Democratic Alaska Senate candidate Mary Peltola’s campaign was secretly behind the effort to find and recruit a man named Dan Sullivan to run against Republican incumbent Sen. Dan Sullivan, the New York Times is reporting. The goal was simple and cynical: flood the ballot with a name-alike candidate, confuse voters, and peel away enough support to sink the real senator.
Fox News correspondent Bill Melugin broke down the Times report, noting that text messages and documents reviewed by the paper show a Peltola campaign staffer received instructions as far back as summer 2025 to scour Alaska voter rolls for anyone named Dan Sullivan. The staffer did exactly that, compiled a list, and handed it over. Your tax-funded democracy at work, folks.
From there, the fake Dan Sullivan Senate scheme got downright cinematic. According to the Times, the operation “involved secret trips to far-flung Alaskan communities and the appearance of a mysterious Midwestern operative, who traversed the state using a fake name and made his pitch to would-be candidates over beers at brew pubs.” A mysterious operative. A fake name. Brew pubs. Democrats really did cosplay a spy thriller just to steal a Senate seat.
And it worked. This spring, a retired teacher from a tiny fishing village along the Alaska Panhandle, a place only reachable by air and sea, announced he was running for Senate. His name, of course, is Dan J. Sullivan. The whole operation landed exactly where Peltola’s people wanted it.
The truly remarkable part of this story is not that Democrats cooked up a scheme this brazen. That’s basically a Tuesday for them. The remarkable part is that the New York Times, not exactly a conservative rag, is the outlet blowing the lid off it. Even the Times apparently has a limit.
Courts will need to step in if the real Sen. Dan Sullivan is going to be protected from having his votes siphoned off by a confusion candidate his opponent’s own operatives recruited. What Peltola’s campaign allegedly orchestrated is not just dirty politics, it’s an attack on the basic integrity of an election. Alaska voters deserve to know who put that name on the ballot and why.
Watch for legal challenges and a whole lot of Democrats suddenly discovering they knew nothing about any of this. Peltola’s team ran a secret operation complete with fake names and bush-plane recruiting missions, but sure, the candidate herself was totally out of the loop. That explanation should go over great with Alaska voters.
