President Donald Trump has demanded that Democratic Senate challenger Mary Peltola be removed from Alaska's ballot, six days before the November 3 midterm election, after a New York Times investigation reported that people linked to her campaign secretly worked to recruit a second candidate named Dan Sullivan. The Trump Alaska Peltola ballot row now centres on whether voters in a tight, four-person ranked-choice race could be confused by two men sharing the incumbent senator's name.
Trump made the demand on Wednesday, October 28, in posts on Truth Social, calling the reported recruitment effort a fraud on the American public and accusing Democrats of lying under oath in federal court. Peltola's campaign and the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee have denied involvement in the other Sullivan's candidacy, and the Times itself reported that its investigation did not establish that Peltola personally directed the effort or that anyone committed perjury.
Trump's intervention came on Wednesday, October 28, as the Alaska race entered its final week. In his first post, he wrote that Democrats had illegally searched for and recruited a man named Dan Sullivan to run against the Republican senator of the same name in order to defraud, confuse and obfuscate the election, taking votes away from the real Senator Dan Sullivan.
In a second post, he went further, writing that Peltola should suffer the legal and political consequences for what she had done, describing it as a fraud on the American public, and that Dan Sullivan should be allowed to run without either Mary Peltola or the fake Dan Sullivan on the ballot. He also accused Democrats of perjury, writing that false statements made under oath in federal court should carry very serious consequences.
The posts followed the publication of the New York Times investigation, which said the recruitment effort began in the summer of 2025 and involved Democratic campaign aides, party officials and lawyers. According to the newspaper, the effort resulted in Dan J. Sullivan, a retired teacher from Petersburg, Alaska, entering the race against incumbent Senator Dan S. Sullivan.
Former Peltola campaign manager Elisa Rios, who was fired in August and later sought to retract her statements to the newspaper, told the Times that Peltola knew about the effort but was not directly involved in organising it. Peltola's campaign and the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee have denied involvement in the other Sullivan's candidacy, and Dan J. Sullivan has said he entered the race of his own volition.
Alaska does not use a conventional party primary followed by a two-candidate general election. Voters first narrow the field, and the top four candidates advance to a ranked-choice general election in which voters rank their preferences. That structure is central to this dispute: with four names on the ballot, even a small shift in first-choice votes can change the outcome, and a candidate with a familiar name can, critics argue, draw support away from the better-known holder of that name.
The four candidates in the 2026 Senate general election are Republican incumbent Dan S. Sullivan, Democrat Mary Peltola, Dan J. Sullivan and Gerald Heikes. An earlier Data for Progress survey, conducted October 8-16 and cited in earlier reporting on the race, put Peltola on 47 percent, Senator Sullivan on 44 percent and Dan J. Sullivan on 4 percent, underlining how close the contest was before the final week.
The legal fight over the second Sullivan is not new. Alaska election officials initially disqualified Dan J. Sullivan, but a state judge overturned that decision and the Alaska Supreme Court upheld his eligibility. The Justice Department subsequently filed a federal lawsuit challenging the potential certification of election results affected by confusion between the two candidates, and Trump has acknowledged directing the department to bring the case. Peltola and the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee have asked a federal judge to dismiss that lawsuit.
The Times noted an important legal distinction in its reporting: recruiting candidates to split an opponent's vote, sometimes called ballot stacking, is generally legal and has been used by both parties in Alaska. That distinction matters because Trump's posts allege illegality and perjury, while the newspaper's own account did not establish criminal wrongdoing or substantiate the perjury allegation.
According to the Times, the operation began in the summer of 2025, when a staffer for Peltola, then eyeing a Senate run, received unusual instructions from top campaign aides: find as many people named Dan Sullivan in Alaska as possible. The staffer complied by combing through voter records to produce a list of Dan Sullivans from across the state.
The newspaper said the effort was internally called the ballot composition project and involved secret trips to far-flung Alaskan communities and a Midwestern operative who travelled the state using a fake name and made his pitch to would-be candidates over beers at brew pubs. That operative was identified as Jerid Kurtz, a native of Ohio described by former campaign manager Elisa Rios as a specialist in secret ballot manoeuvres.
