Alaska runs a nonpartisan top-four primary. Every candidate appears on one ballot no matter their party, and the four highest finishers advance to a ranked-choice general election in November. So sixteen names are on Tuesday’s ballot. Two of them have raised real money.

So the primary itself settles very little. Both Sullivan and Peltola will advance, and everyone involved knows it. What Tuesday produces is a first count, and first counts in Alaska are read closely because nothing else in the state gets polled often.

Still, we have not written about this race before, and that was a mistake. It is the cleanest test available anywhere this cycle of the argument this site exists to make.

Sullivan served thirty years in the Marine Corps and the Marine Corps Reserve. Then he retired as a colonel in February 2024, and he holds a Legion of Merit. The Middle East, Afghanistan, the Taiwan Strait. On paper it is the best military record in any Senate race this year.

Meanwhile Peltola is Yup’ik, and she grew up in the Yukon-Kuskokwim Delta. She won a special election in 2022. That made her the first Alaska Native woman in Congress. After two and a half years she lost to Nick Begich III in 2024. She has no military service. Her campaign describes her as the mother of two Coast Guardsmen.

So Sullivan has built television around the contrast. One campaign ad sets his Marine service against her record in Washington, and the line it uses is not subtle.

On screen, meanwhile, that ad tells Alaskans she voted against a pay raise for their troops. FactCheck.org examined the claim in July and found it misleading. We think that finding matters more to us than to Sullivan, and we take it up separately today.

Peltola had raised $18.5 million through 29 July and held $4.6 million. Sullivan had raised $11.7 million and held nearly $7.3 million, so his cash position is better and his fundraising is not. In the second quarter she out-raised him roughly three to one, $6.9 million against $2 million, and most of hers came from individuals rather than committees.

But that inversion is worth sitting with. Every piece we have written on veteran fundraising says the record opens national donor lists. In Alaska the veteran is the one getting out-raised, and the non-veteran is the one with the small-dollar list.

Since then, outside money has tried to fix it. The Senate Leadership Fund has committed roughly $17 million. Two newer super PACs have spent nearly $2 million in the final stretch, and their strategy is unusual. Instead of attacking the front-runners directly, both poured money into minor candidates, The aim seems to be crowding the top four to split the vote in November.

Alaska Beacon reported the mechanics with OpenSecrets. Fair Deal Alaska formed on 28 July and spent more than $768,000 within days, mostly boosting a Green Party candidate and a little-known Democrat, plus about $152,000 attacking Peltola. Meanwhile Right For Alaska spent $1.2 million between 30 July and 7 August, including nearly $574,000 against Sullivan.

Both groups began spending the day after the reporting cutoff. Because Alaska’s disclosure law doesn’t reach federal races, voters won’t learn who paid for any of it until after they’ve voted. So the last message many Alaskans hear before Tuesday comes from a source none of them can check.

Then there is the ballot itself. A second man named Dan Sullivan, from Petersburg, qualified for the same race. The elections division tried to keep him off, a court put him back on, and the state’s remedy left him the only candidate of sixteen carrying no party label. Nobody can know whether that confuses voters until the count. But in a sixteen-name field, a known surname is an asset. And the senator does not have sole use of his.

State it at full strength, because it is a reasonable reading and we may be wrong.

First, one race is one race. Alaska is a state of roughly 740,000 people with ranked-choice voting, an unusually personal politics, and a Democrat who is genuinely famous there. In fact Peltola won statewide twice. She is the first Alaska Native woman to serve in Congress. In her state, Alaska Native voters can swing a race. Almost none of that carries over.

Then there’s the environment. Trump’s approval is weak, costs are high, and the party holding the White House usually struggles in a midterm. A longtime Alaska reporter told The Hill this week that canvassers found weak support for Sullivan in the deeply Republican Mat-Su Borough. Even his own backers sounded flat. None of that is about anybody’s service record.

The strongest version cuts the other way entirely. Maybe the uniform is the only thing keeping Sullivan close in an environment this bad for his party. A plain Republican incumbent, out-raised three to one by a famous rival, might already be down six. Instead he is inside a three-point margin of error. On that reading Alaska does not refute the thesis. It shows the thesis working, quietly, for the other party.

We think that last argument is the serious one, and we cannot settle it with the evidence available. What we can say is narrower. A strong record is not enough. Sullivan has as good a one as exists in the Senate, and it has not put this seat away.

Three things, though none of them is the winner.

First, the first-count gap between Sullivan and Peltola. Because both advance anyway, the number that matters is the spread. And turnout in an August primary in Alaska leans Democratic. So a narrow Peltola lead on Tuesday is weaker than it looks, and a Sullivan lead is stronger than it looks.

Second, whether the super PAC gambit worked. If a minor candidate funded by outside money finishes in the top four, the tactic worked. Other states will copy it. Still, researchers at FairVote doubt it will work, since voters who rank an unknown first usually rank a front-runner second.

Third, whether Sullivan’s service comes up in any of the coverage. In Hartford last week a Navy veteran won with more than $1 million of veteran money behind him. The Navy never appeared in the write-ups. If Alaska produces the same silence about a thirty-year Marine colonel, that tells us something about how much of this asset is real and how much is ours.