Seven days of conversation about Dan Sullivan and Mary Peltola, split between posts that can be placed in Alaska and posts from the rest of the country. Both candidates read clearly positive at home and roughly flat everywhere else, which is the opposite of what a nationalized race usually looks like.
TOTAL VOLUMEPosts, articles and comments across all geographies. Only 16% of the U.S. portion is original writing; the rest is reposts and replies.
+1.4
SULLIVAN, NATIONALNet sentiment outside Alaska. +17.2 on posts naming them alone.
-1.0
PELTOLA, NATIONALNet sentiment outside Alaska. -7.9 on posts naming them alone.
9K
BIGGEST DAYVolume on Oct 3, when the tariff and stock-portfolio attack landed and the incumbent went on a national show to answer it.
What The Polls Say
Published polling, shown to set context. A poll asks a sample of voters which
candidate they intend to support. Everything else on this page measures something different: the
balance of positive and negative labeled posts about each candidate in the captured conversation.
A candidate can lead the vote and still take the worse of the argument online, and where the two
diverge this page explains the conversation, not the electorate.
Siena College · field date Oct 3, 2026 · 504 LV · margin of error 5.1 points
The polling average has Peltola about 4 points ahead, on two polls. The conversation in Alaska reads better for Sullivan, and unusually for this page both candidates sit on the positive side of it. Alaska is also the thinnest base measured here: 1,059 in-state posts, 34 percent of Sullivan's carrying a sentiment label and 12 percent of Peltola's. Both figures are a direction, not a measurement.
The Week In One Line
Net sentiment runs on the left axis from −100 to +100. Gold bars carry total daily
volume for both candidates combined; hover any bar for the narratives driving that day. Peltola runs above Sullivan on five of seven days. Her one collapse is Tuesday, the day the Vice President landed in Fairbanks.
Sullivan net sentimentPeltola net sentimentTotal posts, articles and comments
Inside Alaska
Posts whose geography resolves to Alaska. These are the smallest cells on this page by a wide margin, and almost all of the in-state conversation happens in the comment threads under the two campaigns' own Facebook pages.
ALASKA
Sullivan
Alaska
539posts
130 positive
55 negative
Hover a segment
403 unique authors · 41 original posts
(8% of volume; the rest are reposts and replies).
Sentiment from 185 labeled posts, 34.3% of this slice;
stored sample behind the labels 84 documents.
Top 3 narratives driving sentiment
1
The Vice President Came To Fairbanks
POSITIVE DRIVER
The single largest in-state event of the week is a visit. Vance flew in with his family, spoke for 33 minutes to a Republican crowd at the airport, and made energy investment the argument.
Yay.., thank u Mr. VP Vance 4 endorsing an honest hardworking Alaskan Senator Sullivan
Alaskans can count on Senator Sullivan to show up and get the job done. Mary Peltola is a revolving door, with a record of missing votes and leaving Alaskans without a voice in Congress.
Peltola’s campaign runs one line in Alaska and runs it hard: that the incumbent’s votes raised the cost of heating a house in Dillingham while raising the value of his own portfolio.
Dan Sullivan's votes for tariffs didn't help Alaska, but they sure helped his brother's chemical company, where he owns up to $5 million in stock. This is the exact kind of corruption that Alaskans are tired of.
Families in Dillingham are worried if they can heat their homes this winter. Meanwhile, Dan Sullivan continues to vote for the war that’s jacking up the price of diesel.
Alaska’s in-state conversation is unusually concentrated: most of it happens beneath the incumbent’s own posts, where supporters and opponents litigate his record at length rather than reposting slogans.
When you show up you just serve as an empty suit Trump minion doing what you are told, like blindly supporting Trump’s disastrous war of choice with Iran. And contrary to your recent lies, Peltola actually got things done.
296 unique authors · 48 original posts
(9% of volume; the rest are reposts and replies).
Sentiment from 62 labeled posts, 11.9% of this slice;
stored sample behind the labels 34 documents.
Top 3 narratives driving sentiment
1
The Resource Record, Argued Line By Line
POSITIVE DRIVER
Her strongest in-state material is not a slogan. It is Alaskans reciting dates and bill names to argue she backed Willow and ANWR while the incumbent says she did not.
Mary Peltola was very instrumental in getting the Willow project approved. Under a Democratic administration. Under people you consider the enemies.
Mary Peltola supports ANWR drilling and clashed with Biden over it. She’s probably supported every resource project you do with the exception of Pebble Mine.
The case against her in Alaska is made almost entirely by the incumbent’s own page, and it is about land: that Washington Democrats would lock up the state’s energy industry and she would let them.
D.C. Democrats want to lock up Alaska’s energy industry. Mary Peltola would empower them to kill Alaska jobs and turn our state into one big national park.
