In August, Mary Peltola 𝕏told Alaskans, “It should be a criminal offense to lie or mislead the electorate. YES!” Her campaign might have wanted to check its own text messages before she said it.
According to a New York Times investigation published Wednesday, top Peltola aides in the summer of 2025 told a staffer to find as many people named Dan Sullivan in Alaska as possible. Dan S. Sullivan is Alaska’s Republican senator, and a second Dan Sullivan on the state’s four-candidate general election ballot could confuse enough voters to cost him the seat. This spring, a retired teacher from Petersburg named Dan J. Sullivan filed for the Senate as a Republican. He is a longtime supporter of Peltola and other Democrats.
According to the Alaska Superior Court’s order in his ballot case, he asked to appear on the ballot as “Sullivan, Dan,” exactly as the senator had. When the Division of Elections asked both men how their names should appear to avoid confusing voters, he first asked to be listed as “Dan S. Sullivan,” using the senator’s middle initial, before settling on Dan J. Sullivan.
The Peltola campaign has repeatedly denied any involvement. The Times reports that the text messages tell a different story. The effort, internally called the “ballot composition project,” involved Peltola’s then chief of staff, senior aides at the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee, and a lawyer at the Elias Law Group. A Democratic operative from Ohio named Jerid Kurtz traveled the state under a fake name, pitching would-be candidates over beers, while Peltola’s aides asked for updates on “our friend.”
The Sullivan scheme was only one piece of it. When a progressive Democrat named David Leslie landed on the general election ballot and threatened to pull votes from Peltola, Kurtz met with him at a Fairbanks cafe, and Leslie soon dropped out. His exit opened the slot for Gerald Heikes, a Republican drywall contractor who the Times reports was also recruited into the race. Peltola’s aides even floated creating a MAGA party to lure conservatives onto the ballot, and the DSCC’s director of campaigns texted back, “Smart.” When a court kept the second Dan Sullivan on the ballot, two Peltola aides and a DSCC staffer reacted in a group chat with heart emojis.
Imagine the National Republican Senatorial Committee had hunted down a second Mary Peltola, sent an operative around Alaska under an alias, and nudged a Republican off the ballot to make room for a spoiler. It would lead every newscast in America. Democrats would call it election subversion, the Elias Law Group would be in court by lunch, and “threat to democracy” would appear in every third paragraph. The Times did the reporting, but most of the rest of the national press will let it pass quietly.
Much of the press considers stopping Republicans a righteous cause — and righteous causes excuse a great deal. Only Republican dirty tricks draw the outrage. Democrats also spent millions of dollars in 2022 boosting weak candidates in Republican primaries while warning voters that those very candidates would end American democracy. The press covered that as a clever strategy, too.
President Trump’s Justice Department has now sued to block certification if the other Dan Sullivan costs the senator the race. Election law experts call the suit dubious because the Constitution leaves the administration of elections to the states and the election has not even happened yet. Conservatives who believe in federalism should not want Washington deciding which Alaska votes count. As a former elections lawyer, I agree that the federal Executive Branch does not really have standing here. In fact, the Justice Department is not even citing a federal statute as proof of standing, just a preamble to legislation.
The voters of Alaska should take action. Democrats say democracy is on the ballot, but the Democrats are the ones trying to subvert it. Peltola wanted lying to the electorate to be treated as a crime. The Alaska Supreme Court has already ruled that the other Dan Sullivan can stay on the ballot. Alaskans can still render their own verdict next week, knowing that the candidate who wanted to criminalize misleading voters had a staffer combing the voter rolls for men named Dan Sullivan.
We are 6 days out from the midterms, and enough of the early vote has been processed to tell us where this is headed. It is not headed anywhere good for Republicans.
Patrick Ruffini, who is about as clear-eyed a Republican numbers guy as you will find, 𝕏laid out the picture this week, and it squares with everything I am hearing from people who do this for a living in state after state.
His read on the national early vote is sobering. More than 33 million ballots have been cast across 44 states. Republicans narrowed the raw gap almost everywhere in the latest data, but the projected final electorates barely budged, and the few that did move went toward Democrats. In the states with a 2024 comparison, the early vote is running about 10 points more Democratic than it was at this point 2 years ago. In North Carolina, Democrats who sat out the 2022 midterms are banking votes at twice the rate of Republicans who did the same. In Georgia, the Black share of the early vote is running nearly 6 points above where it was in 2024.
Georgia is where it really worries me. More than 2 million Georgians have already voted. In the 27 counties Kamala Harris carried in 2024, early turnout is running 9% ahead of the same point in 2022. In the 132 counties President Trump carried, it is essentially flat. The deepest red counties in the state — the ones that gave Trump 85% or more — had turned out a smaller share of their 2022 vote than the Democratic counties as of the weekend.
Rick Jackson told a crowd in Calhoun last week, “We have to overperform in rural Georgia or we’re not going to win.” He is right, and rural Georgia is not overperforming. Republicans have decided to sit this one out, and they are sitting it out even for a self-funded businessman running squarely on Brian Kemp’s record.
There are bright spots. Cherokee and Forsyth are voting well ahead of their 2022 pace, and the north Atlanta exurbs are showing up. You cannot win Georgia statewide with the exurbs alone, though, and if the countryside stays on the couch, the damage will not stop at the governor’s race. The lieutenant governor, attorney general, secretary of state, and a handful of legislative seats Republicans have held for 20 years are all in play.
Voters are furious with the Republican Party right now. They are furious about prices, they are furious that a party that promised to bring down their cost of living put a tax on everything they buy and called it a tariff, and they are furious that nobody in Washington seems to be listening. I understand it. I share a good bit of it. But the Republicans at the state level are not responsible for Washington.
Staying home sends Keisha Lance Bottoms to the Governor’s Mansion and hands a state built over 20 years of Republican governance to people who will spend the next 4 years undoing it.
If you are a Republican and you have already voted, call your Republican friends who have not. Call your parents, your cousins, the guys in your Sunday School class, and the fellow down the road with the flag on his porch who has not been to the polls yet. Early voting ends Friday, and Election Day is Tuesday.
If there is a candidate on that ballot you simply cannot stomach, leave that line blank. I did. You can. But I voted the rest of the ballot. Go vote for the rest of the Republicans on the ballot. Vote for your state representative, your state senator, and the down-ballot statewide candidates, who did not make you angry. They should not pay the price for those who did.
