Peltola’s record puts her in step with Democrats’ most radical 2026 candidates

By SUZANNE DOWNING

Aug. 9, 2026 – Mary Peltola has worked hard to present herself to Alaska voters as a moderate who is above partisan politics. But her own words and the company she would keep in Washington tell a different story.

One of Peltola’s most memorable statements came as questions were mounting about President Joe Biden’s ability to serve another four years.

“I think that Joe Biden’s mental acuity is very, very on,” Peltola said in 2024, the year he faced reelection. “He’s one of the smartest, sharpest people I’ve met in DC.”

It was an extraordinary assessment even at the time. Biden’s public appearances had already produced repeated episodes of confusion, verbal stumbles and apparent memory lapses. Special counsel Robert Hur had just described Biden as an “elderly man with a poor memory” in explaining why he would not recommend criminal charges over Biden’s handling of classified documents.

Peltola nevertheless assured Alaskans that Biden was exceptionally sharp.

Months later, Biden’s disastrous debate performance against Donald Trump made it impossible for Democratic leaders and the national media to continue denying what voters had been seeing. Biden eventually abandoned his reelection campaign.

Peltola never adequately explained how her private assessment of Biden could have been so different from what millions of Americans could see for themselves. Her statement left voters with two possibilities: Either she could not recognize Biden’s decline, or she recognized it and chose party loyalty over candor. Most probable is the assessment that she was caught in a moment of partisan dishonesty.

Her record on women’s sports followed a similar pattern.

In 2023, Peltola voted against the Protection of Women and Girls in Sports Act, which would have preserved female athletic competition under Title IX on the basis of biological sex. Peltola called the legislation “bullying” and “federal overreach,” arguing that it targeted transgender athletes.

During a 2024 debate, she attempted to soften that position.

“I don’t think that we should have men competing in women’s sports,” Peltola said, without explaining her definition of women. But she then dismissed the issue as a “culture wars” distraction.

“This causes a lot of feelings for people,” she said. “This is a culture wars issue. I’m not a very good activist, I’m not a champion on one side or another of most of these culture wars, because I feel like they are a complete and total waste of our time.”

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It’s an issue that has not only not gone away, but has increased in importance in Americans’ opinion. In a New York Times poll, 79% of Americans said biological men “should not” be allowed to compete in women’s sports. The breakdown was 94% of Republicans, 67% of Democrats, and 64% of independents

Peltola also said inflation and workforce shortages were more pressing concerns and added that women Olympians had sometimes been subjected to questions about their femininity.

“This is just not something that is number one for me,” she concluded.

Peltola’s language also could not erase her congressional vote. When given the opportunity to protect female athletic categories, she sided with nearly every other House Democrat against the bill.

Peltola is now asking Alaskans to send her to the US Senate. If elected, she would join a national Democratic Party whose 2026 roster includes candidates who have made statements far outside the American mainstream.

In Texas, Democratic Senate nominee James Talarico declared during a 2021 legislative debate that “God is non-binary.” He has also argued that modern science recognizes more than two genders. After the comments became a general-election liability, Talarico described some of his earlier language as “cringey” and said it had been intended to be deliberately provocative. He maintained that God cannot be confined to human categories.

In Arizona, Democratic congressional candidate JoAnna Mendoza said in a 2020 interview that prostitution should be decriminalized, particularly because transgender women of color may turn to sex work after encountering discrimination in conventional employment. Mendoza answered “yes” when asked whether sex work should be decriminalized and said government needed to “stop criminalizing people for their situations.”

In Colorado, congressional candidate Manny Rutinel has tried to reposition himself as a supporter of farmers while running in one of the state’s most agriculture-dependent districts. But Rutinel previously called animal agriculture “horrific” and founded Climate Refarm, an organization intended to move institutions away from meat and help farmers transition from raising animals to growing plants. He has since said he reconsidered some of those positions.

In Iowa, Democratic congressional candidate Sarah Trone Garriott, a Lutheran minister, warned during a 2023 church speech that religion and political violence were appearing more often in public spaces and felt “very threatening.”

She described the phrase “one nation under God” on a protest sign as one of the “pretty uncomfortable ways that faith and political power have collided.” She also said that, as a state senator, she sought opening prayers that did not come from the “White American Christian variety.” Her fuller argument was directed at what she calls Christian nationalism, but her remarks placed ordinary public expressions of Christian faith within a broader warning about political violence.

One of the most disturbing statements came from Texas Democratic congressional nominee Bobby Pulido.

“Child molestation is abhorrent,” Pulido wrote in a 2018 social-media post. “But is not necessarily rape or murder, what you said. My point, and Geraldo’s point, is they have been unfairly demonized.”

The post received renewed scrutiny after reports about Pulido’s longtime bandmate Frankie Caballero, who was convicted of indecent sexual contact with an 8-year-old girl. Pulido has said he did not know Caballero was a registered sex offender when Caballero appeared with him at a middle-school benefit concert. His campaign has characterized reporting about the relationship as a political smear.

Michigan Democratic Senate nominee Abdul El-Sayed has also faced scrutiny over his association with far-left streamer Hasan Piker, who once said “America deserved 9/11.” El-Sayed appeared with Piker on the eve of the Michigan primary and declined demands that he denounce the streamer, dismissing the pressure as “cancel culture.”

Taken together, the record shows how far the boundaries of acceptable rhetoric inside the Democratic Party have moved.

The party’s leading candidates now include politicians who have described God as non-binary, advocated decriminalizing prostitution partly as an economic accommodation for transgender people, treated traditional animal agriculture as a climate problem, associated public Christian expression with political danger and argued that child molesters have been “unfairly demonized.”

The question for Alaska voters is not merely whether Peltola sounds slightly more moderate than the most radical Democratic candidates elsewhere in the country. It is whether, when control of the Senate is at stake, she would empower the same party and the same ideological movement those candidates represent.