratorium to stand down, why is it so obscene to ask others to bear any brunt of conservation?” The tribes contend that the government’s scientists are underestimating the effect of trawling. One argument is that it’s not just the bycatch but the catch itself. Salmon eat juvenile pollock—or would, if they didn’t become fish sticks. Jim Balsiger, who retired as NOAA’s top fisheries official in Alaska in 2021, said recently, “Removing three to four billion pounds of fish from the Bering Sea every year for four decades is not a benign activity.” [...]
Fishing jobs like these are essential to Alaskan identity and have been declining across the state. Gunnar Knapp, a professor emeritus at the University of Alaska Anchorage and a prominent fishery economist, told me that the trawling issue has become about more than just fishing regulations. “A lot of this is symbolic. There is a vision that the world economy has been moving inexorably toward this dystopia controlled by large corporations, capitalism, and global enterprises, where the individual is marginalized and means nothing,” Knapp said. “If you’ve ever seen a trawl net when it comes in, it seems so appalling. You think, ‘You won’t have any fish left in the ocean!’ Well, it actually is sustainable, for pollock. But it’s not noble like a guy holding up one subsistence salmon.” The choice for Alaskans is difficult: crack down significantly on trawl, and you’ll limit global food supply and inflict significant damage to the state economy. In return, you’ll possibly get small gains upriver. “It’s less economic than moral or ethical,” Knapp said. “What costs are worth it for even a marginal improvement to the salmon runs? I think some people would say anything is worth it.” As a friend in Anchorage put it, “Trawling is our version of data centers.”
by Zach Helfand, New Yorker |
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Image: Clara Mokri / NYT / Redux
