Dan Sullivan Is Running Against Dan Sullivan in Alaska — and Only One of Them Is the Senator

WEDNESDAY, NOVEMBER 4, 2026

Let’s rewind the tape to the Last Frontier, where the ballot itself became the story. Alaska is choosing a United States senator in a race that could help decide which party controls the Senate, and on that ballot, in the same race, sit two men with nearly the same name: Dan S. Sullivan, the two-term Republican incumbent, and Daniel J. Sullivan Jr., a retired schoolteacher from rural Alaska who ran almost no campaign at all. Every Rewind grades the tape that exists. This tape is a ballot — and the numbers on it, in an incomplete count that is not a certified final and will not be one for weeks, are these: at 5 p.m. ET on Wednesday, former Rep. Mary Peltola led the incumbent 48.2% to 47.9%, a margin of 626 votes, according to USA Today. The other Sullivan had 3,583. Read those two numbers next to each other until the joke stops being funny: the decoy, as Republicans have dubbed him, holds more than five times the votes that separate the two people actually contesting the seat.

One ballot, two Sullivans

The ballot does try to help. The incumbent is listed as Dan S. Sullivan, identified as the Republican and the officeholder; the challenger with the famous name is listed in full as Daniel J. Sullivan Jr., with no party affiliation and no other identifying information, per both USA Today and Votebeat. That is the whole disambiguation system: a middle initial, a “Jr.,” and a party label, standing between a voter and a mistake that could outlast a recount. Republicans say that was never going to be enough. They have called the second candidate “Decoy Dan” for months, and they feared precisely what the early count now shows on paper — a namesake candidacy large enough, at 3,583 votes, to matter in a race this close, whether or not a single one of those votes was cast by mistake. And to be plain about what this desk is and is not saying: 3,583 Alaskans voted for Daniel J. Sullivan Jr. How many of them meant to is a question nobody can answer from a secret ballot — a point a federal judge would make herself before the week was out.

How the second Dan got there

Here is where the story stops being a clerical oddity and becomes an accusation, so here is the accusation stated the way the record supports it: reported, not adjudicated. Last month, The New York Times reported that Democratic Party activists had recruited the retired teacher to run as a spoiler — the product, the reporting said, of a months-long search for an Alaskan who shared the senator’s name. Votebeat’s account of the same report describes operatives working with Peltola’s campaign and Democratic leadership working to recruit the second Dan in an effort to dilute the incumbent’s vote. Peltola has denied any connection to the second Sullivan, and she told supporters that no one was confused about who they were voting for. “They’ve tried to distract us,” she said. “We know B.S. when we hear it. We know distractions when we see it. And we are not falling for any of their funny business.” The second Sullivan has a denial of his own: in an interview with the Associated Press published in June, he denied being a spoiler candidate and said he entered the race independently, on his own decision. And when USA Today came calling this week, Daniel J. Sullivan Jr. did not respond to its request for comment — the quietest man in Alaska, holding 3,583 of its loudest votes.

The courts read the ballot first

Alaska’s own election officials were the first to balk: they initially threw the retired schoolteacher off the ballot. The Alaska Supreme Court put him back — ruling in June that he would remain, even if some people thought the candidacy was a “bad faith” effort to confuse voters, as USA Today put it. Washington then tried its own remedy. The Justice Department sued to block certification of the race if the incumbent narrowly lost, asking a court to set aside the ballots cast for the non-incumbent Sullivan and let the federal government investigate what those voters intended. On Sunday, U.S. District Judge Sharon Gleason threw the case out. The federal government, she found, had outlined no realistic way to investigate voter intent without violating ballot secrecy — and ordering ballots segregated days before an election could itself confuse voters and depress turnout, per Votebeat. The ballot went to the voters exactly as the state’s highest court had left it: two Sullivans, one seat, good luck.

“The scheme is working”

The incumbent, for his part, is not waiting for the count to make his argument. Speaking to reporters on Election Day, Sen. Dan S. Sullivan said the move to put a candidate with his name on the ballot showed what Democratic Party leaders think of Alaskans. “This is all about disdain for the people of Alaska,” he said. “Think about it: First order of business is to trick people of their votes. And look, ultimately the scheme is working. There’s going to be thousands of Alaskans who throw away their vote.” The federal government, meanwhile, has moved well past rhetoric. President Donald Trump ordered the Justice Department to investigate and said Peltola should face criminal charges; she has denied any connection to the second Sullivan. Prompted by Trump, the department has sent at least 20 letters to individuals or entities informing them they are investigative targets or should preserve records, and it has served at least 120 subpoenas, a law enforcement source confirmed to USA Today. Twenty letters and 120 subpoenas, over a schoolteacher with almost no campaign and, on the first count, 3,583 votes. Whatever the scheme was, its paperwork is now enormous. Previously’s news desk has the full midterm results story; this desk’s beat is the ballot that needed its own investigation.

Why it probably doesn’t steal the seat anyway

And now the counterweight, because it is load-bearing. Russell Luke, an assistant professor of political science at the University of Alaska Fairbanks, told USA Today he believes most Alaskans were clear on exactly which Sullivan they were voting for — the incumbent was clearly marked on the ballot, and the controversy itself had been covered for months. “I don’t think confusion was a driving factor,” Luke said. Then there is the system Alaska built for exactly this. The state uses ranked-choice voting: if neither Peltola nor Sullivan passes 50% in the initial count, election officials eliminate the lowest candidates and redistribute their votes to each voter’s next choice, a process set to begin November 18, with certification due by November 25. A voter who ranked the teacher first and the senator second has not thrown a vote away at all — it transfers. Ranked-choice researcher Sarah John of Doctors of Democracy put the spoiler scenario at “less than a 1% chance” if Republicans rank their preferences, per Votebeat. The honest summary is the one Votebeat printed on November 2: confusion seems unlikely to matter in most scenarios. Most is not all — a single-choice ballot for the wrong Dan, in a race sitting at 626 votes, is the scenario that keeps lawyers employed — but the safety net exists, and it was built before anyone thought to test it this hard.

The long count

So Alaska waits, the way Alaska always waits. Virtually all of its votes are cast on paper; in rural communities across 586,000 square miles, ballots are tallied by hand at local sites and transported to be counted, and overseas military ballots are still arriving. The blue wave that settled most of the country on Tuesday has not finished washing over the 49th state, and it may not for weeks. What is already settled is the shape of the thing: a Senate race close enough to hold a chamber in suspense, a reported recruitment scheme that its alleged beneficiary denies and its alleged instrument denies, a state supreme court that kept the name on the ballot, a federal judge who refused to take it off the count, a Justice Department probe with triple-digit subpoenas, and a retired teacher who ran almost no campaign, raised almost no money, said almost nothing — and stands, tonight, with more votes than the margin. That is not a spoiler. That is a whole second election, hiding inside the first one, under the same name.

The donkey is not a voter in Juneau squinting at a ballot, and it is not a retired teacher who says he ran on his own. The donkey is the trick itself — a same-name candidacy that a state supreme court had to referee, a federal department had to investigate, and a sitting senator is blaming for a race separated, at last count, by fewer votes than the other Sullivan has. Alaska built a ranked-choice safety net for exactly this kind of confusion, and the net may well hold. A ballot should never have needed one.