Alaska's U.S. Senate race has crystallized around a fight over salmon and who bears the cost of their scarcity.
Evon Waska lives on the Kuskokwim River, where his family's smokehouse sits empty most years. His parents abandoned their nomadic life to settle there, but increasingly few salmon return from the Bering Sea. When stocks dwindle, government agencies close the river to subsistence fishing—affecting families like Waska's while industrial trawlers continue operating miles offshore.
"They don't close the trawlers. They close me and my people first," Waska said.
The pollock trawling industry—worth $1 billion annually, based largely in Seattle—operates massive vessels that drag quarter-mile-long nets with openings the size of a football field. The catch is processed into imitation crab, Filet-O-Fish, and other products. But those nets also scoop up king salmon and other prized fish as bycatch, wasting them and intensifying anger in Alaska's fishing communities.
Republican incumbent Senator Dan Sullivan, long aligned with the trawling industry, is now pushing new legislation he calls "the most comprehensive bycatch legislation ever to reduce bycatch, protect seafloor habitat." Democratic challenger Mary Peltola, who is Indigenous and from the Kuskokwim region, has positioned herself as the anti-trawler candidate. She has called for banning factory trawlers outright and branded Sullivan's bill an "election year ploy." Peltola has also highlighted Sullivan's campaign contributions from the industry, pointing to over $300,000 in donations.
The race hinges on who controls the Senate. Alaska is one of the few remaining competitive seats that will decide partisan control.
