Within the Margin

There comes a time in every political writer’s life when they’ve opted to break up the nation’s Senate elections into geographic chunks by prominent college sports conferences. And having made that choice, they know that Alaska will not fit nightly into this because there are not too many Alaskan colleges and universities – owing to its vastness and terrain. But all we have to do is cast our gaze beyond the D1 conference and embrace the Great Northwest Athletic Conference. It covers Alaska (both the Fairbanks and Anchorage campuses, in fact), Idaho (where are my Northwest Nazarene fans?), Montana (I see you, MSU-Billings), and Oregon (the unstoppable Western Oregon University). In other words, everything we need this year (Washington, too, but they don’t have a Senate election this time around). Tremendous logo, too. I’ll link to it rather than reproduce here because I do not know the copyright laws work for things like that.

I’ll summarize each race in a sentence first, then link to the longer write-up further down the page.

Previous posts in this series:
Senate Week Overview
The Big 10 (Great Lakes/Midwest)
The SEC (East)
The SEC (West)

Alaska
Incumbent: Dan S. Sullivan (R – elected 2014)
2026 matchup: Mary Peltola (D) vs. Dan S. Sullivan (R) vs. Gerald Heikes (R) vs. Daniel J. Sullivan (I)
In a sentence: Sometimes one Dan Sullivan just isn’t enough, but one Mary Peltola may be all Democrats need for a rare Alaska flip. Read more.

Idaho
Incumbent: Jim Risch (R – elected 2008)
2026 matchup: Jim Risch (R) vs. Todd Achilles (I)
In a sentence: How hard do I lean into wordplay about Risch’s vulnerabilities in making the case that there might be a world where this becomes a little bit competitive? Read more.

Montana
Incumbent: Steve Daines (R – retiring)
2026 matchup:
In a sentence: This race is currently defined by its ballot machinations: one that happened and one that did not. Read more.

Oregon
Incumbent: Jeff Merkley (D – elected 2008)
2026 matchup: Jeff Merkley (D) vs. David Brock Smith (R)
In a sentence: Merkley won his first senate election against a guy named Smith, and he’ll win his fourth against one, too. Read more.

Alaska: Incumbent Dan Sullivan once again faces a challenging race. He defeated one-term incumbent Dem Mark Begich to win this seat back for Republicans in 2014; it was a close call, with Sullivan prevailing 48%-46%. In 2020, independent surgeon and commercial fisherman Al Gross mounted a competitive race as the de facto Democratic candidate and polling showed he had a shot – but in the end Sullivan won by a larger-than-expected 54%-41% margin. This time around, Sullivan faces someone who has previously won statewide: former Congressmember Mary Peltola. She rode her “Fish, Family, Freedom” message to a special election victory in August 2022 and election for a full term a few months later. The first Democrat to capture Alaska’s at-large House seat since another Begich (Nick Sr.) died in a plane crash in 1973, Peltola was also the first Alaska Native and first woman to hold the seat. She was defeated for re-election in 2024 Nick Begich III – grandson of Nick Sr. and a Republican, unlike most of the Begich family. It was a narrow loss in a GOP-friendly year, so she remained a compelling recruit for other offices – governor, U.S. Senate, or her old seat. She opted for the Senate race, making it instantly competitive.

Alaska’s election system puts all the candidates together on one primary ballot, with the top four advancing to the ranked-choice general election. Peltola was the lone Dem to advance, while Sullivan is joined by a minor Republican candidate plus another guy named Daniel Sullivan. Being the only Dem has its advantages: “ballot exhaustion” – where voters only rank one candidate – tends to be high and means that people ranking the other Republican first or accidentally choosing the other Dan Sullivan might not rank Sullivan too, so their votes won’t be redistributed to him.

Peltola has fared well in the Alaska Survey Research polls of the race, while Sullivan had a two-point lead (inside the margin of error) in a gold-standard NYT/Siena poll in July. Alaska has always been difficult to poll – perhaps even more so in recent years thanks to the added wrinkle of their ranked choice system – and has sometimes shown Dems competitive in races that turned out not to be particularly close. But Peltola is a well-known figure with a track record of ending up where her polls say she will. This is likely to be a nailbiter all the way to the finish. The current national environment erases much of Alaska’s GOP lean, but not quite all of it. That reality, and the history of Dems underperforming their polling here, kept this in the Tilt Republican column for a long time. But Peltola is a very skilled candidate running a great environment against a figure who has no carved out nearly as independent a path as the state’s more moderate Republican senator, Lisa Murkowski. I’m ready to say that Peltola has the edge here: an incredibly narrow edge, but an edge nonetheless.
Rating: Tilt Democratic (flip)
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Idaho: This is one of several states operating outside the typical D vs. R dynamic this year. At this time in American history, the Democratic brand makes a federal victory in Idaho nearly impossible. It’s not just that Trump carried the state 67% to 30% two years ago; it is that what was once thought of as the “moderate Democrat” is scarcer in states like Idaho than in decades past. Where Idaho Dems once generally opposed abortion rights, for example, that has become quite rare these days. Getting into the conversation for a U.S. Senate race here requires something else. Independent Todd Achilles was a Republican until 2024, was elected as a Democrat to the Idaho House of Representatives in November of that year, then became an independent for his Senate run. A former tank commander in the U.S. Army and public policy professor at Boise State, Achilles sounds like a moderate Dem but is banking on labels – or the lack of one – changing the terms of the debate. Serious points for his logo, by the way.

