Peltola crash halts tour as Alaska Senate race draws DOJ suit
Former Rep. Mary Peltola is postponing campaign stops in her bid for Alaska’s Senate seat after she and her family sustained minor injuries in a car crash Saturday night, her campaign announced Sunday. The disruption lands eight days before the midterms, in a race Politico reports could help determine control of the Senate.
According to Politico, Peltola and her family were traveling to the Alaska Federation of Natives’ annual banquet when another driver struck their vehicle. Anchorage police told the outlet that a vehicle rear-ended the car carrying Peltola at a red light Saturday evening, pushing it into a third vehicle. Peltola and the other passengers in her car were taken to a local hospital with non-life-threatening injuries, and the driver who struck them was also hospitalized with non-life-threatening injuries. Police said the crash remains under investigation.
Campaign manager Cheryl Bruce said in the statement that “Mary and her family sustained minor injuries but are in good spirits,” and that events in Fairbanks and Bethel would be rescheduled “per the advice of medical professionals.” Politico reports that the crash disrupts the start of Peltola’s eight-community “Alaska Always Tour,” a seven-day swing; the Fairbanks and Bethel events, originally set for Sunday and Monday, will move later in the week, while stops in Homer, Kenai, Seward, Juneau, Anchorage and Palmer continue as planned.
The collision is only one strand of a story that has become considerably more complicated than a campaign schedule. Peltola, a Democrat, is challenging Republican Sen. Dan Sullivan in a closely watched race. Politico reports that on Thursday the race became the subject of a Justice Department lawsuit seeking to block certification of the election results if Sullivan loses in November. The administration argues that the presence of an independent candidate also named Dan Sullivan is an effort to mislead voters, despite the Alaska Supreme Court allowing the other Sullivan to remain on the ballot in a June ruling. Attorney General Todd Blanche defended the lawsuit Sunday, arguing voters could confuse the two candidates; the item notes that Peltola’s campaign called — and the text ends there.
That truncation matters for how this should be read. The supplied reporting establishes the fact of the lawsuit, the administration’s stated rationale and the June court ruling, but not the campaign’s full response. What it does establish is the shape of the contest: a candidate forced off the trail by a traffic accident in the final week, in a race where the federal government is already litigating what happens if she wins.
The pattern here is a campaign operating under two kinds of uncertainty at once — the ordinary logistical kind that a rescheduled tour represents, and an extraordinary legal kind that no candidate’s schedule can absorb. The campaign’s own framing, relayed by Politico, is that the injuries are minor and the tour continues in six of eight communities. The lawsuit, by contrast, is not something a week of recovery can resolve, and it implicates the result itself rather than the run-up to it.
The crash, in other words, is the smaller story inside the larger one. A candidate missing two days of a seven-day tour is a scheduling problem. A Justice Department action aimed at certification is a question about whether the tour was ever the thing that would decide the seat.
