
"I hope she dies of a botched abortion." That was Alaska Democratic Senate nominee Mary Peltola, in a text message about a woman who sat on the board of a local Planned Parenthood chapter. Not a political opponent. Not a right-wing activist. A board member of the organization Democrats treat like a secular church.
Peltola is running to unseat Republican Sen. Dan Sullivan. She may want to update the campaign website.
The New York Times published its investigation based on interviews with nine former Peltola staff members and more than 20 other people in her political orbit. What they described wasn't a single bad day. It was a pattern — angry outbursts, physical intimidation, slurs fired off in text messages, and a campaign operation that has burned through staff the way most campaigns burn through yard signs.
The text messages, obtained by the Times, go beyond the abortion comment. In one exchange about Planned Parenthood's scrutiny of her deliberations over a defense bill that included anti-abortion provisions, Peltola wrote: "I hope Planned Parenthood knows that if we don't win it's more their loss than ours. FCK THOSE BTCHES." In another, she referred to a commercial fisheries executive as "Fck that retard." The campaign admitted she used that word, said she "regretted" it, and denied the other slur — the one where multiple sources say she called a gay staffer a "fa*ot."
Then there's the physical incident. In February 2024, Peltola allegedly shoved a male staff member in the chest with one hand in her House office after he failed to produce a memo she wanted. The employee stumbled backward. He subsequently left. Former aides described additional outbursts — paper-sweeping, foot-stomping — the kind of behavior that would end a Republican's career before the news cycle finished.
Her campaign spokesman Harry Child offered the defense you'd expect: Peltola "suddenly and tragically lost both her mother and her husband in the span of a few months in 2023," and critics were "exaggerating and outright lying about moments from the hardest period of her life." Grief is real. Shoving an employee in the chest is assault. Those two things can coexist in the same sentence without one excusing the other.
This is a former U.S. House Democrat with a 30-year public service career who is asking Alaska voters to promote her to the Senate. She ran in 2024 and lost. Kamala Harris lost Alaska by 13 points that same cycle — a deficit so steep that Peltola's own campaign rejected Harris's endorsement. The math was already brutal. Now the candidate is on record wishing death-by-medical-procedure on a woman from her own ideological coalition.
The slur usage alone would have generated wall-to-wall cable coverage if the name on the text messages belonged to a Republican. A GOP candidate caught calling a gay staffer that word would be trending on every platform within the hour, with resignation demands from party leadership by sundown. Peltola gets a grief defense and a news cycle that moved on before most voters heard about it.
The accusations against Peltola continue to pile up, with the campaign visibly spiraling. Nine former employees talked. Twenty-plus associates corroborated. The texts are in print.
Sen. Dan Sullivan didn't have to say a word. The opponent made the case for him.


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