Alaska Senate race shifts to toss-up as Peltola challenges Sullivan

Sabato's Crystal Ball moved Alaska's U.S. Senate race from "leans Republican" to "toss-up" Thursday, a notable shift in the contest between two-term Republican Senator Dan Sullivan and Democrat Mary Peltola. The June 11 change came alongside two other moves in Democrats' favor: Ohio's Senate race also shifted to toss-up, and North Carolina's open seat moved to leans Democratic.

The nonpartisan forecaster at the University of Virginia Center for Politics grounded the change in candidate quality and state trends. Peltola lost her 2024 House race but ran well ahead of Kamala Harris in Alaska, losing by about 2.5 points, and the Crystal Ball described Sullivan as a "fairly run-of-the-mill" Republican while noting Alaska's GOP lean has lessened somewhat in the Trump era.

The same analysis carries cautions for Democrats. When the Crystal Ball first added Alaska to its competitive board in January, it noted the state is a double-digit Trump state, that Sullivan won his 2020 race comfortably, 54 to 41 percent, despite being outspent two-to-one by independent Al Gross, and that Democrats' expensive red-state Senate efforts in 2020 went bust across the board. The forecaster also flagged that Alaska gets little public polling, which makes ratings there more judgment than measurement.

Peltola won Alaska's at-large House seat in 2022, becoming the first Alaska Native elected to Congress, before losing it to Republican Nick Begich III in 2024. Alaska runs a nonpartisan top-four primary, set for August 18, with ranked-choice voting in the November 3 general election.