Politico pimps for Peltola prior to Supreme Court decision

By SUZANNE DOWNING

April 12, 2026 – Someone in the Democrat universe clearly got to the writer at Politico, sounding the alarm and trying to head off a potential ruling by the Supreme Court of the United States, lest it complicate the path for Mary Peltola to win a seat in the Senate.

That’s the unmistakable tone of the article by Lisa Kashinsky, she of the Boston University journalism program (consistently ranked one of the most liberal universities in the nation): Urgent, emotional, and conveniently timed.

The article leans hard into a familiar narrative: Rural Alaska voters are too stupid to vote on time and they’re at the mercy of weather, planes, and slow mail. She is arguing that a Supreme Court decision enforcing stricter ballot deadlines could “disenfranchise” voters across the state. It’s a compelling picture, if you don’t know Alaska.

But if you do, one omission jumps off the page.

Alaska already accounts for these challenges. Voters in remote areas (and military overseas) can cast absentee ballots up to 45 days before Election Day. That’s not a small detail that the writer omitted; it’s the entire system working as designed. It gives rural voters weeks of cushion to get their ballots in, long before storms or flight delays become an issue.

So why isn’t that in the story?

Because including it would undercut the sense of crisis the article is trying to build. It’s much easier to argue that voters are being boxed out if you pretend the only option is to drop a ballot in the mail at the last minute and hope for clear skies.

The piece also leans heavily on one side of the political spectrum. Democrats, activists, and Peltola allies like election-bending Sen. Lisa Murkowski  are given ample space to warn of catastrophic consequences. A strategist is quoted directly tying the issue to Peltola’s chances of upending Sen. Dan Sullivan. Republicans, meanwhile, are largely reduced to brief, almost dismissive counterpoints.

That imbalance was intentional, because by the time readers reach the end, the issue is no longer simply as a legal question about election administration. The author builds it out as a moral test, with a built-in conclusion: If the Supreme Court rules one way, rural Alaskans lose. If it doesn’t, democracy is magically preserved.

And thus we have Politico not only pimping for Mary Peltola, but trying to sway the Supreme Court.

What’s largely missing is any serious discussion of the underlying legal question: whether ballots should be received by Election Day, not just postmarked. That’s a legitimate debate, one that touches on consistency, public confidence, and the basic definition of when an election ends.

Instead, the article substitutes emotional words like “disenfranchise,” “catastrophic,” “blunt-force trauma” instead of a balanced examination of the issue.

Alaskans don’t need a national left-leaning outlet to tell us how our system works. We live it, know the challenges, and we know the accommodations already in place. Natives in rural Alaska are not stupid. They can vote just like any other Alaskan,And we also know that waiting until the last possible moment to mail a ballot in a state where the mail moves by bush plane is a choice—one the system gives you more than a month to avoid.

That doesn’t mean the Supreme Court’s decision won’t have consequences. It will. But those consequences deserve to be debated honestly, with all the facts on the table.

In the end, this wasn’t written for Alaskans at all. It reads like a brief dressed up as journalism, a clear effort to sway the Supreme Court of the United States by framing the stakes in the most politically useful way possible. The target audience wasn’t the voters who understand how Alaska actually works. The target was nine justices in Washington.

Suzanne Downing is founder and editor of The Alaska Story and is a longtime Alaskan.