A few days later, at Alaska’s Senate Fisheries Debate in Kodiak, on the third anniversary of the death of her third husband, she wore salmon-shaped earrings made from the tusk of a walrus and asked moderators to repeat questions.
“Can you restate it please?”
“Say it again?”
To succeed statewide here, said John-Henry Heckendorn, an Anchorage-based Democratic strategist, a Democrat must assemble a convoluted coalition almost at odds with itself — Natives and not, rural and not, commercial fishermen and subsistence fishermen, on and on.
“Mary’s political talent,” he said, “has been her ability to inhabit those tensions.”
She inhabits those tensions because she is born of those tensions. Ms. Peltola is Alaska and Nebraska, the Yukon-Kuskokwim Delta and the Lower 48, Yup’ik collectivism and American individualism. Being “double” can be an advantage, she says, and she is not wrong. It also, though, can be a source of some untenable tug.
She is leading by a bit in polling and by a lot in fund-raising, but voters in Alaska are characteristically contrarian and unpredictable. This race, say independent analysts, could go either way.
On a recent rainy, windy evening in Anchorage, at a canvassing kickoff at an Alaska Democratic Party field office, Ms. Peltola was introduced by the former president of the Alaska A.F.L.-C.I.O. Ms. Peltola was wearing black Adidas and a kuspuk. She touched her face and smiled, looked out at her supporters and began her speech.
“Where do you even start?” she said.
Kitty Bennett, Sheelagh McNeill and Kirsten Noyes contributed research.
