An election challenge in Alaska.
President Trump was always going to cast doubt on the results of the 2026 midterms.
For six years now, I’ve been writing about the various ways the president and his allies have questioned the integrity of our elections. And when they lose (or expect to lose) races they care about, those questions evolve into outright challenges.
The president refused to accept the 2020 election results when he lost, and he even refused to accept the margins by which he won elections in 2016 and 2024. It’s equally likely he will not accept whatever happens to his preferred candidate in 2028, presuming he doesn’t attempt to find a legal pathway to a third term (and I don’t think he will).
So I wasn’t exactly surprised to see the Department of Justice announce its preemptive lawsuit about the results in Alaska. Nor was I surprised to see Trump say openly that he had instructed the DOJ to file the lawsuit, a confession that would have been a monthslong scandal in any other administration. And yet…
And yet.
The situation in Alaska is quite preposterous.
Over the summer, The New York Times sent a reporter to meet “candidate” Daniel J. Sullivan, and it discovered the following: Daniel J. Sullivan has never before run for office. He has voted for the Democratic candidate in the last three presidential elections and has never voted for Sen. Dan Sullivan, the Republican incumbent he’s running against. He attends “No Kings” protests and is politically active against the Trump administration.
Despite that, he registered as a Republican just two days before he filed to run in the Senate race. Later, when corresponding with the Division of Elections about his candidacy, he gave his name as “Dan S. Sullivan,” despite his middle name starting with a “J” (Sen. Sullivan’s middle name just happens to start with an “S”). He chalked this up to a “typo,” even though the “J” and “S” are on opposite sides of the keyboard (if it were actually a typo, I’ll leave it to you to decide what kind of galactic coincidence it is that the typo produced an “S”).
On his campaign website, the challenging Sullivan uses a similar Alaskan flag theme as the Republican incumbent, with the same color schemes and stars. Yet, on Daniel J. Sullivan’s website, there are no policy positions outlined.
He is not campaigning.
He is hardly raising money.
He doesn’t seem to be trying to win at all.
So: Does anyone actually think this is anything but an attempt to undermine Sen. Dan S. Sullivan? I don’t see any reason to pretend. Daniel J. Sullivan hired the longtime Democratic consultant Amber Lee to help him file (again, as a Republican — and again, with the same name as the sitting Republican senator). When asked about this by The Times, he demurred, saying he didn’t want to talk about it because of ongoing litigation. He conceded that he figured his name would offer “an instant megaphone” for his campaign, though he hasn’t used that megaphone to do much campaigning, if any. The duplicitous candidate has played coy, but his intentions seem transparent.
Now: How big of an impact will this have on the election? My guess is very, very little. This is a ranked-choice election, so Daniel J. Sullivan is likely to be eliminated after the first round (assuming no candidate gets to 50% immediately). Even in an election where only a few hundred thousand people will cast votes, I have a hard time imagining a scenario where the challenging Sullivan will make a big difference. I’m also happy to cede that only the least informed voters here will get confused, and even then they can still simply vote for both Sullivans. Kudos to Alaska’s election officials, who — recognizing they can’t remove Daniel J. Sullivan from the ballot — have done a great job making sure everyone knows who is who:
How each candidate will appear on the ballot
None of this adds up to an election that has been compromised, or an election whose results are preemptively corrupted. The DOJ insisting an election result not be certified before the election takes place, in the event its preferred candidate loses by a certain number of votes, is ludicrous and dangerous. The annoying truth is that there may actually be some genuine Daniel J. Sullivan voters out there. Every election has protest votes (my dad is a poll worker in Pennsylvania, and he has to stay late counting ballots for Mickey Mouse and Donald Duck every year). If Republicans and Democrats can’t win a vote from disaffected Alaskans over a pretend candidate like this, that’s more a party problem than a Daniel J. Sullivan problem.
And yet.
| Get more of the story... We broke down the lawsuit with just the facts, and then we picked out the best arguments from conservative, progressive, and independent writers in today's free newsletter so you can make up your own mind. Read them here. |
I can’t focus all my ire on the Trump administration. I have plenty to spare for Daniel J. Sullivan, who is clearly trying to siphon votes from the Republican Party and upend the already sensitive ranked-choice voting election in Alaska.
To be honest, I’m exhausted by these dirty tricks and the partisans who defend them. In Texas, right-wing activists generated a totally made-up “mental health crisis” story about James Talarico and seemed to send out fliers and texts pretending to be trans organizations. All the while, they’ve run AI-generated ads of Talarico scribbling notes in a Bible and reading made-up passages. They do this instead of honestly campaigning on the issues or promoting their candidate to the electorate. Republicans and Democrats are both running fake news websites boosting their own candidates. Republicans and Democrats are both putting money into the other party’s primaries to fund candidates they think they’ll beat in a general election, rather than spending on their preferred candidates.
It goes on and on and on like this — cheap, dirty, lame political plays from people who can’t win with an affirmative message about what they’ll do. And that’s to say nothing of the gerrymandering or robocalls or vicious and desperate personal attack ads permeating this year’s midterms.
So, do I worry about the Trump administration preemptively challenging an election result before election day? Of course. I’m gearing up for a long, arduous, infuriating post-election series of denials and conspiracy theories that I’ll have to write about here. But also, in this specific case, I think Republicans’ frustration is warranted. In fact, I blame Daniel J. Sullivan for giving Trump a politically defensible reason for challenging the election results. Democrats would be just as mad, and probably just as litigious, if a Republican voter with the same name as their incumbent candidate got on the ballot as a Democrat with the help of a Republican operative in a competitive Senate race while not actually campaigning, running on any specific issues, or even trying to win.
For all of that, Daniel J. Sullivan — like election deniers and political tricksters trying to corrupt an otherwise functioning electoral system — deserves our scorn.
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Staff concurrence. Will Kaback Senior Editor
I’m in lockstep with Isaac on the second Sullivan — I believe he’s a sham candidate who entered the race to sabotage Sen. Sullivan. And yet… the DOJ’s lawsuit concerns me more.
RedState’s Ward Clark is an unabashedly pro-Trump commentator, but I thought he made the most principled point against the DOJ’s lawsuit of all the writers we surveyed today: “No matter what we suspect about Daniel J. Sullivan’s motivations… the only thing that matters here is that Daniel J. Sullivan followed all of the legal procedures and requirements to run for this office.”
More specifically, Republicans challenged the unaffiliated Sullivan’s candidacy, and the Alaska Supreme Court ruled that he qualified for the ballot. In that case, what grounds does the Justice Department have to bring a preemptive suit? Cato’s Walter Olson and the Election Law Blog’s Rick Hasen both noted that the DOJ’s reading of the National Voter Registration Act assumes the federal government has the power to interfere with states’ certification of their elections (and possibly other state election processes). It’s a tortured interpretation of the law, and one that, if affirmed, would dissolve the constitutional boundary between federal and state governments in administering elections.
Fortunately, I don’t think the lawsuit will succeed. But even as I share Isaac’s (and Republicans’) frustration with what’s playing out in Alaska’s Senate race, I’m much more alarmed by the power the DOJ seeks to assert in its response.
