The New York Times has performed a public service by detailing the quiet, methodical effort by Democrats and their allies to place a second Dan Sullivan on Alaska’s Senate ballot. What the paper describes is not ordinary campaign rough-and-tumble. It is a calculated attempt to manufacture confusion in a system already designed to favor the unpredictable, all in service of flipping a seat that could decide control of the Senate.
According to the New York Times’s reporting, a staffer for former Rep. Mary Peltola was instructed in the summer of 2025 to comb voter records for every Dan Sullivan in the state. The goal was straightforward: find someone who could be persuaded to file as a Republican against Sen. Dan Sullivan (R-AK), thereby siphoning votes from the incumbent on Alaska’s top-four primary ballot.
The effort was fruitful, producing Dan J. Sullivan, a retired teacher from the remote fishing village of Petersburg. He registered as a Republican days before filing, despite a history of supporting Democrats and expressing opposition to President Donald Trump. He has offered few policy positions, raised little money, and shown little interest in actually campaigning.
THE SOCIALIST-BACKED SCAM THAT COULD HAND DEMOCRATS THE SENATE
The effort, internally dubbed the “ballot composition project,” went further. It involved coordination with the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee in Washington; secret trips by an operative named Jerid Kurtz, who used the alias “Zane”; and attempts to recruit additional spoilers. Text messages and interviews, including with a former Peltola campaign manager who later tried to retract her statements, paint a picture of ongoing consultation between campaign aides and national party staffers. The Peltola campaign and the DSCC, meanwhile, repeatedly denied they played any role in recruiting the second Sullivan. The documentary record now assembled by the New York Times makes those denials difficult to credit.
Alaska’s election rules make this kind of maneuver unusually easy. Candidates can claim any party label without party permission, and the top four finishers advance to the general election regardless of affiliation. Both parties have exploited the system before; Republicans once helped keep a Democratic inmate on the House ballot to complicate Peltola’s path. The difference here is the degree of secrecy, the use of a name-twin designed to confuse voters, and the national party’s apparent participation in a race with national stakes. Polls have shown the contest competitive, with Peltola often leading. Even a few thousand votes diverted to the other Sullivan could matter.
There is a larger point. Democrats have spent years arguing that Republican challenges to election administration, mail-in rules, and voter ID amount to an assault on democracy itself. They have framed every procedural dispute as existential. Yet when the opportunity arises to shape the ballot through the recruitment of an unserious candidate whose primary qualification is his name, the same voices fall silent or issue flat denials. The hypocrisy is not subtle. If the goal is simply to win, the tactics are understandable in a bare-knuckle political environment. What is harder to defend is the simultaneous claim that one’s opponents are uniquely dangerous to democratic norms while engaging in operations that depend on voter confusion.
The New York Times notes that ballot-stacking is common and generally legal. That is true. It is also true that legality is not the same as legitimacy in the eyes of voters who expect candidates to seek office because they want to serve, not because someone in Washington calculated that their presence on the ballot would hurt the other side. The retired teacher from Petersburg has insisted he is running of his own accord. The reporting suggests otherwise, and the pattern of his registration, his political history, and the involvement of Democratic consultants is consistent with the broader project.
Alaska voters are not naive. They have navigated ranked choice voting, jungle primaries, and independent streaks for years. Most will figure out which Sullivan is which. Some will not, particularly those voting by mail or under time pressure. The practical effect is the same either way: a deliberate attempt to dilute support for the incumbent in a state where small margins have mattered before.
HOW DEMOCRATS ARE PULLING A FAST ONE OVER ALASKA REPUBLICANS
This episode arrives at a moment when trust in elections is already strained, for reasons that are obvious to everyone but reporters who cover campaigns.
Courts will sort out the Justice Department’s related lawsuit seeking to block certification under certain circumstances — legal experts view that case as weak. The more durable damage may be political. When campaigns treat the ballot as a puzzle to be engineered rather than a list of choices for voters, they invite skepticism about every close result. Democrats who correctly insist that losing candidates should concede and that courts should not rewrite election rules after the fact would do well to apply the same standard to pre-election ballot manipulation.
A veteran journalist formerly on staff at U.S. News & World Report, UPI, and other outlets, Peter Roff regularly produces commentary on current political and public policy matters for domestic and international outlets. You can reach him at RoffColumns@gmail.com and follow him on social media @TheRoffDraft.
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[ H/T Washington Examiner ]
