Republicans are worried about losing the Senate race in Alaska, a state President Donald Trump easily won by 13 percentage points in the 2024 election, so they are clinging to a shoddy story published in The New York Times.
On Tuesday, the Times ran a story about the effort to place on Alaska’s ballot a Senate candidate named “Dan Sullivan,” a name that matches that of the state’s Republican senator who is running for reelection this year. The theory here is that voters may be confused and vote for the wrong Dan Sullivan, thus benefitting Democratic nominee Mary Peltola.
Promoting the story on his Truth Social account, Trump wrote, “It has just been determined that the Democrats in Alaska illegally searched for, and recruited, a man named Dan Sullivan to run against our distinguished Republican Senator, Dan Sullivan, in order to defraud, confuse, and obfuscate the Election, thereby taking votes away from the REAL Senator, Dan Sullivan.”
Trump’s solution, as usual, is to upend the democratic process and remove Sen. Dan Sullivan’s competitors, thereby giving Trump a solid GOP vote in the Senate.
This echoes the Department of Justice’s ongoing effort to pressure Alaska into blocking Peltola from being seated if she wins the election by a narrow margin. Alaska’s Republican governor, Mike Dunleavy, said he ordered a probe of the ballot process following the Times report.
Fox News, the Republican Party’s most strident media ally, pushed the story at the top of its website on Thursday morning, and on Wednesday night, Fox host Sean Hannity interviewed Sen. Dan Sullivan on his show to complain about his ballot doppelganger.
It is an all-hands-on-deck operation, in other words.
But the Times story that is pushing this attempted October surprise almost immediately deflates upon scrutiny.
Times reporter Kellen Browning admits eight paragraphs into the article that “[b]allot-stacking tactics are common in politics and generally considered legal—and have been employed by both parties in Alaska.”
Then a whopping 33 paragraphs into the story, he also concedes, “Republicans have also taken advantage of this system. When Ms. Peltola ran for re-election to the House two years ago, the state Republican Party backed an effort to help a Democrat—an inmate who ran his campaign from a New York prison—stay on the ballot.”
Then what is the actual story this year? Activists and party operatives engaged in a legal strategy that the opposing party has itself done? That sounds more like a manufactured scandal than a legitimate October surprise.
In fact, in 2022, Republicans ran a candidate named Mike Doyle for a Pennsylvania congressional seat—conveniently with the same name as a Democrat in a nearby Pennsylvania district. And Ballotpedia notes that in this year’s elections, there are at least 331 races around the country featuring candidates who share a surname.
Time to get Trump, Fox, and The New York Times to cover all of those races.
The Times appears to be chasing the institutional high that came from plastering stories about Hillary Clinton’s emails on the front page during the 2016 election cycle. That was a boon to Trump, and as the paper who proclaimed the “age of Trump” last year, perhaps this fake controversy is another gift between allies.
Published with permission of Daily Kos