The fight for the Senate majority runs through Alaska. I joined Cabot Phillips to talk about what’s at stake, the decoy Dan on your ballot, and how Mary Peltola failed Alaska.
The same week reads differently depending on where you stand. Net sentiment is plotted
from Alaska on the left to the rest of the country on the right; the solid line counts every post
naming a candidate, the dashed line counts only posts that name that candidate and not the other.
All posts naming the candidate
Posts naming that candidate only
+39.2Dan SullivanAlaska minus national · +12.6 on single-subject posts
Alaska treats Sullivan 39 points better than the country does, the widest home-field gap on this page. Strip out posts that also name Peltola and the gap narrows to 13, because much of what reads as national criticism of him is her campaign’s own material.
+23.6Mary PeltolaAlaska minus national · +23.7 on single-subject posts
Peltola reads 24 points better at home than nationally, and the direction holds under the single-subject test. The level does not: her Alaska meter rests on 34 stored documents, the thinnest base in this series.
What each audience actually argues about
Geography, not party. Both columns cover the same week and the same two candidates; what separates them is which arguments actually travel.
IN ALASKA
Fish, Fuel And Who Holds Town Halls
Alaska argues about things that only matter if you live there: trawling rules, the price of diesel in Dillingham, and whether a candidate showed up in all twelve regions.
The trawling fightFisheries policy is the one subject both campaigns treat as decisive, and the only one argued in bycatch limits and bill numbers.
Dan Sullivan is doing a great job. Making sure that bycatch is limited in every way. Investing in legislation and research to make a difference.
The country argues about what Alaska is worth: one seat, the Senate majority, and how to read a survey that takes three rounds to produce a winner.
Control of the chamberAlaska appears mostly as arithmetic in a national count.
Vice President JD Vance called on Alaskans to vote for U.S. Sen. Dan Sullivan in one of the closest races in the country, which could determine control of the Senate.
Both candidates are liked at home and unremarkable everywhere else, which is rare in a nationalized race. The explanation is in the volume: Alaska generates so little conversation that the in-state picture is essentially two Facebook comment sections, while the national picture is a Vice-Presidential visit and a poll.
The Rest Of The Country
Posts placed elsewhere in the United States. Sullivan draws roughly half again Peltola's national volume, and both land within two points of neutral.
NATIONAL
Sullivan
Rest of United States
16,751posts
3,054 positive
2,971 negative
Hover a segment
10,287 unique authors · 2,672 original posts
(16% of volume; the rest are reposts and replies).
Sentiment from 6,025 labeled posts, 36.0% of this slice;
stored sample behind the labels 1,475 documents.
Top 3 narratives driving sentiment
1
The Seat That Could Decide The Senate
POSITIVE DRIVER
Nationally the race is covered as arithmetic. Alaska is named as one of the closest contests in the country and the reason a Vice President spent a Monday on a plane.
Vice President JD Vance is traveling to Alaska to campaign for Republican Sen. Dan Sullivan, with second lady Usha Vance and some of their children joining him on the trip. Sullivan is facing a competitive reelection challenge.
One Constituent Clip, Twenty-Seven Thousand Reactions
NEGATIVE DRIVER
The most-engaged post about either candidate all week is not from Alaska and not from a news outlet. It is a national Democratic page clipping a Republican voter turning on the incumbent.
Republican Senator Dan Sullivan gets completely obliterated by his own MAGA constituent in a brutal race-flipping takedown.
After Dan Sullivan voted over a dozen times to continue the Iran War, gas in rural Alaska is reaching over $10/gallon. Alaskans are ready for a change.
A promised South Korean investment in Alaska was announced as good news for the incumbent and contradicted by Seoul the following day, which turned a campaign asset into a national story about the claim itself.
Donald Trump announced a massive South Korean investment in Alaska, claiming it was great news for Republican Sen. Dan Sullivan. One day later, South Korea lodged a strong protest.
6,993 unique authors · 1,887 original posts
(16% of volume; the rest are reposts and replies).
Sentiment from 2,221 labeled posts, 19.3% of this slice;
stored sample behind the labels 747 documents.
Top 3 narratives driving sentiment
1
Ahead After The Third Round
POSITIVE DRIVER
Alaska counts by ranked choice, so a national poll story about this race has to explain a third round before it can report a leader. That is the shape of most of her positive national coverage.
A new Alaska Survey Research poll finds Mary Peltola (D) leading Dan S. Sullivan (R) after the third round of ranked-choice voting in the U.S. Senate race.
His national case against her is personal and about staff turnover rather than policy, delivered on conservative talk radio and in Alaska opinion pages the same week.
Dan S. Sullivan tells C&B that Mary Peltola is not so sweet and not exactly Miss Congeniality. He says 25 staffers quit on her, young Alaskans, ties her to Chuck Schumer on resource development, and closes with she’s unfit.
Opinion: Alaska needs a senator who can keep a team. I once contributed to his opponent, Mary Peltola, in an earlier race. Her inaction in office changed my mind.
