Angry outbursts, slurs and firings: Tumult rocks a key Senate campaign
By KELLEN BROWING
National Democrats cheered when Mary Peltola, the former Alaska congresswoman, declared in January that she would run for the Senate.
Peltola, an Alaska Native who grew up fishing for salmon on the Kuskokwim River, was well-known and well-liked statewide, even by Republicans. Her party hailed her as one of its strongest prospects for ousting a Republican incumbent and winning control of the Senate.
But behind the scenes, her political operation has been marked by tumult, a pattern that stretches back to her time in Congress. Former aides describe angry and profane outbursts, sometimes directed at aides and sometimes expressed about others who had displeased her. In one instance, she shoved an aide, according to a former staff member who was present and two others who were told about it at the time. Another conflict led to a surprising staff shake-up on the eve of the primary election last month.
Four former staff members said they directly heard her use the word “faggot” over the years, in some cases about her own staff members, an allegation the campaign denied. She also used the word “retarded,” according to former aides and text messages viewed by The New York Times.
Her demands could be unusual, such as requiring aides to feed live crickets to her family’s pet chameleon, Meatball.
Peltola’s displays of anger, the extent of which has not been previously reported, have been spilling out into the high-stakes race. This account is based on interviews with nine former staff members, who requested anonymity out of fear of retaliation and to preserve their professional reputations, as well as dozens of contemporaneous text messages and photos.
The volatility also affected the operations of Peltola’s congressional office. During her brief tenure in the House, she amassed one of the highest staff turnover rates on Capitol Hill.
Last month, the tensions boiled over after a seemingly minor disagreement, when Peltola, locked in a competitive bid to oust Sen. Dan Sullivan, a Republican, fired a handful of longtime staff members just days before the Alaska primary. The campaign downplayed the upheaval at the time, but two of Peltola’s former aides said it was fueled by one of the candidate’s blowups.
In response to questions from the Times, a spokesperson for Peltola’s campaign denied any pattern of abusive behavior. But the campaign acknowledged that she had sometimes struggled to deal with the grief of losing her mother and her husband over a few months in 2023. Her husband, Eugene, was killed in a plane crash.
“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 reelection campaign — all while shouldering the enormous burden of grief,” said the spokesperson, Harry Child. “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,” he said.
His statement also said Peltola had treated her staff “with respect and care.” And, in interviews, several people who worked with her over the decades described positive experiences.
Peltola declined to be interviewed for this article.
One of the more notable incidents described by former aides occurred in Peltola’s congressional office in February 2024. Frustrated that she couldn’t find a memo for a meeting, Peltola shoved a male employee in the chest with one hand, causing him to stumble backward, according to a person who was there and two others who heard about the incident soon after, as well as text messages sent at the time. The aide departed Peltola’s team soon after.
The campaign denied that it had been a shove and said that Peltola had bumped the aide accidentally on her husband’s first birthday after his death, and she was unfocused.
Peltola also disparaged Planned Parenthood, particularly one of its regional board members. Running for reelection to the House in 2024, Peltola was frustrated about the organization’s scrutiny of her deliberations over how to vote on a defense bill that included anti-abortion policies.
“I hope Planned Parenthood knows that if we don’t win it’s more their loss than ours. FUCK THOSE BITCHES,” she later wrote in a text message to her staff in January 2024 that was viewed by the Times.
Later that year, 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 Peltola’s previous campaigns, did not endorse her this year.
‘I Nothing Him’
Peltola, 53, a former state legislator, stunned the political establishment with an upset win in a special House race in 2022 to succeed Don Young, the longtime Republican congressman who had died that year. She ran as a moderate Democrat who supported abortion access, warned about climate change and prioritized subsistence fishing over commercial trawlers.
(Peltola won a full term that fall. One of her biggest acts in Congress was to successfully push for more oil drilling in Alaska. In 2024, she lost reelection to Nick Begich III, a Republican, despite her general alignment with Alaska’s independent-minded voters.
Since that first congressional victory, her staff has made efforts to carefully manage Peltola’s moods. Former aides recalled that she could blow up without warning over seemingly minor issues, such as a staff member’s improper dress for cold weather, or a social media post issued by her campaign or congressional office that she didn’t like.
