BETHEL, Alaska — In this remote city in the Yukon-Kuskokwim Delta, a pound of tomatoes costs nearly $7. Milk, when it’s available, is more than $13 a gallon. Almost all residents hunt or fish to feed themselves. Otherwise, they would go hungry. The cost of groceries is just too high. Gas, currently $10 a gallon, is delivered during one small window each year by barge when the river water thaws. If the price is high when the gas arrives, as it has been this year due to the war in Iran, tough luck.
“That’s the price you’re set stuck with,” said Nicholai Joekay, a 42-year-old Bethel resident, on a recent blustery afternoon. “We’re already spread thin and you just get spread even more thin.”
Few places feel the national concerns over affordability more acutely than Alaska. Though the state is usually red, Democrats believe frustration over high prices and the Trump administration will help them flip Alaska — a key state in their quest for control of the Senate. Former congresswoman Mary Peltola, a Democrat, is tying her opponent, incumbent Sen. Dan Sullivan, to Republican policies that she said is making the cost of living worse.
“Cuts to public radio, cuts to VA benefits, cuts to SNAP,” Peltola said at a recent campaign event in Anchorage. “It’s like reverse Robin Hood.”
Using bethel as an example for an article is a bit disingenuous. It’s not a place that people should really be living any way other than off the land. It’s like saying the groceries on the space station or at everest base camp are expensive.
It’s like 500 km from any roads and thousands from anywhere capable of agriculture as the rest of the world knows it.
It’s also mainly Yupik, and politically, idk how they vote, but they aren’t exactly politically relevant compared to the basically 3 cities with more than 10,000 people in Alaska.