Senate Democrats are rejoicing as their recruiting lands another strong contender, former lawmaker Mary Peltola, whose announcement Monday that she is launching her candidacy for the U.S. Senate has suddenly made Alaska one of the most competitive races of 2026.

Over the course of 2025, Senator Chuck Schumer made a concerted effort to recruit a number of Democratic candidates. Governors Roy Cooper of North Carolina and Janet Mills of Maine are on board to contest Senate seats, as is Sherrod Brown, who lost his Ohio Senate seat in 2024, but is seeking to make another run. The four campaigns nearly guarantee that the races later this year to unseat Republicans will be competitive. 

Many view Ms. Peltola as being a particularly equipped candidate given her popularity in Alaska. She won a special election to represent the state in the U.S. House back in 2022, and then won a full term later that year. In 2024, she lost re-election for the at-large seat, though only by three points in the state that President Trump won on the same day by more than 13 points. 

“It’s not just that politicians in D.C. don’t care that we’re paying $17 a gallon for milk in rural Alaska — they don’t even believe us,” Ms. Peltola said in her announcement video on Monday, in which she whipsawed Washington politicians for self-dealing. 

“When they actually work together on something, it’s usually to help themselves,” she said. “They’re going to complain that I’m proposing term limits. But it’s time. Systemic change is the only way to bring down grocery costs.” 

Ms. Peltola also called out her state’s three-member congressional delegation — Congressman Nick Begich, Senator Lisa Murkowski, and Senator Dan Sullivan, against whom she is now running — for not standing up to President Trump. 

“Ted Stevens and Don Young ignored Lower 48 partisanship to fight for things like public media and disaster relief,” Ms. Peltola said, highlighting the work of her state’s late lawmakers, Senator Ted Stevens and Congressman Don Young, who were re-elected for decades thanks to their commitment to getting appropriations directed to Alaska.

“Ted Stevens often said, ‘To hell with politics, put Alaska first.’ It’s about time Alaskans teach the rest of the country what Alaska First — and really, America First — looks like,” she said, borrowing from Mr. Trump. 

Her candidacy is likely to make Republican campaign operators especially nervous given the polling conducted in the lead-up to Ms. Peltola’s announcement. A number of polls show that Ms. Peltola and Mr. Sullivan would be in a nearly tied race were she to enter. 

A poll taken by Alaska Survey Research in July showed Ms. Peltola trailing Mr. Sullivan by five points. A second poll by the same firm conducted in October showed her beating Mr. Sullivan by two points. The Alaska Survey Research poll contacted more than 1,600 for each of those polls. 

Another survey from the Democratic Party-aligned firm Data for Progress showed a similarly close result, with Ms. Peltola beating Mr. Sullivan by one point. 

Alaska has a ranked-choice voting system for federal elections, meaning voters rank candidates on their ballots by preference. Whichever candidate receives the fewest number of votes in the first round is eliminated and their support is reallocated to other candidates based on voters’ second choice in the rankings. The process repeats itself until someone has won more than 50 percent of the vote. 

Within minutes of Ms. Peltola’s announcement, political analysts began adjusting their assessments of Democrats’ ability to win back the Senate. Sabato’s Crystal Ball at the University of Virginia — which ranks elections based on which party is likely to win — changed its assessment to a “lean Republican” seat rather than its previous ranking of “safe Republican.”

The Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee — the group charged with electing Senate Democrats — endorsed Ms. Peltola immediately. EMILYs List, a group which supports Democratic women across the country, also backed Ms. Peltola, saying she would tackle the “broken system in Washington to deliver for Alaska.”