Democrats say rising costs put Senator Dan Sullivan’s seat at risk Tuesday
With less than 17 hours to go before the noontime start of Alaska’s Bering Sea crab season, Oystein Lone stood on a dock in Unalaska preparing to take one of his two boats out into a forecast of 60mph gusts that would kick up white-capped swells and make crabbing — already one of the most dangerous jobs in the United States — even more hazardous. The weather was not what troubled him, and neither were the quotas, which state regulators had raised for red king, tanner and snow crab. It was the fuel: diesel cost more than ever, after crude oil prices rose in tandem with the war in Iran. “This is the most challenging time I’ve seen,” said Lone, who has been fishing since 1989 and captains the Pacific Mariner. He had already spent $86,000 to put 12,000 gallons of diesel in one boat, and with prices climbing since, expected a second fill-up to cost $100,000.
Unalaska, a city of nearly 4,300 residents that has been the country’s most productive seafood port by volume for more than two and a half decades, is absorbing that cost alongside canceled federal grants, disrupted institutions and tariff-driven shipping changes, days before Tuesday’s midterm elections. When crab and pollock seasons are open, thousands of deckhands and processors arrive for tough but well-paying jobs on boats offshore and in seafood plants crowded into the city.
The town sits farther west than the Hawaiian islands — closer to Beijing, Tokyo and Seoul than to Washington — and most visitors arrive on flights from Anchorage that cost at least $1,600 round trip and are prone to cancellation in the region’s storms and fog. In 2023, the most recent year with available data, more than 780m pounds of catch valued at nearly $225m moved through its port, Dutch Harbor, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. Pollock is the main product: anyone who has eaten fish sticks, imitation crab or a Filet-O-Fish sandwich at a McDonald’s in Asia or the United States has eaten fish whose ingredients may well have been processed on Unalaska. Bering Sea crab comes across the same docks, where camera crews embark each year to film the reality series Deadliest Catch. The name Unalaska comes from the language of the Unangax̂ people, who have lived on the island for thousands of years; it roughly translates to “near the mainland”, a reference to the island’s proximity to Alaska’s southwestern peninsula. Russian fur traders arrived in the mid-18th century, and the colony they established came under American control with the 1867 purchase of Alaska. As the second world war approached, the US military built bases on the large, mountainous island of Unalaska and the smaller Amaknak island next to it, connected by a single bridge in the 1970s. In June 1942, Japan staged back-to-back air raids that killed dozens, leaving pillboxes and bunkers strewn across the town’s treeless hills.
The disruptions of Trump’s second term have reached all of it. Since Trump returned to office in 2025 and began signing executive orders billed as rooting out federal waste, supplemented by Elon Musk’s now-shuttered “department of government efficiency” — an effort Democrats and good governance groups said undermined important functions of government and was of dubious legality — the library, museum, public radio station and local government have all had funding they relied on disrupted or canceled. A March 2025 order attempted to dismantle a slate of federal agencies including the Institute of Museum and Library Services, the source of a yearly grant Unalaska’s public library uses to buy books. Librarian Karen Kresh expected $6,000 last year and was told the money would not come. “It had been stable and been reliable for years and years, and that was sort of a surprise to see that instability come up with that grant,” she said.
The Museum of the Aleutians, the main repository in the United States for cultural and natural history objects from the island chain, was cataloging artifacts dating to the Russians’ first contact with the Unangax̂ under a grant of more than $347,000 from the National Endowment for the Humanities. At the beginning of April, executive director Virginia Hatfield received a message saying the grant was canceled because it “no longer effectuates the agency’s needs and priorities” and the funds would be reallocated “in a new direction in furtherance of the president’s agenda”. The cut put the project on hold and forced her to lay off six people. “It’s very heartbreaking, and it kind of truncated important work,” she said. The grant was restored in June of this year, but by then the project director and outreach specialist Hatfield had hired had found other work, and the professor who excavated the artifacts had died.
Weeks after the museum’s cut, Republicans in Congress approved legislation ending funding for public media, which they have long accused of broadcasting news with a liberal bias. The stakes are particular in Alaska, the largest state, where small remote communities like Unalaska are unreachable by road and cellphone service can be unreliable, making radio the best way to spread emergency warnings — the same day the Senate began debating the cuts, Unalaska’s public broadcaster KUCB was warning of a potential tsunami. The wave did not arrive, and after Trump signed the bill, KUCB lost half its budget, general manager Lauren Adams said. A surge in donations from outraged listeners — mirrored at public media outlets nationwide — and temporary funding from the Bureau of Indian Affairs, which reached more than a dozen Alaska stations, left the station with reserves in the bank but no long-term answer to how it stays open now that its annual federal funding is gone. “When you get just this windfall fundraising from around the United States, what’s the sustainability of that?” Adams said. “Eventually, we’re going to run out of those reserves and things that kept us going.”
The administration’s record in Unalaska has not been solely disruptive. Iliuliuk Family & Health Services, the city’s only clinic, which handles everything from checkups to emergencies, is preparing to open a pharmacy that can replace the mail-order drugs most residents rely on, funded by more than $400,000 from the federal Rural Health Transformation Program — created under Trump’s main domestic policy legislation, the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, to address Republican concerns that cuts to Medicaid, the health insurance program for poor and disabled Americans, elsewhere in the law would put rural hospitals out of business. Most of the law’s Medicaid provisions have not yet taken effect, and hospitals nationwide remain concerned that even with the Rural Health Transformation money they could lose patients vital to keeping their doors open; Christy Fassbender, the clinic’s chief operating officer, said that is unlikely to be an issue in Unalaska. “We have a very small Medicaid population. We are less than 6% for Medicare and Medicaid, and that is because this is a working town,” Fassbender said. Some cuts have been reversed — the IMLS restored the library’s book money, NEH grants cut nationwide were restored after a lawsuit, and a separate suit halted the IMLS’s closure — but Kresh has since learned the Federal Communications Commission is considering ending E-Rate, a program that helps the library and Unalaska’s school district provide internet access; if it ended, Kresh said, the library would have to find another way to cover the cost of the only free public wifi in town, which residents and visitors use to apply for jobs and stay connected.
