Politically Unstable: Is ‘Decoy Dan’ Sullivan a Democratic plant?

Video

Saturday, August 29, 2026

OPINION:

Alaska’s Senate race has turned into one of the strangest stories of the midterms: a second candidate named Dan Sullivan has qualified for the ranked-choice general election, drawing comparisons to the Republican incumbent with the same name, raising questions about who recruited him and why.

On Politically Unstable, Kelly Sadler asks Honest Elections’ Jason Snead the question Alaska voters can’t shake: Is “Decoy Dan” Sullivan really a Democratic plant designed to split the Republican vote?

[SADLER] Jason, talk to me about rank choice. Talk to me about the state of Alaska and the state of affairs there right now.

[SNEAD] This is one of the more interesting stories that’s breaking in this midterm election cycle. You’ve got the state of Alaska, where you actually have Senator Dan Sullivan competing against a guy that we’ve called Decoy Dan, because you have to come up with a name for him because his name is Dan Sullivan. And it certainly looks an awful lot like this particular Dan Sullivan was recruited to act as an unusual spoiler — taking advantage of their really convoluted election system, where they combine a California-style jungle primary with ranked-choice voting — to essentially mislead just enough voters to potentially help vault Mary Peltola, the Democrat running in this race, into the Senate.

And that could not only flip that particular seat, but it could also wind up deciding who controls Congress. And all of this because of a combination of ranked-choice voting and what looks an awful lot like a dirty tricks campaign trying to actually mislead a few thousand voters into ranking the wrong Dan Sullivan in this election.

[SADLER] Explain Alaska’s voting system, because I think the majority of people are not familiar with it. You mentioned it’s kind of a two-phase process. One is a jungle primary to see who gets into the runoff. I think four names are selected for the runoff. And then it goes into ranked-choice. So describe that process for us, please.

[SNEAD] This is a system that, frankly, nobody should be familiar with because it just shouldn’t exist. It’s one of these things that you could really cook up in a lab and then try to see sort of experimentally if it works. I think that the people of Alaska have figured out that it doesn’t, which is why they might repeal this whole thing later this year. And maybe we can touch on that again in a moment.

But it is a two-part system, very similar to the way that we all conduct elections. There’s a primary and a general, except that everything else is completely different. So instead of having a Republican primary, a Democratic primary, a Green Party primary, you have one single jungle primary where every candidate from every party is running against one another.

Voters in Alaska are asked to pick whoever your favorite is in that primary, and then the top four will advance to the general election where you’ll use ranked-choice voting to decide the winner. And what that means is, instead of voting for one person like you did in the primary, now you’re ranking first, second, third, fourth, your preferences for those top four candidates.

And then to get a winner, what they do is they will run a round of tabulation. And if nobody gets over 50% of the first-place vote, then they will begin elimination rounds where they will get rid of the candidate who got the fewest first-place votes, and they’ll redistribute all the ballots that were cast for that candidate to each voter’s next highest pick. And they’ll do that as many times as they need to get to a winner.

So it’s a really convoluted system that really combines the worst of both California’s jungle primaries and ranked-choice voting into one Frankenstein’s monster.

[SADLER] Going into this jungle primary, there was multiple candidates running for each of these positions, House, Senate, governor, you know, 16 candidates, I believe, for the U.S. Senate. Some of them didn’t even live in the state of Alaska.

[SNEAD] Yeah, that’s right. One of the things that we’ve been told for years by the ranked-choice voting lobby is that this system is supposed to make politics nicer, more civil, more reflective of the moderate middle, and ultimately that it’s less susceptible to gamesmanship. And yet here we have a race that could decide political control of the U.S. Senate, and it could be itself decided by exactly the sort of political games that the ranked-choice voting lobby says that their system prevents.

So you’ve got all these candidates, most of whom voters have never even heard of. They’re extremely fringe candidates or they’re candidates like the guy you mentioned who doesn’t even live in the state, who just filed because he thought it would be fun. And what we’re seeing now that we’re getting close to final results out of this race is that there’s really only two candidates that have a decent shot of winning. And that’s Mary Peltola on the Democratic side and Senator Dan Sullivan on the Republican side. And they got, you know, between them about 90% or more of the vote. And then the third- and fourth-place candidates, Decoy Dan, and we’re still waiting to see who the fourth place is going to be, only got a few thousand votes between them.

So all ranked-choice voting is doing is making it harder to vote, forcing voters to wade through a sea of fringe and frivolous candidates to get to the ones that really have a shot. It’s just not the way that an election system is supposed to be run.

[SADLER] And in the state of Alaska, anyone can run for any position, unlike other states where you have to have signatures to get on the ballot to run. You only have to pay one hundred dollars. And then all of a sudden you’re a candidate for office.

And this Decoy Dan that you’re talking about, Kimberley Strassel at The Wall Street Journal wrote a column on this last week saying that, is he even a real candidate like you’re suggesting? Is he just a Democrat decoy? He only has 12 donors. His background is fuzzy. I’ve read some stories where I think he endorsed the real Dan Sullivan. But did he endorse the real Dan Sullivan? And how will voters in Alaska be able to decipher who the real Dan Sullivan is and who’s the decoy?