Mary Peltola, the former Alaska congresswoman running against incumbent Dan Sullivan for the state’s Senate seat, is now leading in polls with a 7 percentage points margin, showing she has managed to brush off a damning report on her alleged abusive behavior to staffers. According to the latest New York Times/Siena University poll, conducted between September 24 and October 1 among 504 likely voters, Peltola had 50 percent of the vote against Sullivan’s 43 percent, giving the Democrat a +7 margin. The poll’s margin of error was plus or minus 5.1 percentage points.
Peltola boasted about this result on social media, highlighting the progress made by her campaign since the summer. This month, in the very same poll, we’re up by 7,” she wrote on X. Previous polls conducted at the end of September showed Peltola and Sullivan stuck in a tie or only a couple of points ahead of each other.
A Quantus Insight poll conducted between September 28-30 among 758 likely voters gave Sullivan 46.1 percent of the vote and Peltola 45.5 percent - a 0.6-point difference that was far smaller than the survey’s roughly eight-point margin of error. Neither of the candidates, the poll concluded, held “a measurable lead” with only a few weeks to go before the election. Another poll, conducted by Republican pollster Trafalgar Group between September 22-24 among 1,079 likely voters, placed Sullivan in the lead by 1 point, while one conducted by co/efficient between September 14-17 among 799 likely voters gave the Senator a +2 margin.
A poll by Alaska Survey Research conducted between September 10-12 among 1,352 likely voters gave Peltola a +5 margin, with a margin of error of plus or minus 3 percentage points. Interestingly, it is the latest poll that gives Peltola the biggest advantage over her Republican rival so far, even as it was conducted after a New York Times piece covering former and current staffers’ accusations of Peltola’s alleged angry outburst and use of inappropriate language and offensive slurs. The report, published on September 23, included accusations by former aides that Peltola used the word “faggot” - a derogatory slur historically directed at gay men and LGBTQ+ people - at times toward her own staffers, a claim her campaign denied.
The former aides and text messages reviewed by the Times also alleged she used the word “retarded,” a term widely considered an offensive slur against people with intellectual disabilities. Peltola was also accused of shoving a staffer aside on one occasion. Peltola’s campaign has denied all accusations, saying that, at the times the accusations refer to, she was struggling to deal with the deaths of both her mother and her husband, who passed within a few months of each other in 2023.
House of Representatives thousands of miles from home, and running a competitive re-election campaign - all while shouldering the enormous burden of grief,” spokesperson Harry Child told the New York Times. Sullivan’s campaign has been trying to weaponize the New York Times exposé, with the Last Frontier PAC supporting the Republican senator turning it into a campaign ad against Peltola. But it is unclear what impact, if any, this ad would have on Alaska voters given the latest poll’s results.
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