Is Jim Risch actually vulnerable? The three-term senator and former governor chairs the Senate Foreign Relations Committee at a time when the United States is engaged in an odd war with Iran where the terms of victory remain ill-defined. He’s 83 at a time when America has taken halting steps against the gerontocracy. The departure from the race late last month of Democratic nominee David Roth, a realtor with little campaign organization and no shot at winning, creates space for Achilles to consolidate Democratic and independent voters – but he’s going to need quite a few Trump voters to cross over to make this a competitive race. We’re not there yet, but it’s an interesting race to watch.
Rating: Safe Rep (hold)
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Montana: Two-term incumbent Steve Daines flipped his seat for Republicans with relative ease back in 2014 and then defeated a popular Democratic governor by ten points to secure re-election in 2020. He surprised many with his retirement just minutes before the filing deadline this year. His quickly endorsed a replacement, Kurt Alme, who had conveniently filed to run that day…and thanks to the late-breaking retirement, he was the only major Republican doing so. Alme has worked two stints as U.S. Attorney for Montana and served as the state’s budget director in between.

The Democratic nominee is Air Force veteran Alani Bankhead, who defeated a better-funded state legislator in the primary. That race played out amid speculation over which candidate, if any, would eventually drop out in favor of independent Seth Bodnar, a former University of Montana president who entered the race with the endorsement of former Senator Jon Tester. That’s the best endorsement you can get in Democratic circles in Montana, and there is something to be said for Tester’s instincts as a Democrat who won three Senate elections in Montana before his defeat in 2024 (admittedly, the first time he had to run in a GOP-leaning year). Tester argued that as things currently stand, a Democrat cannot win statewide in Montana – they have to run as an independent instead. This is an odd argument insofar as most voters are going to ask, “well, are they truly independent or just a Democrat pretending to be?” And that’s before we contemplate how this might be counterproductive from a party-building standpoint. That said, I understand the need to try something different in order to replace Trump-aligned senators and create checks and balances in the Senate.

In any event, Bankhead won the primary and did not bail on the race as m any thought she would, either immediately or eventually, and polling is split on whether she or Bodnar is in second place…far behind Alme, who is benefiting from the split and maintaining a large lead despite only polling in the low 40s. Montana has enough of an independent streak and some Democratic-voting muscle memory for this race to be competitive, but it won’t happen as a three-way fight. It’s too late to be removed from the ballot, so either Bankhead or Bodnar need to end their campaign, endorse the other, and team up to make clear to voters who the alternative to Alme is. Until that happens, Alme is cruising to victory in a race no one thought he was going to be in until the literal last minute.
Rating: Safe Rep (hold)
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Oregon: For decades, Oregon was a bastion of prominent moderate Republicans: Wayne Morse (until he switched parties), Bob Packwood and Mark Hatfield all made their mark in the Senate as moderates (Hatfield also served two terms as governor). The state’s last Republican senator, Gordon Smith, identified as a conservative but was in the center of his caucus, and would probably be considered relatively moderate by today’s GOP standards. By the time Smith was defeated for re-election in 2008 by Democrat Jeff Merkley, the national Republican Party had shifted far to the right compared to the Packwood and Hatfield days. Accordingly, they haven’t run a competitive Senate race here since: Merkley won re-election in 2014 and 2020 by 19 and 17 points, respectively. The state’s other senator, Ron Wyden, first won his seat in a 1996 special election to replace the scandal-ridden Packwood. He narrowly defeated Smith, and has cruised to margins of 15 points or more in each election since. 2026 will be little different: Merkley faces David Brock Smith, a very conservative state senator from tiny Port Orford in southwestern Oregon. He has neither the funds nor the ideological profile to make this race competitive.

By the way, if you want to learn more about the Oregon GOP’s shift from a moderate party that did quite well in state politics to a right-wing party that hasn’t won the governorship since the 1980s, I strong recommend following political historian Seth Cotlar on social media and his Substack, Rightlandia.
Rating: Safe Dem (hold)
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