Alaska Dems Spent Months Finding a Duplicate 'Dan Sullivan' to Confuse GOP Voters Ahead of Senate Race
Was there ever a doubt that Democrats were behind “Decoy Dan”?
After months of flagrantly unbelievable denials by Democratic officials and the Democratic Senate candidate herself, the party has been exposed as lying about its efforts to win an Alaska Senate seat by confusing voters in the Last Frontier.
The exposure came in about the least likely place imaginable and said more about the Democratic Party than any campaign commercial ever could.
BREAKING: NYT reports that operatives with Democratic Alaska U.S. Senate candidate Mary Peltola’s campaign were behind the effort to find & recruit a candidate named Dan Sullivan to run against incumbent GOP Senator Dan S. Sullivan in an effort to confuse voters and peel votes from him.
Specifically, NYT says they have reviewed text messages and documents that reveal in summer 2025, a Peltola staffer received instructions from campaign staffers to find as many people named Dan Sullivan in Alaska as possible.
The staffer complied, going through voter records, and compiled a list. The operation “involved secret trips to far-flung Alaskan communities and the appearance of 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.”
Per NYT:
“The plan worked. This spring, a retired teacher from a tiny fishing village along the Alaska Panhandle, reachable only by air and sea, announced his candidacy for Senate. His name was Dan J. Sullivan.”
https://t.co/Fh1n4fporW
— Bill Melugin (@BillMelugin_) October 28, 2026
The New York Times, normally the unofficial house organ of the Democratic Party, published a lengthy report Wednesday describing a months-long effort by Alaskan Democrats to recruit a Potemkin candidate with the same name as incumbent Republican Sen. Dan Sullivan.
The goal was simple — to have someone named “Dan Sullivan” run against the senator named “Dan Sullivan” to draw enough confused votes away from the real Republican to win an undeserved victory for Democrat Mary Peltola.
“The plan worked,” the newspaper reported. “This spring, a retired teacher from a tiny fishing village along the Alaska Panhandle, reachable only by air and sea, announced his candidacy for Senate. His name was Dan J. Sullivan.”
That’s the man Republicans call “Decoy Dan.” And he’s on the general election ballot after finishing among the top four candidates in the Aug. 18 primary.
(Primaries in Alaska are nonpartisan, with the four top finishers going on to the general election.)
From the start, he denied being a red herring in the normally red state.
“I’m not trying to trick people,” he told the Associated Press in June. “I just decided it was something I needed to do.”
Likewise, according to The New York Times, “The Peltola campaign has repeatedly denied any involvement in his candidacy.”
According to the @nytimes: Mary Peltola’s people spent months hunting for a second Dan Sullivan to put on Alaska’s ballot and trick voters. The so-called party of democracy, everyone. https://t.co/9PFnoKsTsx
— Scott Jennings (@ScottJenningsKY) October 28, 2026
But the Wednesday report tells a different story.
It opens with a scene-setter from 2025, when a Peltola staffer was instructed to comb the state’s voting rolls for any resident named “Dan Sullivan.”
It describes an operation known to the Peltola campaign as “the ballot composition project,” which saw a particularly shady operative making clandestine trips across the state to recruit possible dummy candidates for the state’s primary election.
It describes how the Peltola campaign’s lawyers were well aware of the activity to defraud Alaska’s voters.
It describes how the top echelons of the national Democratic Party, including the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee, were involved.
And it describes how happy the decoy was to lend a hand.
Everyone in the extremely damning @nytimes report exposing the Peltola/Democratic role in the Dans Sullivan Maneuver sure did seem to know that it would be bad if they got caught. https://t.co/YO1g6aPnYP
— Noah Rothman (@NoahCRothman) October 28, 2026
Sullivan, the non-senator, “said he hated Trump, and if it was going to help Mary, he liked Mary,” former Peltola campaign manager Elisa Rios told the newspaper.
“He didn’t have any interest in being a politician, but if this could help.”
To be fair, Rios could conceivably have an axe to grind. Despite being a longtime aide to Peltola, she was fired by the campaign in August and was planning a wrongful termination lawsuit, according to the report.
However, in addition to Rios, who was interviewed on numerous occasions, the report was based on interviews with a dozen individuals “who participated in or were told of the plan, or were would-be candidates that the team tried to recruit,” according to The New York Times.
That sounds like pretty solid reporting, by New York Times standards.
(Had it been aimed at smearing President Donald Trump or some other national figure, two anonymous sources and a kid who hated him in kindergarten would probably have done the trick.)
“Alaskan voters need to know,” Rios told reporter Kellen Browning, according to the report. “There was a lot of speculation, and voters should get the full picture when making their decisions.”
Interestingly enough, Rios apparently changed her mind about what voters need to know. As the article neared publication, she contacted Browning to try to retract her statements.
As National Review’s Dan McLaughlin noted, “one can only wonder” if a private settlement had been reached, one that maybe included Rios keeping her mouth shut about Decoy Dan.
The New York Times, to its credit, declined to go along with Rios’ attempted withdrawal.
As much as the report reveals about the inherent dishonesty of the Peltola campaign, it reveals much, much more about the state of the modern Democratic Party.
This is a morally and politically bankrupt organization, driven to desperation to pull out any trick possible to take undeserved control of the United States Senate, and the country as a whole.
A party that was confident of its ideas wouldn’t have to resort to chicanery. It wouldn’t have to recruit impostor candidates in a deliberate attempt to confuse American voters.
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It would state its positions loudly and clearly and dare voters to turn them down. But the positions of the modern Democratic Party are increasingly at odds with American history, tradition, and values.
It can’t win over voters by preaching socialism, impoverishment of the country, and appeasement of its enemies. So it lies repeatedly about anything that matters.
Politics isn’t beanbag, of course. It never has been and it never will be.
But a months-long campaign of lying, and lying about lying, and then trying to cover up the lying by lying again, is the province of a political party that has nothing to offer its country but lies in the first place.
The New York Times has done its share of lying for Democrats in its hatred of Trump and in the service of its Democratic comrades — it even “won” a shameful Pulitzer Prize for doing it.
Unbelievable. Even the New York Times is reporting this.
Mary Peltola’s team combed Alaska’s voter rolls for every man named Dan Sullivan, then recruited one to run to confuse voters. Senior Democratic Senate campaign officials in Washington were in on it.
Two terms in Congress. Zero bills signed into law. But she found time to hunt down every Dan Sullivan in Alaska.
Control of the Senate goes through Alaska. Let’s elect the REAL Dan Sullivan.
— Ted Cruz (@tedcruz) October 28, 2026
But this report bucks tradition — and with only a week to go before the election, at that.
Alaskans, and the rest of the country, should pray that it’s not too late now for the truth to come out.
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