Rios told the Times that Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee aides introduced Kurtz to her and to Anton McParland, then Peltola's chief of staff, in an early meeting. Months later, in early 2026, Kurtz took part in a video call with members of the ballot composition team and said he had made contact with one of the Dan Sullivans, who lived in the tiny village of Petersburg. Rios said Kurtz described him as amenable to running if it would help Peltola, quoting him as saying he hated Trump, liked Mary, had no interest in being a politician, but would run if it could help.
The Times said its article was based on interviews over the past two months with 12 people who participated in or were told of the plan, or were would-be candidates the team tried to recruit, and on dozens of text messages that tracked the effort's progress. It also cited documents prepared for a potential lawsuit against the campaign, and extensive interviews with Rios.
Text messages viewed by the Times showed Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee officials and Peltola campaign staff communicating for months about the project, the newspaper reported. McParland asked for updates from Jarid, Jared or our friend, and committee officials quickly scheduled calls. In one January message, McParland wrote that our friend in the state is being noticed, and Andrew Piatt, the committee's director of campaigns, replied that they would check in.
In late May, just before Dan J. Sullivan filed his papers to run, Kurtz spoke by phone to a Peltola campaign aide, saying he had just got off a plane in Petersburg, according to Rios and another person familiar with the conversation. Campaign aides worried at times that Kurtz's efforts would be discovered, including when he posted an image of Anchorage airport on his Instagram account.
The Times found that the effort went beyond the two Sullivans. While the Justice Department has focused on the name confusion, the newspaper reported that the team also sought to recruit other Alaskans as spoilers, not all of whom shared the senator's name, simply to add options to the ballot and potentially siphon support from the incumbent. In one text exchange, Peltola advisers appeared to make fun of voters while watching a focus group, with a consultant writing do we have a scheme for you and a pollster describing one voter as the perfect audience for our ballot strategy plan.
The August 18 primary brought both Dan Sullivans through to the four-way general election, but with a complication for Peltola's side: the fourth spot had gone to a Democrat who could siphon votes away from her that autumn. That Democrat, progressive David Leslie, quickly faced calls from his party to withdraw. One of those callers, Leslie said in an interview, was Kurtz, who met him in person at a cafe in Fairbanks. Leslie soon agreed to drop out, and Kurtz wrote to him on August 31, the day he dropped out, saying he was really proud of the action Leslie had taken that day.
Leslie's exit cleared the way for another Republican to take his spot on the ballot, potentially dividing the Republican vote even further: Gerald Heikes, a drywall contractor from Palmer, who said in an interview that he was recruited to run for Senate that spring by a guy from the Midwest who first reached him by phone and then met him at a deli in his hometown.
The Times also reported that campaign aides toyed with an audacious idea to establish a right-wing state party that could challenge the incumbent senator. In January, McParland wrote imagine if there was a MAGA party, and Piatt replied smart, let's see. Jacquelyn Lopez, an attorney with the Elias Law Group, the firm that represents both the committee and the Peltola campaign, was part of the effort, according to Rios. The MAGA party plan fizzled out in May, but in June, the committee celebrated alongside the campaign when an Alaska court cleared the way for the other Dan Sullivan to stay on the ballot, with a committee employee writing other Dan won, will be on ballot in an internal group chat.
Trump's own words set the tone for the Republican response. He wrote: It has just been determined that the Democrats in Alaska illegally searched for, and recruited, a man named Dan Sullivan to run against our distinguished Republican Senator, Dan Sullivan, in order to defraud, confuse, and obfuscate the Election, thereby taking votes away from the REAL Senator, Dan Sullivan.
He added: The Democrats' false statements were made under oath in Federal Court. Therefore, they perjured themselves, and should be liable for very serious consequences. And: Mary Peltola should suffer the Legal and Political consequences for what she has done, A FRAUD ON THE AMERICAN PUBLIC, and Dan Sullivan should be allowed to run without either Mary Peltola or FAKE Dan Sullivan on the Ballot.
Republican-aligned groups moved quickly to amplify the Times report. The Senate Leadership Fund, a Republican super political action committee, published a summary headlined with the claim that the Peltola campaign recruited a fake Dan Sullivan to fool Alaskans, drawing directly on the newspaper's findings about the ballot composition project.
