Mary Peltola is a Democrat who, as a child, campaigned with her father and his friend, the state’s longtime Republican congressman. Later, she helped reelect a Republican senator. And she is friendly with Sarah Palin, the state’s former governor who popularized the kind of combative, anti-establishment politics that propelled Donald Trump to the White House.
“She is progressive, especially socially,” Lindsay Kavanaugh, the executive director of the Alaska Democratic Party, said of Peltola. “She is an Alaska Democrat,” and “probably, compared to a Lower 48 Democrat, she is a little more moderate.”