Alaska's U.S. Senate race — the only Senate contest in the country that the Associated Press had still not called as of Saturday morning — moved sharply on Friday, November 13, when a new batch of ballots widened Democrat Mary Peltola's lead over Republican Senator Dan Sullivan to 10,412 votes. This is a new development in a race this newsroom has followed since the first counts on November 4, when Peltola's early lead was just 626 votes, and since a judge's November 12 ruling on her campaign's lawsuit over rejected absentee ballots.
Source: Alaska Division of Elections via Owasso Local News
The Alaska Division of Elections' unofficial summary, timestamped 7:14 p.m. Alaska time on Friday, counted 22,511 additional ballots that day. It now shows Peltola with 138,240 first-choice votes, or 49.84 percent, and Sullivan with 127,828 votes, or 46.09 percent. Two other candidates trail far behind: Gerald Heikes with 5,885 votes and Daniel J. Sullivan Jr. with 4,560 votes, plus 855 write-in votes. In total, 277,368 first-choice votes have been recorded in the contest, out of 279,328 ballots cast.
Source: Fish4News / Alaska Division of Elections
How the lead grew this week
The margin has widened at every stage of the count. An Associated Press snapshot late on November 13 (17:28 UTC) had Peltola ahead 125,157 to 119,357 — a lead of 5,800 votes with about 88 percent of the expected vote counted and 255,010 votes recorded. Decision Desk HQ's early November 13 snapshot put the lead at 5,801 votes. Friday's fuller count, adding more than 22,500 ballots, nearly doubled the lead to 10,412. The Associated Press, as reported by NBC News on Saturday morning, estimated that 96.2 percent of the expected vote has now been counted, with about 12,000 ballots remaining, and it still has not called the race.
Earlier in the week the same race produced a court fight. On November 12, Superior Court Judge Thomas Matthews denied the Peltola campaign's request for the names of voters whose absentee ballots had been rejected, calling the request not reasonable in the middle of the count; at that point her lead stood at 4,250 votes. The campaign had sued over access to those records on November 6. Friday's count makes that dispute less likely to decide the outcome, but the ruling stands as the legal backdrop to the final count.
Why 49.84 percent is not yet a win: ranked-choice voting
Alaska does not simply award the seat to the first-choice leader. Peltola's 138,240 votes leave her 445 votes short of an outright majority of the first-choice votes recorded so far, and if no candidate passes 50 percent, the state runs a ranked-choice tabulation: the last-place candidate is eliminated and those ballots are transferred to each voter's next choice, repeating until one candidate has a majority of the continuing ballots.
That tabulation is scheduled for Wednesday, November 18, after the deadline for ballots mailed from overseas to arrive, and the Division of Elections says ranked-choice results will not be available until that day, once all eligible ballots have been reviewed and counted. The division will keep counting ballots through Wednesday. The state's target date to certify the result is November 25. Alaska voters also rejected Ballot Measure 2 in this election, so the ranked-choice system itself stays in place for future races, Alaska Public Media reported.
Peltola, a former congresswoman, leads a two-term Republican incumbent who had President Trump's backing — but a lead is not a call. With roughly 12,000 ballots still out and a ranked-choice tabulation set for November 18, no news organisation has declared a winner, and the official result belongs to the completed count.
What it means beyond Alaska
Democrats have already secured majorities in both chambers of Congress in the November 3 midterms, according to national reporting, but the size of the Senate majority is still undetermined — and Alaska is the one seat left. A Peltola win would flip a Republican-held Senate seat in a state that has backed Republican presidential candidates, and would do it under a ranked-choice system that rewards candidates who attract second-choice support as well as first-choice loyalty. A Sullivan hold would keep the seat in Republican hands despite a first-choice deficit, if transfers break his way.
For readers watching the count from outside Alaska, the timetable is the story now: ballots continue to arrive and be counted through Wednesday, the ranked-choice tabulation follows on November 18, and certification is targeted for November 25. Until then, the accurate headline is the one the numbers support — Peltola leads by 10,412 votes, strongly positioned, in America's last uncalled Senate race.