Alaska Democrat Senate candidate Mary Peltola walked into a bar in Juneau Thursday night and tried to walk out with her credibility intact. It didn’t go great. Peltola publicly denied any knowledge of a scheme to place a second man named Dan Sullivan on the ballot to confuse voters and steal the Senate seat from Republican incumbent Dan Sullivan.
“I just want to clear the air,” Peltola told local press at the bar. “I knew nothing about any other candidate on the ballot except for me and the incumbent. That is all I have ever known about. I am not interested in tricking voters.” Sure, Mary. Totally believable. Democrats are never interested in tricking voters.
The problem is that the New York Times dropped a bombshell report saying Democrat operatives, with Peltola’s knowledge, recruited a retired teacher and self-described “pragmatic Republican centrist” who also happens to be named Dan Sullivan to run in the same race. Republicans quickly dubbed this guy “Decoy Dan.” The scheme reportedly involved Peltola campaign staff, Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee officials, political consultants, and an operative who traveled around Alaska under a false name to recruit candidates. Democrats cooking up a fake Republican named Dan Sullivan to mess with an actual Republican named Dan Sullivan is the kind of thing you’d think was too dumb to be real. And yet, here we are. the Decoy Dan election scheme has now attracted the attention of federal prosecutors and state investigators alike.
The Peltola campaign’s fired manager, Elisa Rios, was the Times’ main on-the-record source and said Peltola was “definitely aware” of the plot. Rios later tried to walk back her statements, but the Times said her account matched other reporting, including internal texts showing national Democrats and campaign aides planning the whole thing. The campaign denied any role in the scheme. Shockingly, the Justice Department did not take their word for it.
The DOJ sent subpoenas to Peltola’s campaign and to Decoy Dan himself. A U.S. official told NBC News that investigators issued at least three dozen new subpoenas and document preservation requests. Alaska Republican Governor Mike Dunleavy also opened a state investigation to look at possible criminal charges or civil action. So that’s both state and federal heat, all because Democrats thought running a fake Dan Sullivan was a perfectly normal campaign strategy.
Before all this blew up publicly, the Justice Department had already asked a federal court to be ready to delay certification of the election results if the two Dan Sullivans on the ballot confused voters enough to affect the outcome. Democrats have leaned heavily on Alaska’s ranked-choice voting system in recent years, and it’s paid off. Peltola won Alaska’s lone House seat in 2022 after two Republican candidates split the vote and both fell short of a majority. She won in the second round of counting, which is basically the political equivalent of winning on a technicality.
Now the investigation is growing, the subpoenas are piling up, and Peltola is claiming she knew nothing, saw nothing, and heard nothing. The next steps are the November election and whatever comes out of the DOJ and state probes. Democrats tried to run a con in Alaska, and it turns out Alaska noticed.
