On Jan 12, Mary Peltola announced her campaign for Senate, challenging Senator Dan Sullivan, who has been serving Alaska in the Senate for 10 years.
Peltola’s campaign video showcases political deception at its finest. The video is warm, appealing, and has a “homey” Alaskan feel. Peltola speaks to the average Alaskan by highlighting “the rigged system in DC” and her priorities of “fish, family, freedom.” In fact, the video almost has a conservative feel. Her campaign slogan “To hell with politics… Put Alaska first” seems to harken to Republicans’ “America First” focus.
Democrats had long begun their wide-reaching effort to disparage Sullivan and convince the average Alaskan that Sullivan is destroying Alaska for his own benefit. Peltola herself is now trying to win over conservatives and independent voters with deceptive rhetoric.
According to Senate Majority PAC spokesperson Lauren French: “Mary Peltola is a dedicated champion for Alaska, and her leadership in the Senate is what working families need to reverse the economic harm caused by Donald Trump and Dan Sullivan…Her entrance into the Senate race completely upends the campaign, putting an already unpopular and weak Dan Sullivan on his heels.”
In her video, Peltola states: “My agenda for Alaska will always be fish, family, and freedom. But our future also depends on fixing the rigged system in DC that’s shutting down Alaska while politicians feather their own nest.”
Many conservatives can agree that politicians are often out for their own interests rather than the interests of their constituents. However, Peltola skids right passed the obvious questions: “Who is shutting down Alaska?” and “Who is benefiting?”
Under the Biden administration, 70 acts were signed into law that locked down Alaska’s natural resources. On President Trump’s first day in office, he signed the Executive Order “Unleashing Alaska’s Extraordinary Resource Potential.” The EO lays out a detailed roadmap for unlocking Alaska, and the Alaska Congressional Delegation (Senators Dan Sullivan and Lisa Murkowski and Rep. Nick Begich III) got to work making it happen.
Senator Sullivan backed the joint resolution, now passed into law, that “prevents BLM from implementing sweeping and permanent restrictions on access, development, and infrastructure across more than 13 million acres of public land in Alaska within the 56-million-acre planning area (a land mass nearly the size of Virginia, Maryland, and Pennsylvania combined).”
The Trump Administration has clearly shown its prioritization of unlocking Alaska’s resources for the benefit of Alaskans and Americans.
Trump’s EO states: “By developing [Alaska’s] resources to the fullest extent possible, we can help deliver price relief for Americans, create high-quality jobs for our citizens, ameliorate our trade imbalances, augment the Nation’s exercise of global energy dominance, and guard against foreign powers weaponizing energy supplies in theaters of geopolitical conflict.
“Unleashing this opportunity, however, requires an immediate end to the assault on Alaska’s sovereignty and its ability to responsibly develop these resources for the benefit of the Nation. It is, therefore, imperative to immediately reverse the punitive restrictions implemented by the previous administration that specifically target resource development on both State and Federal lands in Alaska.”
What does Peltola have to prove her commitment to stopping the politicians shutting down Alaska? During her stint in Congress, she missed the vote on legislation to stop Biden from depleting our national reserves to historically low levels, supported anti-carbon policies that cause consumer prices to rise, voted against reinstating oil leasing in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, supported expanded environmental protections in the National Petroleum Reserve-Alaska, opposed Pebble Mine, and opposed the Ambler Road.
Peltola is right that Alaskans cannot afford crooked politicians locking up our land and our resources. The irony is that she expects Alaskans to believe she is the one who will stop Democrats from locking up of Alaska.