Alaska Poll Gives Mary Peltola 7-Point Lead After NYT Staffer Report - Newsweek

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. “In June, we were down by 2 points. This month, in the very same poll, we’re up by 7,” she wrote on X. “Alaska, we can win this.”

Should she keep this lead, Peltola would become Alaska’s first Democratic senator since Mark Begich lost his seat to Sullivan in 2014.

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.

“At the time of their passing, Mary was parenting kids through their own grief, serving full-time in the U.S. 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. “Like any person who has gone through multiple personal tragedies in the span of a few months, Mary sometimes struggled to deal with her grief.”

Newsweek contacted Peltola’s and Sullivan’s campaigns for comment by email on Monday morning.

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. Already a couple of days after the New York Times published its damning report, the newspaper reported that Alaska voters were unwilling to change their votes in light of the allegations, even when admitting to being disappointed.

Many liberals have rallied around Peltola, showing her support to a candidate they hope could move the needle in the Democratic Party’s nationwide efforts to gain control of Congress in the midterms.

Those included longtime political commentator James Carville, who said staffers who complained about Democrats needed to put their heads down to “save the country.”

Meanwhile, Peltola’s campaign has continued attacking Sullivan on his personal financial situation, which has emerged as a point of vulnerability in the race. In 2022, Sullivan was found to have violated the Stop Trading on Congressional Knowledge (STOCK) Act, a transparency law introduced 10 years prior that requires federal lawmakers to disclose their stock trades.

According to reports by the Alaska Current, Sullivan is the Alaska congressional delegation's most active stock trader, and his trades have helped him triple his personal wealth during his two terms in the Senate. Sullivan has made an estimated $2 million in stock trades during his time in office, the Current added.

Peltola has actively campaigned on a platform supporting a ban on congressional stock trading, and her financial disclosures show no significant individual stock holdings.

Alaska is shaping up to be one of the races where Democrats can hope to gain ground in the Senate, where Republicans currently hold a narrow majority of 53 to 47.

Democrats would need a net gain of four seats to take the majority in the upper chamber, but they will also be defending several of their own competitive seats in the midterms.

Initially, this could have seemed like an uphill battle for Democrats, as Alaska has not elected a Democrat to the U.S. Senate since 2008. When it comes to presidential elections, Alaska has long been seen as solidly red, having voted Republican for the 15th consecutive time in 2024.

But Democrats have been growing optimistic about the Alaska Senate race as Peltola has made strides in polls. The Democratic candidate is running with a centrist agenda aimed at gathering the support of independents and disgruntled moderate Republicans alike, who might not back a candidate who has been endorsed by President Donald Trump, like Sullivan.

Coincidentally, Peltola is gaining ground over Sullivan right as Trump’s popularity in The Last Frontier is waning.

The same New York Times/Siena University poll shows that 48 percent of likely Alaska voters “strongly disapprove” of Trump’s handling of his job as president and 8 percent “somewhat disapprove,” while only 29 percent “strongly approve” and 12 percent “somewhat approve” of it.

A previous poll conducted in June showed that 43 percent of Alaska likely voters strongly disapproved of Trump’s handling of his job and 6 percent somewhat disapproved, while 29 percent strongly approved of it and 18 percent somewhat approved of it.

Contact Newsweek editors on this story: Ben Kelly and Cristina Diciu.