Next Tuesday, a voter in Alaska will look at the Senate ballot and see the name Dan Sullivan twice. One is the Republican senator who has represented the state since 2015, and the other is a retired teacher from Petersburg, a small fishing town reachable only by air and sea. According to The New York Times, that confusion is no accident.
The Times reported this week that people working for Mary Peltola, the Democratic nominee, spent months with their allies recruiting a second Dan Sullivan to run. Their goal was to confuse voters and pull support away from the real senator. What troubled me more than the scheme itself, however, was how many Times readers cheered it.
This article asks two questions. The first is why a candidate with a real record and a real chance of winning would stoop this low. The second is harder, because it asks why so many Americans in both parties now applaud deception when their own side does it.
With the election only days away, in Alaska and across the country, the answer to that second question says less about any one candidate than it does about who we have become as a nation.
How the Scheme Worked
The Times built its story on interviews, text messages and legal documents. In the summer of 2025, a Peltola staffer was told to find as many Dan Sullivans in Alaska as possible and combed through voter records to build the list. This spring, Dan J. Sullivan entered the race.
The effort, which the team called the ballot composition project, reached well beyond one name. According to the Times, a veteran Democratic operative used a fake name, “Zane,” to recruit other would-be candidates, and he pitched one of them over beers at an Anchorage pub.
In one text exchange, Peltola’s advisers watched a focus group and joked that a participant was the perfect audience “for our ballot strategy plan.” That is not how anyone should talk about the voters they hope to serve.
In June, the Alaska Supreme Court ruled that the second Sullivan could stay on the ballot. An employee of the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee, which runs the party’s national Senate campaigns, shared the news in a group chat: “Other Dan won, will be on ballot.” Two Peltola aides and a committee staffer replied with heart emojis.
The Peltola campaign denies recruiting any candidates, and Dan J. Sullivan says he entered the race on his own. Peltola’s former campaign manager, who has since tried to take back her interviews, told the Times that Peltola was not directly involved but was “definitely aware.”
The Times also notes that stacking a ballot this way is generally considered legal, and that both parties have done it in Alaska. Two years ago, the state Republican Party backed an effort to keep a Democrat on the ballot against Peltola while he ran his campaign from a New York prison. Something can be legal and still be wrong, though, and it was wrong both times.
Deception Knows No Party
What makes this so hard to understand is that Peltola did not need it. Polls give her a strong chance of winning, according to the Times, and she could have run on her own record and trusted Alaskans to decide.
The same failure shows up on the other side of the aisle. In Ohio, Vivek Ramaswamy, the Republican nominee for governor, is spending $4 million to promote an ad in which Dr. Amy Acton’s mother calls her daughter a liar.
The attack ad never mentions that the mother’s husband was charged in 1978 with raping Acton when she was 12. Even Ohio’s Republican governor, Mike DeWine, has asked Ramaswamy to take it down.
Is Peltola’s conduct as bad as Ramaswamy’s? No. Is it as troubling as the record of Ken Paxton, the Republican Senate nominee in Texas, who was impeached on corruption charges by his own party in 2023 before the state Senate acquitted him? No.
Still, this is not about ranking candidates on a scale of disgrace. More than 150 million Americans voted in 2024, and from that enormous pool we choose just 535 people to serve in Congress, 435 in the House and 100 in the Senate. Surely, we can do better than this.
Two Parties Pulled to the Extremes
None of this happened overnight. In my new book, The Opening, I describe how five forces pulled our two parties away from the center over roughly fifty years: campaign money, the internet, partisan cable news, gerrymandered districts and the primary system. Together, they turned two big-tent parties where most Americans could find a home into polarized organizations that answer to their most committed activists.
Make no mistake: Our two parties have moved toward their extremes and are not coming back leaving a significant portion of moderate Americans without a political home. In fact, Gallup reported in January that a record 45 percent of us now call ourselves independents. Only 27 percent identify as Democrats, and another 27 percent identify as Republicans.
That drift explains much of what we are seeing in this extraordinarily ugly midterm election. A generation ago, voters could often choose between capable candidates who leaned left or right but still met in the middle to govern. Today, many of us end up voting for candidates we would never consider worthy of one of those 535 seats, simply because we dare not let the other side fill it.
