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.”

  • CharlesDarwin@lemmy.world
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    24 hours ago

    Seeing the latest rounds of donnie voters doing hot-takes and complaining about how donnie needs to get back to tending to their needs, LOL.

    You dumbfucks voted for a piece of shit that is disappearing people, ripping away people’s healthcare, cratering trust in science and government, self-dealing to himself and his family, destroying democracy and pissing the law and the Constitution, and on and on, and only now that you have to pay more for diesel, only then do you start mewling about it.

  • crank0271@lemmy.world
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    1 day ago

    Have the grocery bill you voted for.

    If the Dems pull off some big sweep, I hope they’ve got someone smarter than me to work out how to start unraveling the damage that’s been done. Not just how to put things back the way they were, because they certainly needed improvement, but to put more resilient systems in place. And, something they’ve never been good at, successfully messaging it to the media and to voters.

    • Hanrahan@slrpnk.net
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      15 hours ago

      not much they can do even if they had the inclination. Use an ecar, build hydro, put some rail in, takes decades ? diesel drops back down and everyone has the memory of a goldfish

    • timbuck2themoon@sh.itjust.works
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      1 day ago

      Not sure it’ll matter. Dems could cure lung cancer but voters would question why they didn’t cure all cancer.

      People have no concept that Republicans destroy everything every time and then the dems have to fix not only that but all the other problems that existed before.

    • evasive_chimpanzee@lemmy.world
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      1 day ago

      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.

  • WhatAmLemmy@lemmy.world
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    1 day ago

    All this does is prove just how indoctrinated, ignorant, selfish, and/or narcissistic the average Alaskan is. They supported the antichrist until it personally affected them.

    • velma@sh.itjust.worksOP
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      1 day ago

      And maybe it’s enough to change their votes blue.

      There are Alaskans that did not vote for this and I’m rooting for them in particular.

      • 14th_cylon@lemmy.zip
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        1 day ago

        There are Alaskans that did not vote for this and I’m rooting for them in particular.

        there is no such thing as not voting. not voting is also decision which contributed to the situation, so lets not pretend they are some innocent victims and let them have fun with their leopards.

          • 14th_cylon@lemmy.zip
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            1 day ago

            otherwise not Republican

            what is “otherwise not republican”? in the system you(they) have there, not voting blue is voting red. there is no realistic third option, no matter how much you want it to be.

  • WhoIzDisIz@lemmy.today
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    1 day ago

    It’s so stupid - they’re all short-term thinkers complaining about long-term problems. If things can’t be fixed quickly enough when a Dem gets in, they’ll switch right back. Accomplishing nothing & wasting more time as things get worse.

    We need a drastic governmental overhaul, and it ain’t gonna happen until the country collapses entirely because people are too stupid and chickenshit.

    EDIT for those making assumptions that I mean they’re stupid for dumping Democrats at first chance, that’s not what I’m saying. I’m saying all we’re doing is bouncing between two sides of the same coin, wasting time we don’t have to fix shit.

    • gAlienLifeform@lemmy.world
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      If we want to talk stupid we really need to talk about the Biden administration’s policy and politics. Their big marquee infrastructure bill basically just put money into state governments and for profit companies without requiring them to make any changes to how they had been doing business, while at the same time they knifed households in the back by cutting stimulus checks and support for expanded unemployment benefits. Maybe some of that stuff could have eventually trickled down in some way, but the fact that they were basically doing Reaganomics was really just a giant middle finger to their base in pursuit of Republican votes that never came in.

      • WhoIzDisIz@lemmy.today
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        1 day ago

        You seem to assume I support corporate Dems as well. That’s wrong, and you can go through my comment history to confirm that. I’d like nothing more than a progressive takeover to start with, and we can work from there.