The diesel squeeze reaches every household, since seafood plants generate their own electricity while the rest of the city runs on a separate, generator-powered grid. “This whole town runs on diesel,” said Daneen Looby, a longtime resident who sits on the city council and owns the Norwegian Rat Saloon. Under Joe Biden, the Department of Energy established the Office of Clean Energy Demonstrations, and Unalaska was applying for funds to install five one-megawatt wind turbines and a battery system on a windy parcel of land that utility director Erik Hernandez said could have replaced most of the city’s diesel generators — leaders have also long contemplated geothermal power from a nearby volcano. After Trump took office, the DOE stopped communicating about the grant, and in June 2025 the city was informed the money was no longer available; the DOE did not respond to a request for comment. Earlier this year, the Government Accountability Office found the Office of Clean Energy Demonstrations had lost 85% of its staff over the first six months of Trump’s second term and placed a stop-work order on all its contracts. The fluctuating rate the city charges power users to cover fuel costs has climbed almost two-thirds, from $0.22 per kilowatt hour last year to as much as $0.36 now, Hernandez said.
Immigration policy has reshaped processing crews as well. At Unisea, one of the largest seafood processors in the city, director of Alaska operations Ron Kjorsvik said the company is rebuilding its workforce after moving away from foreign guest workers whose visas had long been hard to get and eventually became too unreliable. The only foreign workers still processing pollock, crab, black cod and halibut are 15 Ukrainians on a special visa for nationals of the war-ravaged country, and none had their visas renewed, Kjorsvik said — they will be leaving soon. After congressional Democrats led by Virginia’s James Walkinshaw complained to US Citizenship and Immigration Services in March about delays processing such applications, the agency’s director said in a reply seen by The Guardian that USCIS had “many competing priorities and urgent requests for consideration daily” and could not “prioritize” Ukrainians holding U4U visas.
Tariffs have changed the work on the docks, too. Pollock have been small and scarce in 2026 and storms frequent, furthering the strain on a fishing industry that was already not having a great year and leaving less work for the longshoremen who move refrigerated containers of seafood onto ships bound for Asia and the US west coast. Some have been tasked with loading empty containers onto vessels, because containers that remain in the United States too long are considered imports subject to the tariffs Trump has imposed on trading partners globally. Shawn Schomer, the International Longshore and Warehouse Union’s shop steward at Matson, one of the major shipping lines serving the port, said he has recently been getting a new and unusual request from his superiors when they ask for containers to be loaded onto outgoing vessels: “We got to get these tariff cans out of here. That’s what the management tells us.” “It can’t be good business to bring in empties and then have to sort them and ship them back out empty,” he said. A Matson spokesperson declined to comment.
The fuel costs are rippling through the fleet. Lone, 58, who has spent his adult life fishing, expects the high price of diesel to ripple through his industry: crew members can make six figures in a season, but vessel overhead cuts into their pay, and the price boats receive for their catch could fall as processors and shippers offset their own fuel costs. “Unfortunately, we’re at the bottom. We take the beating,” Lone said. “Everybody else just passes on their cost to us.” CJ Peterson, captain of the trawler Pacific Challenger, said he had been contemplating how much more his business could take while waiting to unload a 135-ton haul of pollock; one of Alaska’s native corporations owns his vessel, and Peterson knows the economics could someday keep him and his crew on land. “If the fish price doesn’t match the fuel costs, they’ll shut us down,” Peterson said.
The politics of the moment sit close to the surface in a town candidates only occasionally visit, where only a handful of campaign signs are up and residents interviewed expressed anger over the country’s direction since Trump returned to office. The midterm elections are on Tuesday, and Alaska is set to play a major role in determining whether the president’s Democratic foes regain control of Congress. Alaska resoundingly backed Trump in 2024, as did a majority of Unalaska voters, but Democrats believe the president’s plunging public approval ratings together with rising fuel prices have put two-term Republican Senator Dan Sullivan at risk of losing re-election to their nominee, Mary Peltola, even as her campaign faces controversy. Looby is weighing menu price increases because distributors have raised the fuel surcharges she pays on food and alcohol shipments. “I didn’t want to, but I kind of have to, otherwise I’m going to become a charity,” she said. “I feel like we have a rogue government right now, and I don’t feel like the Republicans are doing their job. I don’t understand why Congress isn’t getting more involved.” Lone wonders whether some of the Republicans he had previously trusted to stand up for Alaska’s interests in Washington are doing their job. “I support Sullivan and Begich, but I’m not too sure if they’re doing much for us,” he said of the state’s junior senator and Representative Nick Begich. Senior Senator Lisa Murkowski has opposed the Iran war and the effort to cut public media funding; Sullivan and Begich supported both, and face fierce challenges to their re-elections this year.
Captain Chris Studeman was not waiting to see how the numbers shook out. The evening before the noontime start of crab season, he gassed up his boat, the Kevleen K, at one of Unalaska’s marine fuel terminals and tried not to think about how much more he was paying this year than last. “Don’t have much choice,” Studeman yelled from the bridge as his crew prepared the vessel, painted white and green and laden with crab pots, to cast off. “Can’t really change your plan. You just got to go for it.” And with that, he turned to port and headed northeast, away from Unalaska and into the Bering Sea.