Mary Peltola’s campaign to represent Alaska in the US Senate has taken her to parts of the massive state’s interior that are inaccessible by road and on the frontlines of the cost-of-living crisis she hopes will make her the first Democrat to win the seat in nearly two decades.

She has been to towns where paper towels retail for $40, a half gallon of oat milk goes for $21 and the cost of a new freezer can be quadruple what it is in the state’s largest city, Anchorage, simply because it’s so complicated to get there. Along the Arctic Ocean, she’s heard of communities where power bills have climbed to $1,500 a month because they rely on generators for power and the Iran war has pushed the cost of diesel to new heights.

“Nobody can afford that,” Peltola said in an interview.

Alaska, a right-leaning state that’s about twice the size of Texas but the third least-populous in the country, has always been among the more expensive places to live, and the price increases in the state’s rural areas haven’t necessarily been felt to the same degree in the more populous cities and towns.

Yet the state’s Democrats believe circumstances have aligned for them to win a slew of competitive elections in the 3 November midterms. The Senate seat currently held by two-term Republican Dan Sullivan is a top prize.

“In 23 short days, we’re going to be voting both [Republican congressman] Nick Begich and Dan Sullivan out of office, and they richly deserve it,” the chair of the state Democratic party, Eric Croft, said at a press conference last week.

“They are self-serving, self-dealing DC politicians who repeatedly voted to make life harder and more expensive for Alaskans.”

All signs indicate that Republicans are taking seriously the threat posed by Peltola, an Alaska native and former US House lawmaker who supports oil and gas and gun rights. Outside groups have poured in tens of millions of dollars into supporting both candidates, and last week Donald Trump made the long journey from Washington DC to the conservative Matanuska-Susitna valley to rally voters behind Sullivan, who has trailed in some recent polls.

“Here in Alaska, the Democrats are running radical left Mary Peltola for the Senate. If she gets in, you’re screwed,” the president told a packed sports center in Wasilla, which is best known outside the state as being the home town of Sarah Palin, the Republican former vice-presidential nominee.

On the campaign trail, Peltola and Sullivan have dueled over who would do a better job lowering costs for Alaskans, and also representing its vital fishing and oil and gas industries in the US Capitol. There have been mutual accusations of allegiances not to a state known as “the last frontier” but to special interests in the Lower 48, while Sullivan has accused Peltola of denigrating Alaskans after a report that she mistreated her staffers.

The incumbent has his own unique vulnerability in the form of a similarly named Republican challenger who made it through the state’s top-four primary, and could split his support. And while polls open on 3 November, the outcome may not be known for days – Alaska has always taken a long time to count its ballots, and its use of ranked-choice voting in the Senate contest could result in an even lengthier wait for the final result.

No state like it

Since becoming the 49th state in 1959, Alaska has only once supported a Democratic candidate in a presidential election – Lyndon B Johnson in 1964. But its politics are nuanced – bipartisan majorities currently control the legislature and the frontrunner in the governor’s race is a Democrat. In the race for the state’s lone US House seat, the party has coalesced behind the independent candidate Bill Hill to take on Begich.

“Sixty per cent of Alaskans do not identify with the Republican or the Democratic party. We are a great example in this state of how government should work,” Hill, who is receiving support from the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, said in an interview.

A former state lawmaker, Peltola rose to prominence in 2022 when she won a special election to replace Don Young, the long-serving Republican congressman who died at 88, and became the first Alaska native in Congress. She was elected to a full term later that year, then lost re-election to Begich in 2024. This year, Peltola is viewed as the best candidate Democrats could field to take on Sullivan.

Centering her campaign on the slogan “fish, family, freedom”, she has added an Alaskan twist to the cost-focused platform many Democrats have adopted nationwide. Visitors to her campaign website can play a video game intended to highlight her views on bycatch, or the accidental netting of other species by trawlers, which has become a major controversy in Alaska as salmon runs have dwindled.

Peltola opposes Trump’s tariff regime, noting it has driven up costs for imports from Canada, which separates Alaska from the rest of the country. She has also condemned his decision to attack Iran and spark a conflict that has driven costs for gasoline and diesel – which typically arrive by barge or ship in the state’s interior and island communities – even higher than usual.

“These really frivolous decisions are just putting Alaskans in a bind, and we’re really paying the price for these weird partisan wars,” Peltola said as she visited a picket line of flight attendants at Anchorage’s main airport. With a laugh, she added: “I don’t know what’s funny about that, but it’s funny.”

Sullivan, her opponent, was first elected in 2014 after ousting a Democratic incumbent. He serves alongside Republican Lisa Murkowski, Alaska’s senior senator who is one of the most outspoken Trump critics in the Senate, but has nonetheless remained a firm ally of of the president, even as his popularity has waned, unlike many vulnerable Republicans who have sought distance. Sullivan has emphasized his advocacy for Alaska’s military installations, as well as the state’s long list of proposed oil developments and major infrastructure projects that he argues will only come to fruition if Republicans are kept in charge.

“Joe Biden, Schumer, their Democratic allies came after Alaska with a barrage of executive orders to shut down our state, kill jobs, drive up the cost of energy, and my opponent, Mary Peltola, not only did nothing to stop it, she enabled it,” Sullivan said as he rallied with Trump.

“They try to kill our jobs and turn us into a national park. Ladies and gentlemen, the conflict in the Middle East is temporary. The true forever war is the national Democrats’ war against Alaska oil and gas and our jobs.”

He gained new ammunition against Peltola in September, when the New York Times reported allegations that she had verbally and physically abused her staff and used slurs. “My opponent really doesn’t like her fellow Alaskans. She just doesn’t,” Sullivan told supporters in Wasilla.

Peltola’s campaign has said parts of the report are not true, and noted some of the behavior occurred when she was grieving the death of her husband in a plane crash, and the death of her mother around the same time. When Peltola was asked about the report during a debate with Sullivan last week, she replied: “I do not think that this election is about me on my worst day, and I found so many of these allegations concerning and outright fabrications.”

‘Priced out of petroleum’

Alaska is one of the nation’s top oil-producing states, and every year its permanent fund pays each resident a dividend that’s usually upwards of $1,000. But production, which is concentrated on the state’s North Slope, has steadily declined since peaking in the late 1980s, and how to manage the resource is a constant topic in the state’s politics.

Sullivan is all-in on oil production, supporting moves by Trump to open up more protected federal land and waters to drilling, which could offer new revenue opportunities. He cheered the president’s announcement that South Korea would invest $54bn to build a long-discussed natural gas pipeline across the state, although reports have since emerged that Seoul has agreed to no such deal.

Though she was in the House of Representatives for just over two years, Peltola has taken credit for pushing Joe Biden to approve the massive Willow oil project, over the objections of environmentalists. But she also emphasizes the opportunities renewable energy could present to Alaska’s communities, and is cognizant that she is a member of a party that prioritizes fighting the climate crisis, which many believe requires curbing oil and gas production.

“We do need more oil production in our state for our state revenues to pay for our schools, our roads, our public safety,” Peltola said.

But the sky-high prices for gas in parts of Alaska are proof to the candidate that oil is not the solution alone.

“When you’re paying $26 a gallon for gas or diesel, we’re priced out of petroleum,” she said.