Sullivan and Peltola, fighting over the same salmon

Alaska's U.S. Senate race is being fought, in part, over a fish. Sen. Dan Sullivan, the Republican incumbent, introduced a bycatch bill earlier this week that he calls the most comprehensive in the nation's history. His Democratic challenger, former Rep. Mary Peltola — who has built two campaigns on salmon and bycatch — met it coolly, her campaign casting it as an election-year turn on ground she has worked for years.

Sullivan's bill, S. 4938, introduced June 24, would set gear-performance and seafloor-contact standards for trawlers across the Bering Sea, Aleutian Islands, and Gulf of Alaska, require salmon excluder devices, expand electronic monitoring, and create a fund for bycatch-reduction and habitat work. It would also bar imports of seafood caught unsustainably abroad. Sullivan, who sits on the Senate Commerce Committee that oversees federal fisheries law, has said he hopes to move it through the committee.

Peltola, a Yup'ik former tribal fisheries manager from the Kuskokwim, has made bycatch her signature since 2022. In Congress she introduced the Bottom Trawl Clarity Act and the Bycatch Reduction and Mitigation Act in 2024, and her Senate campaign has since rolled out a fisheries plan that goes further than Sullivan's bill — calling to ban factory trawling outright, keep midwater trawlers off the seafloor, and add Tribal seats to the federal council that manages the fisheries. "We don't need more studies to tell us what's happening in front of our eyes," she said in announcing it.

The fight turns on a question science has not settled cleanly: how much of Western Alaska's salmon collapse to lay at the trawlers' nets. Yup'ik and other Western Alaska communities, shut out of their own subsistence fishing for years, argue it is unjust for the pollock fleet to take any Alaska-bound salmon as bycatch. The trawl industry and some federal research push the other way, pointing to warming oceans as a major driver of the declines and to genetic studies suggesting many salmon caught as bycatch were bound for Asian and Canadian rivers, not Alaska's. The North Pacific council has tightened chum bycatch limits even so.

The numbers Alaskans will see this summer are grim, though not in a way that maps neatly onto the dispute. The state forecasts a 2026 commercial salmon harvest of about 125 million fish, down from roughly 197 million in 2025 — but most of that drop is pink salmon, a boom-and-bust species far from the kings and chums at the heart of the bycatch fight.

What is not contested is the politics. Trawling has become a rare issue that cuts across Alaska's usual party lines, and in a Senate race expected to be among the most expensive in state history, both Sullivan and Peltola are betting that voters who have watched their rivers go quiet are listening.