Alaska Democrat Mary Peltola Pushes Back Against Endorsement From Kamala Harris

For former Representative Mary Peltola, a Democrat, to win the Senate race in Alaska this year, she would have to drastically outperform former Vice President Kamala Harris’s showing in the state in the 2024 presidential election.

So after Ms. Harris, who lost Alaska by 14 percentage points, signed a recent fund-raising email from her PAC supporting Ms. Peltola, Republicans saw an opening for an attack — and pounced. Ms. Peltola’s campaign, in turn, quickly said it had not approved the appeal and did not seek the former vice president’s endorsement.

In the fund-raising appeal, sent Wednesday, Ms. Harris urged supporters to “stand behind Mary,” describing the battle in Alaska as a “must-win race” for Democrats in their quest to reclaim the Senate. The well-funded Ms. Peltola is running as an independent-minded centrist against Senator Dan Sullivan of Alaska. Limited polling suggests the race is competitive.

The email from Ms. Harris’s political action committee links to a donation page for a Democratic PAC and urges supporters to split their donations between Ms. Peltola’s campaign and Ms. Harris’s committee. It says: “If there’s anyone who can flip Alaska and secure the Senate majority for Democrats — it’s Mary.”

A day after the email went out, the campaign arm of Senate Republicans, the National Republican Senatorial Committee, moved to tie Ms. Peltola to Ms. Harris. A spokesman for the group, Nick Puglia, declared in a statement that Ms. Peltola had worked “hand in hand with Kamala Harris to put Alaska last, so it’s no surprise that Harris is backing Peltola.” (Ms. Peltola’s brief tenure in Congress, a little more than two years, overlapped with the Biden administration.)

A spokesman for Mr. Sullivan’s campaign, Nate Adams, piled on, saying in a statement, “No matter how hard Mary Peltola tries to hide from the endorsement, Alaskans can see exactly whose team she and Kamala Harris are on.”

Ms. Peltola’s campaign pushed back.

“Mary isn’t seeking endorsements from anyone from the Lower 48 — her focus is and always will be Alaska,” the campaign said in a statement that cited the support Ms. Peltola has captured from several Alaska labor groups.

The Peltola campaign said that it did not approve the email from Ms. Harris’s organization, and that it had no knowledge about it before it was sent out.

A representative for Ms. Harris did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

It was not the first fund-raising appeal Ms. Harris’s political action committee, the Fight for the People PAC, had sent trying to use Ms. Peltola’s candidacy to raise funds for its own coffers.

On Jan. 12, the day Ms. Peltola announced her run, the PAC sent a similar message to supporters. “This is the race that may determine control of the Senate,” the January email began. But the timing of the latest solicitation stood out with the state’s Aug. 18 nonpartisan primary just days away.

Ms. Peltola is widely expected to advance Tuesday to the November general election. Under Alaska’s election system, the top four candidates in the primary move on. But Primary Day will offer the candidates a spotlight to deliver their messages and set the stage for the general-election race, along with an audience that is likely to be paying closer attention.

Defending Republican attacks linking Ms. Peltola with Ms. Harris is probably not the message the candidate had in mind for this important moment.

The appeal by Ms. Harris’s group also arrived as she considers running for president again. In the spring, she told the Rev. Al Sharpton that she “might” run, and she has spent recent months making public appearances across the country.

Ms. Peltola did not endorse Ms. Harris in 2024. The former congresswoman’s campaign slogan this year is “fish, family and freedom.”

State Representative Rebecca Himschoot of Alaska, an independent, said the email from Ms. Harris’s group could be somewhat unhelpful for Ms. Peltola, but that it was just a small part of a deluge of messaging from outside Alaska flooding the Senate race.

“I pity the voters in Alaska this cycle: it’s tremendously manipulative, all the stuff we’re getting,” Ms. Himschoot said, even as she described the outreach by Ms. Harris’s organization as “really dumb.”

“She’s riding Mary Peltola’s coattails,” Ms. Himschoot added. “And she’s not even running for anything that anyone knows of yet, and didn’t do well here to begin with.”

Alaska has not elected a Democrat to the Senate in nearly two decades, though the state has an independent streak and has showed signs of shifting toward Democrats in some recent election cycles.

Most Alaska voters are politically unaffiliated. Senator Lisa Murkowski, a centrist Republican, won re-election in the state in 2022 by beating a Trump-backed rival.

Republicans also worry that the arrival in the race of another Dan Sullivan, a former elementary-school teacher with no political experience, will confuse supporters of the senator with the same name, potentially siphoning away some of his votes and lifting Ms. Peltola to victory.

Republicans have claimed that Ms. Peltola’s campaign planted the second Mr. Sullivan in the race to trick voters, but the Peltola campaign has denied coordinating with him. That Mr. Sullivan waged a successful court battle to remain on the ballot after elections officials tried to remove him.