On the other side, the denials have been consistent. Peltola's campaign and the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee have denied involvement in Dan J. Sullivan's candidacy. Dan J. Sullivan himself has long denied running at Democrats' behest, saying in June after announcing his run that he had no contact with Peltola's campaign, in his words: Zero, none, zilch. He did not immediately respond to a message seeking comment on the latest report, according to the Associated Press account.
Rios's position is more complicated. She was fired in August, later sought to retract her statements to the newspaper, and told the Times that Peltola knew about the effort but was not directly involved in organising it. That account leaves open the central question in the dispute: what exactly the candidate herself knew, authorised or merely tolerated, as opposed to what her aides and party committee staff did.
McParland, who was demoted to a consulting role in August, did not respond to multiple requests for comment from the Times, the newspaper reported, and Lopez did not respond to a request for comment on her reported role in the effort.
The Alaska race matters far beyond the state's borders because control of the Senate could turn on a handful of seats, and Alaska is one of the closest contests in the country. A race that was already tight, with Peltola narrowly ahead in the earlier October survey, becomes harder to predict when voters face two candidates with the same name on a ranked-choice ballot.
The dispute also raises a broader question about how far campaigns can go in shaping who appears on the ballot. If recruiting spoiler candidates is generally legal, as the Times noted, then the argument becomes political and ethical rather than criminal: is it fair play, or is it deception, to find a namesake and persuade him to run? Democrats who defend the practice point to its history on both sides; Republicans who condemn it argue that the intent here, confusion, makes it different in kind.
There is also a governance consequence. The Justice Department's lawsuit, which Trump acknowledged directing, seeks to block certification of results affected by confusion between the candidates. If the election is close, that lawsuit could become the centre of a post-election legal fight, with the certification of Alaska's Senate result delayed or contested even after votes are counted on November 3.
Finally, the episode tests the credibility of both campaigns in the final week. For Peltola, the Times report, built on interviews and text messages, contradicts years of denials and forces her to explain what her campaign knew. For Trump and the Republican side, the leap from the newspaper's findings to allegations of illegality and perjury goes further than the reporting itself, which did not establish either claim, and that gap will be scrutinised by voters and courts alike.
The immediate next step is the election itself on Tuesday, November 3, when Alaskans will rank the four candidates. Trump's demand does not, by itself, remove any name from the ballot: ballot changes at this stage would require action by election officials or a court, and no such order has been reported. Voters will therefore almost certainly see both Dan Sullivans on the ballot as planned.
After polling day, attention will turn to the count and to the ranked-choice tabulation, which can take days to resolve if no candidate wins an outright majority of first-choice votes. If the margin is narrow, expect the Justice Department's certification challenge and the dispute over voter confusion to move to the foreground, with Peltola and the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee continuing to press for dismissal of the federal case.
Watch also for further statements from Peltola herself, who has not been shown by the Times reporting to have personally directed the recruitment, and from the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee, whose senior aides feature prominently in the newspaper's account. Any fresh documents, text messages or on-the-record accounts could shift the story again before or after November 3.
Related coverage: Trump's Texas rallies and the closing-week midterm fight and Trump's $1 million voter-fraud reward and the election-integrity debate.
Dan S. Sullivan is the Republican incumbent senator. Dan J. Sullivan is a retired teacher from Petersburg, Alaska, who entered the race in 2026. The New York Times reported that people linked to Mary Peltola's campaign worked to recruit him as a spoiler candidate.
Trump demanded that both Mary Peltola and the second Dan Sullivan be removed from the ballot, so that Senator Dan Sullivan could run without either of them, and accused Democrats of fraud and perjury.
No. The Times reported that former campaign manager Elisa Rios said Peltola knew about the effort but was not directly involved in organising it, and the newspaper said its reporting did not establish that Peltola personally directed it.
Not necessarily. The Times noted that recruiting candidates to split an opponent's vote is generally legal and has been used by both parties in Alaska, and its investigation did not establish criminal wrongdoing.
Voting takes place on Tuesday, November 3, 2026, as part of the midterm elections, using Alaska's four-person ranked-choice ballot.
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