New reporting from E&E News lays out how Dan Sullivan’s factory trawl-funded, anti-Alaska agenda on fisheries is sinking his reelection campaign, noting that “nearly three in four Alaskans support banning trawling, including majorities of both parties,” as “out-of-state moneyed interests are extracting the state’s natural resources.”

Dan Sullivan took hundreds of thousands from donors connected to the trawling industry while Southwest Alaska fisheries are facing “growing challenges” – and he’s repeatedly been in lockstep with his Lower 48 trawl donors, including his second largest donor Trident Seafoods, who was fined millions of dollars after repeatedly engaging in practices that harmed Alaska’s sea life.

Fishing declines have led to the “closing of many waterways in the state” including waterways Alaskans rely on fishing “to feed themselves and their families,” all while factory trawlers continue to “catch and discard” fish and funnel money into Dan Sullivan’s campaign.

Read more about Dan Sullivan’s anti-fish agenda: 

E&E News: Fish fights take center stage in Alaska Senate race

By Ian Stevenson

August 17, 2026

• The plight of the state’s fisheries, some of the most productive in the world, has become a flashpoint in Alaska’s Senate race and arisen as a potential weakness for two-term incumbent Dan Sullivan.

• Sullivan faces a tough reelection bid against former Democratic Rep. Mary Peltola, who has centered her campaign around “Fish, Family, Freedom.” She’s trying to harness anger at out-of-state commercial fishing to win her way back to Congress.

• Alaska hosts some of the largest commercial pollock fisheries in the world as well as major salmon populations — buttressing a seafood industry that supports more than 15,000 Alaskan jobs with around $5 billion in value. Many Alaska Natives harvest fish from the state’s mighty rivers and rely on the catch during winter.

• Precipitous population declines in recent years that threaten commercial, sport and subsistence fisheries are shaping the election ahead of November. While some voters back the trawling industry for its economic contributions, other Alaskans are upset they cannot fish some rivers in the state anymore while huge commercial fisheries in the ocean continue to thrive, and Peltola’s campaign wants to pin that on Sullivan.

• These declines have led to the closing of many waterways in the state to Chinook salmon fishing, including to thousands of Alaskans fishing to feed themselves and their families. The Yukon River watershed Chinook fishery has been entirely closed for seven years, with some state leaders shipping frozen fish to in-need communities.

• “The cultural importance of salmon to the communities up and down the Yukon is hard to overstate, and that’s why there’s so much concern and controversy over all of this,” Mueter said.

• Meanwhile Alaskans are seeing pollock trawlers, who fish the largest fishery in the U.S. using huge nets in the Bering Sea and the Gulf of Alaska, catch millions of pounds of salmon, crab, halibut and other fish they don’t intend to, an occurrence known as bycatch.

• For many fishermen, the situation is confounding: While a flotilla of large-scale operators continue to catch and discard many fish, smaller-scale inland fishermen must go without.

• Further stoking the controversy is the fact that many of the trawling boats are based in Seattle, leading some Alaskans to conclude that out-of-state moneyed interests are extracting the state’s natural resources. And multiple voting members of the North Pacific Fishery Management Council, a NOAA institution which manages the marine fisheries, have ties to the fishing industry.

• “They’re taking and taking and taking, and Alaska and the people who live here and our oceans and rivers are really feeling the harm of all that extraction,” said Cooper Freeman, Alaska director at the Center for Biological Diversity. While many of the problems are linked to climate change, “there’s a lot of damage being done from the trawl fleet.”

• Polling from Data for Progress, a left-leaning group, found that nearly three in four Alaskans support banning trawling, including majorities of both parties.

• Peltola has sought to tie Sullivan to the trawlers and position herself as the ideal candidate to tackle the issue. It’s an extension of what earned her a seat in the House.

• When Peltola burst onto the national political scene to win a 2022 special election House race, she centered fisheries in her campaign. A former executive director of the Kuskokwim River Inter-Tribal Fish Commission, she is credited by some with raising the profile of the state’s issues with fish.

• “She really added to that snowball effect we’ve seen,” Bayes said.

• On the campaign trail, she has emphasized her family’s history of salmon fishing on the Kuskokwim River and is calling for banning factory trawling.

• She’s pointed to campaign donations Sullivan received from the trawling industry as evidence he won’t take action on the issue.

• “Out-of-state trawlers are collapsing our runs, and our leaders refuse to act,” Peltola said in a recent social media post.

• In a statement, a Peltola spokesperson said Sullivan “and his Lower 48 factory trawl donors will do everything in their power to avoid accountability for enabling the decline of Alaska fisheries.”

• “Alaskans see a clear choice this November: Dan Sullivan who will put the Seattle trawl fleet before Alaska fishermen at every turn, or Mary Peltola, a lifelong Alaska fisherman who will fight for bold solutions to restore Alaska fisheries,” the spokesperson said.