(CNN) — The Alaska primary on Tuesday presented us with something unusual ahead of the 2026 midterm elections: An actual matchup between the two candidates who will face off in November in a key Senate race.
That’s because the state uses an all-party primary system and ranked-choice voting. Also, there were no other serious contenders.
The results should be pretty encouraging for Democrats.
With about 80% of votes counted, Democratic former Rep. Mary Peltola leads Republican Sen. Dan Sullivan, 48.1% to 42.7%. The rest of the vote was split up between also-ran candidates from both parties trying to make the general election by finishing in the top four.
And given most of the votes left to count are advance ballots, which Peltola has done well with so far, she could expand her advantage further, possibly approaching 50%.
So what we appear to have here is an incumbent senator losing pretty handily in the first round of voting.
That doesn’t mean Sullivan will lose in November, when the electorate will be different. But it’s pretty inauspicious for Republicans – and in a very important state for Democrats’ Senate majority math.
A few key points:
- It appears Democrats might have received a majority of votes in the primary. Currently, 49.8% voted for a Democrat, with the Republican vote share trailing a few points behind. (And again, that gap could widen with 1 in 5 votes still not counted.)
- It looks as though the other Dan Sullivan – the one Republicans fought to keep off the ballot by claiming he intended to steal votes from the GOP senator – will make the final four. He’s in third place at 2.4%.
- The other Dan Sullivan (who didn’t have a party affiliation on the ballot) also seemed to do better in Democratic-leaning precincts. That might suggest he actually got support from Democratic-leaning voters who wanted him to advance – but who will ultimately vote for Peltola rather than Sen. Dan Sullivan.
Primaries aren’t predictive, of course.
For example, Peltola actually got 51% in the 2024 primary for her House seat but still lost a close race in November.
But in other years, including the last midterm election in 2022, Democrats actually wound up having a higher share of voters on Election Day than they did in the primary. Four years ago, Republican votes outpaced Democratic ones in the state’s US House primary 61.1%-36.8%, but Peltola went on to win anyway.
Some of that was likely because her final opponent was the polarizing former GOP Gov. Sarah Palin. But the 2026 midterm electorate is looking like it will be more favorable to Democrats than the 2024 presidential electorate was, judging by higher enthusiasm on the Democratic side.
Turnout in the 2026 primary was also high, which suggests an electorate that will be closer to the general election electorate than 2024 was.
There will likely be around 160,000 votes in this year’s primary when they’re all counted. That amounts to about 60% of the votes cast in the last midterm election, in 2022. By contrast, the approximately 110,000 votes cast in the 2024 US House primary was only about 33% of the 330,000 ballots that were ultimately cast in the presidential election.
In other words, there’s likely to be less of a difference between November’s electorate and the one we saw Tuesday than there was two years ago, when Peltola lost ground in the general election.
And the final point is that Sullivan’s current sub-43% showing is just kind of underwhelming.
He is, after all, the incumbent – just like Peltola was in 2024. But more than 57% of voters turned out to vote for someone else.
He could recoup some of those votes thanks to the state’s ranked-choice system, if voters who supported other candidates in the primary at least rank him ahead of Peltola. But that’s low for an incumbent.
And the percentage of voters that voted for a candidate listed as a Republican in the Senate race – around 45.7% right now – is less than in the state’s US House primary (49%) and the gubernatorial primary (51%). That suggests Peltola picked off voters who were otherwise inclined towards Republicans.
There is still much to play out, including the counting of the remaining votes. And Democrats shouldn’t be celebrating just yet.
But a big reason these numbers are encouraging is that this is exactly the kind of state that will decide whether Democrats could win a Senate majority. The need to win at least two states that President Donald Trump carried by double-digits in 2024, with the likeliest candidates being Alaska, Iowa, Ohio and Texas.
So far, the polling has suggested that’s a possibility, with all four states looking pretty competitive. But you never know until the votes were actually cast.
Tuesday was basically a poll featuring actual votes being cast, and it went well for the blue side.
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