In the long arc of American political ambition, campaigns often fall not to opposing forces but to the weight of their own internal contradictions. Mary Peltola, the Alaska congresswoman who represented a rare Democratic foothold in deeply red terrain, now finds her Senate bid imperiled not by her Republican opponents but by former aides describing a workplace marked by volatility and misconduct. The story unfolding in Alaska is an old one — the distance between a candidate's public promise and private conduct — arriving at a moment when Democrats had allowed themselves to believe a Senate sea