The New York Times published a particularly damning report Wednesday about Mary Peltola, Alaska’s Democratic Senate Nominee and a former member of Congress. Former aides described toxic and “chaotic” conditions in both her campaign and congressional office, alleging that she lashed out at staff and others with angry, profane outbursts and used slurs including “f****ts” and “re****s.”
The article is based on interviews with nine former employees who spoke on the condition of anonymity.
In a February 2024 incident, Peltola, “frustrated that she couldn’t find a memo for a meeting,” allegedly shoved an aide in the chest, “causing him to stumble backward.” He resigned soon afterward. According to The Times, an eyewitness corroborated his account; two others said they heard about it shortly after it happened, and text messages from the time supported it.
The Times reached out to Peltola’s campaign for comment on this incident. “The campaign denied that it had been a shove and said that Ms. Peltola had bumped the aide accidentally on her husband’s first birthday after his death, and she was unfocused.”
During her 2024 House reelection campaign, Peltola took aim at Planned Parenthood after it criticized her potential support for a defense bill that included anti-abortion policies. In a text message to staff that was reviewed by The Times, she wrote: “I hope Planned Parenthood knows that if we don’t win it’s more their loss than ours. F*** THOSE B****ES.”
Later that year, Ms. Peltola, appearing to refer to a woman on the board of the local Planned Parenthood chapter, wrote in another text, “I hope she dies of a botched abortion.”
Planned Parenthood, whose political arm had endorsed Ms. Peltola’s previous campaigns, did not endorse her this year.
Here are some of the most notable takeaways from the report:
Her staff has made efforts to carefully manage Ms. Peltola’s moods. Former aides recalled that she could blow up without warning over seemingly minor issues
Sometimes she jumped up and down and stomped her feet. … [During one 2024 incident] Peltola was so frustrated that she swept stacks of papers on her desk into the air in a way that the two people independently likened to a scene from the political satire “Veep.”
Ms. Peltola sometimes cut people out altogether if she concluded they had wronged her. She would “nothing” them, according to three former staff members and a text message viewed by The Times, using a phrase of dismissal popularized on the TV show “Scrubs.”
“F*** that r****d,” Ms. Peltola wrote this year in the text message, after a commercial fisheries executive posted a selfie with her that caused a political headache because she is opposed to large-scale commercial trawling. “Honestly. I nothing him.”
…
The campaign denied that she had used the word “f***t,” contradicting the accounts of the four former staff members.
The atmosphere in her office rattled staff members, who were sometimes driven to tears and often discussed quitting. Some said the mental anguish caused them to lose weight or deal with the stress in therapy.
…
Former aides signing onto this year’s [campaign] hoped that the work environment had improved. But it quickly became clear, they said, that it hadn’t.
Low morale has plagued the campaign, with staff members complaining that Ms. Peltola’s behavior had left them anxious and exhausted, according to text messages viewed by The Times.
[This account covers only a portion of the allegations about Peltola’s conduct contained in the report.]
Mary Peltola literally runs away when she’s asked about verbally and physically assaulting her own staff, and about saying she hopes a voter “dies of a botched abortion.”
She won’t answer for any of it. She just flees the cameras. Pathetic, and a disgrace to the office she…
— 🇺🇸 David J. Urban 🇺🇸 (@DavidJUrban) September 24, 2026
Some former aides and friends defended Peltola. Paul Horner, who served as the finance director during her 2022 campaign, told the outlet, “Mary Peltola is one of the finest human beings that I’ve ever worked for. If you are hearing anything negative, it does not align with my interaction with her.”
Pat Jackson, who served as an aide for Peltola during her time in the state legislature (in the 2000s) “said the idea of Ms. Peltola yelling at her staff ‘just doesn’t sound like the Mary I worked with.’”
[I suppose even Genghis Khan had his supporters, but I digress.]
Peltola spokesman Harry Child attributed her behavior to the trauma of losing both her mother and then her husband in a plane crash within months of each other in 2023.
At the time of their passing, Mary was parenting kids through their own grief, serving full-time in the U.S. House of Representatives thousands of miles from home, and running a competitive re-election campaign — all while shouldering the enormous burden of grief. Like any person who has gone through multiple personal tragedies in the span of a few months, Mary sometimes struggled to deal with her grief.
Exaggerating and outright lying about moments from the hardest period of her life, and falsely presenting them as a pattern of behavior, is wrong.
Whatever the reason for her alleged improper behavior, The Times‘ report is good news for Republican incumbent Sen. Dan Sullivan, who has been trailing Peltola by roughly 2 points since polling began in this race. Peltola leads Sullivan by 2.3 percentage points in the RealClearPolitics polling average, while Polymarket currently puts her chance of winning at 71%.
With control of the Senate at stake, I was frankly surprised to see The Times publish such a damaging account of a Democratic nominee. Perhaps it’s trying to reclaim some of its lost credibility.
Alaska Democrat Mary Peltola lies to voters and says she ran for Congress in 2022 to “elevate fish issues.”
Peltola did not introduce a single bill on fish and had zero bills passed during her first term. pic.twitter.com/io43bMUDkT
— RNC Research (@RNCResearch) September 25, 2026
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