Heacox says Peltola must apologize, calls Sullivan a disaster for Alaska

DOJ seeks to block Peltola win pending probe into namesake votes

Kim Heacox, a former ranger at Alaska’s Glacier Bay, Denali and Katmai national parks, published an opinion column Oct. 30 in The Guardian headlined “Mary Peltola made a mistake. But her Republican opponent would be a disaster for Alaska.” Heacox, whose books include “The Only Kayak” and “Jimmy Bluefeather,” wrote that Peltola “needs to do what Trump has never done: apologize.”

Heacox opened by calling Trump’s trip to Alaska earlier this month “a real doozy,” recalling that during the previous visit, in August 2025, Trump ordered the U.S. military to roll out a red carpet for Russia’s Vladimir Putin, and that the two leaders talked about the war in Ukraine while achieving no formal ceasefire and no peace agreement.

He wrote that Sullivan, Alaska’s junior Republican senator seeking a third term, is in a tight race with Peltola and that “control of the US Senate for the next two years could come down to Alaska.”

He described Peltola as “a lifelong Alaskan who knows how to listen and who understands what she calls ‘kitchen table issues,’” and called Sullivan “a corporate shill” who, he wrote, has voted with Trump’s stated positions more than 95% of the time, including 14 votes against resolutions aimed at curtailing the president’s military authority or against removing US forces from Iran.

Heacox wrote that about a week before the column appeared, Trump directed the U.S. Department of Justice to file a lawsuit against the state of Alaska because a second Dan Sullivan — a retired schoolteacher from the coastal fishing town of Petersburg — is also on the ballot. The lawsuit, he wrote, seeks to block a Peltola win “pending an investigation to determine whether votes cast for Daniel J. Sullivan were meant to be cast for Senator Sullivan.” The Justice Department has reportedly issued subpoenas over the matter.

Heacox noted that four months ago, the Alaska supreme court approved both Sullivans on the ballot; the Alaska division of elections lists the Petersburg candidate as “Sullivan, Daniel J Jr” without a party affiliation and the senator, Dan S Sullivan, as the incumbent Republican. He wrote that on Wednesday, the New York Times reported that back in the summer of 2025, Democratic operatives began to engineer ways to get a spoiler on the Alaska ballot, according to interviews with Peltola’s former campaign manager and longtime aide, Elisa Rios, who was fired in a staff shake-up in August. Other sources, he wrote, included texts.

Rios, Heacox wrote, said Peltola was not directly involved in the operation but was aware of it. Last week, he wrote, Rios contacted the Times and retracted all statements “made regarding the 2026 Alaska Senate Race,” adding, “I am not willing to be a source for any story in any capacity.” A spokesperson for the Democratic Senate campaign arm told The Guardian: “Republicans have a long history of recruiting and propping up candidates in an attempt to boost their own campaigns.”

Heacox wrote that criticism of the lawsuit “has been deep and wide.” He quoted Libby Bakalar, the municipal attorney for Bethel and a former assistant attorney general, who wrote: “Donald Trump is abusing the judicial system in an attempt to personally appoint your next United States senator. Don’t let him.” Following the Times story, he wrote, Bakalar told KTOO: “Not a single illegal thing happened here.”

Heacox wrote that at the Oct. 13 rally in a Wasilla sports center, Trump and Sullivan “appeared to have a good time, playing to all the flags and phones and red hats.” Sullivan, he wrote, said nothing about Alaska’s federal employees who lost their jobs due to government cuts, many of them highly educated scientists, and made no appeal to Alaskans in remote villages who struggle with some of the highest prices in the state’s history: home heating fuel at $7-$9 a gallon, milk at $25-$30 a gallon. He also said nothing, Heacox wrote, about the estimated 30,000 Alaskans who have lost, or will soon lose, their medical coverage. Instead, Sullivan told the crowd what he had said to Trump privately: “Mr President, I just really want to thank you for all that you’re doing for Alaska.”

Trump took a jab at Peltola, Heacox wrote, but saved his best for other matters. “Bring on the pardons,” he announced, and the beneficiaries were two Anchorage mechanics who had pleaded guilty to violating the Clean Air Act through a business that disabled pollution control devices on diesel engines. “They want to put them in jail for 10 years because they fixed an engine,” Trump told the crowd. “How sick.” He proceeded, Heacox wrote, to talk about trucking and “all of the environmental crap” that makes vehicles expensive and inefficient.

Heacox also criticized Trump and Sullivan over drilling for oil in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, reducing the western Brooks Range to a massive mining district reached by a cut-and-fill road through Gates of the Arctic national park, and repealing the U.S. Forest Service’s Roadless Rule to enable clearcut logging in the Tongass national forest — “a temperate rainforest, one of the rarest biomes on Earth” that stores more carbon than any other national forest in the country. Of the roughly 1.6 million responses, he wrote, more than 99% opposed the repeal.

He wrote that while Trump and Sullivan shared the stage, Peltola was off the road system, listening to village Alaskans express their concerns about the cost of fuel and food, their warming world and declining numbers of caribou and fish, northern rivers “turning rustic orange-yellow, laced with toxic metals leached from thawing permafrost,” and homes sinking into swamps or falling into a sea that no longer freezes in autumn, allowing ocean storms to tear down protective bluffs and eat away at villages. He wrote that she needs to “come clean with the people she seeks to represent” and “stand strong and promise to take the high ground.”

Heacox, who wrote that he came north in the 1970s as a young ranger with the U.S. National Park Service and has lived in Alaska for nearly 50 years, closed with a forecast: “Can Peltola unseat Sullivan on 3 November? Yes. Alaska will be counted last, but don’t count us out. My forecast from the land of caribou, whales and bears: cloudy with a chance of better days ahead.”