When every race feels like a fight for survival, winning starts to justify almost anything. That is how a campaign staffer ends up searching voter rolls for a man with the right name, and how a candidate for governor ends up spending $4 million on an ad that leaves out the most important part of the story.
Who Will Ever Stand for Democracy?
Is there any hope that this can change? There is, but it cannot start with “Well, if only the other side…” Real change begins when someone is willing to go first, even when going first costs them something.
We had a chance to see that kind of courage last year, and we missed it. In the summer of 2025, President Trump pressed Texas Republicans to redraw their congressional map in the middle of the decade, with the goal of winning five more House seats. California Governor Gavin Newsom vowed to “fight fire with fire,” and California voters approved a new map designed to cancel out those five seats.
Other states soon joined the fight, with both parties defending their actions as necessary responses to the other side. But regardless of who started it, the result was the same: voters were left with fewer competitive districts and fewer meaningful choices.
Now imagine a different summer. Imagine a prominent leader, perhaps one with an eye on the White House, standing before the country and declaring that their party would not answer one wrong with another. That leader could have warned that if both parties kept redrawing maps to choose their own voters, every American would lose a piece of their freedom, no matter which party won the next round.
That decision might have cost a few seats. It also might have been the turning point this country has been waiting for, because Americans remember who did the right thing when it was hard. No such leader stepped forward, and the fight went on.
An Unlikely Hero
This week, the country finally saw that kind of courage, and it did not come from a politician. It came from The New York Times.
The Times published its investigation less than a week before Election Day, in a race that could decide which party controls the Senate. The paper is widely perceived as liberal, and it could easily have waited until after the votes were counted or just tucked away the story. It did neither.
The Times has taken a beating for that choice, from many of its own readers in the comments and from Peltola herself, who dismissed the report as “stuff to sell newspapers.” For years, President Trump has told Americans that the mainstream press protects Democrats. With one story, the Times made that claim much harder to sustain.
The report may cost Democrats this seat, and possibly control of the Senate. Even so, the Times did what was right for Alaska’s voters and for our democracy, and it honored the free press the First Amendment was written to protect.
We cannot let that moment pass unnoticed. Americans of every political stripe should applaud the Times for putting the truth ahead of the outcome. We should also demand the same from every newsroom in America, from the cable networks to the local paper to the newest online outlet.
That standard applies to the rest of us, too. The Times did not wait for the other side to go first, and neither should we.
Next Tuesday, that voter in Alaska will look at two Dan Sullivans and try to sort out the truth. Thanks to one newspaper’s courage, that voter now knows it.
Paul J. Chapman is the founder and executive director of the Centercratic Party and the author of The Opening.
Sources
Kellen Browning, “Inside Democrats’ Secret Effort to Stack Alaska’s Ballot,” The New York Times, October 28, 2026, https://www.nytimes.com/2026/10/28/us/politics/alaska-dan-sullivan-conspiracy-peltola.html
“Abuse and estrangement: What Ramaswamy’s Ohio governor’s race ad with Amy Acton’s mom didn’t mention,” PolitiFact, October 21, 2026, https://politifact.com/article/2026/oct/21/amy-acton-ohio-mother-ramaswamy-campaign-ad/
“Ramaswamy campaign says it produced ad with Amy Acton’s mother and will spend millions to promote it,” Associated Press via PBS NewsHour, October 2026, https://www.pbs.org/newshour/politics/ramaswamy-campaign-says-it-produced-ad-with-amy-actons-mother-and-will-spend-millions-to-promote-it
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“Republican Texas AG Ken Paxton is acquitted of corruption charges at historic impeachment trial,” Associated Press, September 16, 2023, https://apnews.com/article/ken-paxton-impeachment-texas-871fb9c57b38fbda5bec5c2e5f280755
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“Alaskans Dismayed, but Not Moved, by Peltola’s Treatment of Her Staff,” The New York Times, September 2026, https://www.nytimes.com/2026/09/25/us/politics/24pol-peltola-alaska-senate-reaction.html
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Paul J. Chapman, The Opening (Soro Publishing, 2026), https://theopeningbook.com/