The money is its own story nationally: Republican committees defending a state Trump carried by double digits, which outlets read as evidence the seat is genuinely at risk.
Republican super political action committees have been forced to spend staggering amounts of money defending seats Trump won by double digits.
This page is the product of two different kinds of work. One half is data that no public API makes available; the other half is judgment about what the data does and does not support.
What Quid made possible
None of the following could be assembled from public endpoints inside a week.
One corpus, seven channels37K posts, articles and comments from X, Facebook, Instagram, Bluesky, Reddit, YouTube and news sites, answered as a single query.
Geography at the post levelSeparating 539 Alaska posts about Sullivan and 520 about Peltola from the 28,260 placed elsewhere is what makes a state-versus-national read possible in a state this small.
Sentiment aimed at a personScoring sentiment toward a named figure rather than toward the post as a whole, across roughly 8,600 labeled posts.
A sensitivity test in one passRe-running every figure against a different boolean is what showed Sullivan’s national number moving up 16 points once his opponent’s campaign posts are removed from his own cell.
Amplification, countedUnique-author and original-post metrics showed 16% of this conversation is original writing, the highest share in this series.
The receiptsEvery cited post came back with its URL, author, channel and engagement count, which is why this page can link its evidence.
What Claude was responsible for
The data does not interpret itself, and it arrives with traps in it.
Disambiguating a common surnameBare "Sullivan" returns 107K posts in this window and is unusable. The query was narrowed to full-name forms plus an Alaska gate, and the gate’s additions were sampled and confirmed on-subject before being kept.
Deciding what each name can carry"Peltola" is distinctive enough to stand alone. "Sullivan" is not, so the two queries are not symmetrical, and that is stated here rather than hidden.
Reading the postsDocuments across eight cells read to derive 12 narratives and 7 daily storylines, and to place every quote against the sentiment it actually supports.
Catching a cell made of the opponentSullivan’s in-state positive cell is topped by Mary Peltola’s own attack posts. The narratives place that material where it belongs rather than reading it as support for him.
Saying when a base is too thinThirty-four stored documents sit behind Peltola’s Alaska meter. The page reports the number rather than letting a precise-looking figure imply precision.
Checking and shippingEvery citation audited for liveness, then layout, charts, gauges, tooltips and publication.
Neither half can establish cause. This page measures what was said, how much of it there was, and who said it. It is not a poll, it does not model turnout, and it does not predict the November result.
How to read this
Source. Quid, run against the full-resolution recent index. Each person is defined
by an ad-hoc boolean query with primary: sentiment targeting, so the sentiment is scored
toward that named figure rather than toward the post as a whole.
Window. Oct 2 - Oct 8, 2026, seven complete day buckets. Quid closes its day at 23:00 UTC and
ignores the timezone parameter, so each bucket covers roughly 23 hours of the labeled calendar day.
Net sentiment is (positive − negative) / (positive + negative) × 100, computed on
labeled posts only. Neutral posts are excluded from the meter but counted in the volume figures.
Sentiment coverage. Sentiment labels cover 34 to 36% of Sullivan's posts and 12 to 19% of Peltola's.
Alaska is a small state and the cells show it: 84 stored documents sit behind Sullivan's in-state labels and 34 behind Peltola's. Thirty-four documents is the narrowest base anywhere in this series, so read Peltola's Alaska meter as a direction and nothing finer. The national cells rest on 1,475 and 747.
Classifier attribution is imperfect. In a two-candidate race most posts name both people, and
the classifier sometimes assigns a post's sentiment to the wrong subject, and several posts attacking one
candidate are labeled positive for them. Every soundbite shown here was read and placed against the narrative
it actually supports, but the donut and meter totals are the classifier's unedited output.
Twitter/X counts are projected ×10 from a 10% sample, so volume figures exceed the number of
individually stored documents. Counts and samples are never mixed inside one ratio.
Sensitivity test. 25% of Sullivan's posts and 37% of Peltola's name both candidates, where the classifier can credit sentiment to the wrong one. Re-running every figure on posts that name one
candidate only pulls both men down and leaves the shape intact. Sullivan goes from +40.5 to +29.8 in Alaska and from +1.4 to +17.2 nationally; Peltola goes from +22.6 to +15.8 at home and from -1.0 to -7.9 nationally. Sullivan's national figure is the one that moves most, and it moves upward, because the posts naming both men are largely Peltola's campaign attacking him.
Volume is amplification, not voices. Only 16% of posts are original; the rest are reposts and replies. Unique-author counts
are shown on every panel and are the better measure of how many people are actually talking.
Link integrity. Every source link on this page was checked for liveness at publication.
Exploratory. Figures may not match Quid's own dashboards exactly. Sentiment is a
measure of how people are talking, not a poll, and nothing here projects a November result.
