Peltola campaign launches salmon video game attacking Sullivan over trawling

Mary Peltola's Senate campaign released a browser game Thursday called Salmon Run, in which the player is a salmon swimming through a gauntlet of factory trawler nets. The campaign calls it educational. It is also an attack ad with a scoreboard.

The gameplay is thin by design — tap to rise, dodge nets and seals, repeat until a net gets you. It is a competent version of a genre that peaked fifteen years ago, which is roughly the right level of effort for a campaign handout.

On-screen messages accuse Sen. Dan Sullivan of taking nearly $400,000 from the trawling industry while Alaska fishermen face closures. That figure comes from the campaign's own analysis of federal filings and has not been independently verified. The game's bycatch numbers, including roughly 20,000 Chinook killed so far this year, track with NOAA data, though the campaign supplies the framing around them. Campaign manager Elisa Rios said Sullivan has stayed "in lockstep with the factory trawling agenda."

The game also pitches Peltola's fisheries platform, which would ban factory trawling and keep mid-water trawlers off the ocean floor.

Sullivan has his own record on the issue. He introduced the Bycatch Reduction Act in June, which would require salmon excluder devices on all pollock vessels and reauthorize NOAA's bycatch engineering program, and he holds the endorsement of United Fishermen of Alaska. Trawl vessel owners argue that sweeping bans would cost thousands of jobs in coastal communities that depend on the fleet.