‘Decoy Dan’ dirty trick has sent Trump on the warpath in Alaska

New York: It may not be a quintessential October Surprise, but a bombshell news report on the unusual ballot situation in Alaska has rocked one of the closest contests in the US midterm elections, and sent Donald Trump and his Republicans into overdrive demanding justice.

The situation is thus: voters in Alaska have four names on the ballot for the US Senate – including incumbent Republican senator Dan Sullivan, the Democratic challenger Mary Peltola and a second Dan Sullivan, who is unaffiliated. There is also another long-shot candidate named Gerald Heikes.

Republicans have tried and failed to keep the second Dan Sullivan, a retired teacher, off the ballot, arguing he was a Democratic plant designed to confuse voters and suck votes from the Republican. Democrats had denied any involvement in his candidacy.

But on Wednesday (US time), The New York Times released an investigation revealing that the Democrats had co-ordinated the ploy from the start.

The Times reported that a staffer for Peltola received “unusual instructions from top campaign aides” in the summer of 2025 (July/August) asking them to find as many people named Dan Sullivan in Alaska as possible.

The investigation found that Peltola’s team worked with people trying to recruit these Sullivans to contest the election, including 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”.

The initiative was called the “ballot composition project” and involved the Peltola campaign’s lawyers as well as senior aides at the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee, the Times reported.

Elisa Rios, Peltola’s former campaign manager who was fired in August, told the Times: “Alaskan voters need to know. There was a lot of speculation, and voters should get the full picture when making their decisions.”

The Trump administration, through the Department of Justice, had already filed a legal complaint against the state of Alaska demanding that the election results not be certified if the Republican Sullivan lost and it were possible that he would have won if not for the other Sullivan.

Trump had been publicly fuming about the situation before the Times story broke. On Wednesday, he seized on its revelations, insisting that Peltola and Sullivan should be struck off the ballot.

“It was just determined that the Dumocrats in Alaska, despite their sworn statements to the contrary, put a man named Dan Sullivan on the Ballot in order to confuse the Public with respect to Highly Esteemed Senator Dan Sullivan,” he wrote on Truth Social.

“This is Voter Fraud at the Highest Level, and the Dumocrat Candidate, who was involved in the scheme, Mary Peltola, should be removed from the Ballot and prosecuted – So should the FAKE Dan Sullivan. Nothing else will do! This behaviour in our Elections cannot be allowed to continue.”

Speaking at a campaign function in Alaska on Wednesday, Peltola said the Times story was a diversion and a distraction, but did not deny the substance.

“Anybody who’s working in our best interest isn’t going to talk about the nonsense,” she told reporters. “This is all stuff to sell newspapers, this is all stuff to get subscriptions. Nobody at The New York Times cares about affordability in Alaska.”

On social media, Peltola has ignored the story completely, posting statements and video clips about other issues.

There is a great deal of irony in the fact this bombshell was dropped by the Times, a newspaper Trump regularly denigrates as “fake news”, and which he counts as among the most offensive news outlets in the US.

But on Wednesday, he and other senior administration officials were only too happy to quote liberally from the Times’ story.

“Even the New York Times admits that Mary Peltola is a total crook who tried to rig the Alaska senate race in her favour,” said Vice President JD Vance.

There is no suggestion that what the Democrats have reportedly done is illegal. Alaska’s Supreme Court signed off on the “decoy” Dan Sullivan remaining on the ballot. His full name is shown as Daniel J. Sullivan Jr, and the papers clearly show the other candidate, Dan S. Sullivan, as the registered Republican incumbent.

Nonetheless, the tactic is clearly manipulative and designed to confuse voters for Democrats’ electoral gain.

Sure, it pales in comparison to some of the things Trump and his allies have done to try to overturn legitimate election results. But that doesn’t excuse the Dems – especially since they appear to have lied about it in court.

At a time when voters are sick of political subterfuge, and wary of the grift and corruption encircling the Trump administration in Washington, why taint yourself by engaging in these kinds of dirty tricks? And why would you give Trump the ammunition to say, “Look, I was right all along, our elections are crooked.”

The Times story was notable for its depth and rigour – it even had a former campaign aide quoted on the record. And yet Peltola’s instinct has been to dismiss it, ignore it and post through it. Clearly, in the Democrats’ view, you can just get away with this sort of stuff in modern US politics.

This is a disaster for the Democrats because at the very moment they should be identified by Americans as the party that wants to preserve this country’s great democracy, they have been shown to undermine it with tricky games, and then lie about it.

And while Trump may find he has no legal leg to stand on, he will use this incident to his advantage if, as seems increasingly likely, he challenges the results of these elections – and not just in Alaska.

As Lisa Murkowski, the other US senator from Alaska, and a Republican who frequently breaks with Trump, said on X: “While some may try to write this off as just how politics works now, ballot-stacking should have no place in our electoral process.

“Run and win on your merits: your views, your policy ideas, and your accomplishments. By contrast, recruiting candidates to manipulate the field and influence voting outcomes is simply wrong.”

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