No, We Are Not Joking

Most political endorsements force a choice between two somewhat different questions: Who is the candidate you like best, and who is the candidate you actually want voters to support?

Alaska’s ranked-choice voting system largely removes that problem.

That is why our recommendation in this year’s U.S. Senate race may look a little unusual. We rank retired Petersburg teacher Daniel J. Sullivan Jr. first, former Representative Mary Peltola second, and incumbent Senator Dan S. Sullivan third. We recommend not ranking Gerald Heikes.

Although some may see Daniel J. Sullivan’s candidacy as a stunt built around his name, ranked-choice voting allows us to look past that novelty and recognize that, on policy and temperament, he presents a serious alternative.

We do not expect Daniel J. Sullivan Jr. to win. He received only a small share of the primary vote, has never held major public office, and became nationally known largely because he happens to share a name with the incumbent senator.

Then we looked at what he actually believes.

He sounds surprisingly like the kind of Republican we keep looking for and seldom find. He favors low taxes and a market-oriented economy, but he has criticized President Trump’s across-the-board tariffs for raising prices. He supports Ukraine. He accepts legitimate election results. He supports Alaska’s open-primary and ranked-choice system. He takes a moderate position on abortion and talks about political compromise as something necessary rather than shameful.

There are many things we still do not know about him. But ranked-choice voting allows us to put him first without pretending he is likely to become Alaska’s next senator.

Our second choice, Mary Peltola, is the candidate we would prefer in the likely decisive contest.

Peltola was an unusually independent Democrat during her service in the House. She supported Alaska oil and gas development, including the Willow project, while maintaining positions on firearms and other issues that frequently separated her from the national Democratic Party. She supports Ukraine and has been particularly good on an issue that increasingly matters to us: Congress reclaiming constitutional authority from the presidency over tariffs and war.

We disagree with her on important economic questions. Her proposed federal price-gouging prohibition is bad policy. So are some of her targeted tax subsidies. And she has opposed a carbon tax, which remains central to our climate policy.

Interestingly, we do not object to her support for Willow. Our test for approving a fossil-fuel project in the absence of a carbon tax is whether it would remain economic if carbon were properly priced. The available evidence suggests Willow would.

Incumbent Dan Sullivan presents a harder judgment.

He deserves genuine credit for refusing to participate in efforts to overturn the 2020 election. His support for Ukraine, NATO and an engaged American foreign policy is also substantially closer to our position than that of many Republicans today.

But during President Trump’s second term, his institutional independence has become harder to find. He has supported Trump’s broad tariffs, resisted congressional efforts to reclaim war powers during the Iran conflict, and repeatedly supported unusually controversial presidential nominees when other Republican senators were willing to say no.

Those were not normal nominees. They included a mix of inadequate qualifications, questionable competence and, in some cases, records or views that seemed counterproductive to the missions of the agencies they were chosen to oversee.

That is why we put the incumbent third.

We do not recommend ranking Gerald Heikes, whose ideological rhetoric and extreme policy positions place him well outside CIVPAC’s centrist approach.

Ranked-choice voting lets us make all of these distinctions without forcing them into a binary choice.

We like that.

Our full ranking and the reasoning behind it are in our Alaska U.S. Senate recommendation.

You can also see all of our 2026 U.S. Senate endorsements and races under review.