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.”
“Fuck that retard,” 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 said Peltola recognized that the word was inappropriate and regretted using it. But the campaign denied that she had used the word “faggot,” contradicting the accounts of the four former staff members.
Peltola racked up one of the highest staff turnover rates on Capitol Hill during her time in Congress, according to the research website LegiStorm. In 2023, she experienced a higher rate of staff departures than all but four other members of the House. She also went through three state directors during her roughly two years on the Hill.
For some on her staff, one task exemplified the disregard Peltola appeared to have for her employees: feeding her daughter’s pet chameleon, Meatball.
Meatball’s preferred diet consisted of live crickets, according to three staff members familiar with the demand, including two who fed the chameleon. Peltola instructed aides to purchase the insects at a pet store and then feed them to Meatball.
Aides initially went to Peltola’s apartment in Washington to feed Meatball, but the congresswoman later brought the reptile into her office on Capitol Hill. On at least one occasion, the crickets escaped in the office and had to be recaptured, according to two former aides who witnessed it as well as a photo viewed by the Times that showed aides in the office trying to trap the crickets using manila folders and small paper cups.
A Mediation Effort
Former aides signing onto this year’s operation hoped that the work environment had improved. But it quickly became clear, they said, that it hadn’t.
In one episode last December, aides held a prep session during which they peppered Peltola with questions they anticipated the press would ask her. Peltola grew frustrated. Mimicking a reporter, she picked up a water bottle and pretended it was a microphone, shoving it toward a staff member as she berated her, according to a former aide. Text messages sent at the time described Peltola as “an inch” from the woman, “shoving” the bottle in her face.
Two other people present in the room with Peltola and the aide, who are still connected with the campaign, said the water bottle had gotten close to the aide’s face, but said the interaction was lighthearted, not tense, with no raised voices.
Some friends and former aides recalled only positive experiences working for or with Peltola.
“Mary Peltola is one of the finest human beings that I’ve ever worked for,” said Paul Horner, Peltola’s finance director during her 2022 campaign. “If you are hearing anything negative” about a poor workplace environment, he added, “it does not align with my interaction with her.”
In addition, Peltola’s campaign offered a handful of former staff members to speak to the candidate’s temperament. One of them, Pat Jackson, who was Peltola’s aide for most of the time she served in the state Legislature in the 2000s, said the idea of Peltola yelling at her staff “just doesn’t sound like the Mary I worked with.”
Another, Tyson Fick, served as Peltola’s special assistant and advised her on fishing policy while she was in Congress. He said she was “awesome and demanding,” with high expectations.
Fick said there were times when Peltola “raised her voice” at her staff. He suggested that she was grappling with her grief and that people not used to working in blue-collar environments like a commercial fishing boat might be overstating the incidents.
“There is some communication that could have been better, but I don’t think it was ever an abusive scenario,” he said.
Despite the environment, Peltola’s campaign has performed well this year. She has raked in millions of dollars from donors and came in first in the state’s open primary on Aug. 18, putting Alaska on a short list of states likely to decide control of the Senate.
But low morale has plagued the campaign, with staff members complaining that Peltola’s behavior had left them anxious and exhausted, according to text messages viewed by the Times.
The big blowup came in August, on the heels of what aides initially thought was a minor complaint from Peltola about their lack of large campaign signs. “BIG SIGNS NEED TO BE SENT TO SOUTHEAST,” she wrote to aides in texts viewed by the Times. “OUR SIGN GAME IS FUCKED.”
Peltola eventually became so frustrated with her staff that she called a senior leader at the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee, the campaign arm of Senate Democrats. They agreed to bring in a new consultant, Brad Elkins, who quickly flew to Anchorage, according to three people familiar with the outreach.
Elkins met with the staff, and some told him about Peltola’s behavior. Some said they intended to quit, according to three people familiar with the conversations as well as text messages viewed by the Times.
In at least one meeting, Elkins was conciliatory, urging staff members to consider staying and suggesting that he could serve as an intermediary to improve morale, one person said.
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