Buck Brief - The Shady “Decoy Dan” Scheme Rocking Alaska’s Senate Race

Buck Sexton (0:00)

Is this the dirtiest political trick the Democrats have pulled in my lifetime? I'm talking about the Alaska Senate race. Things up there are just getting filthy. Fresh New York Times reporting confirms what we on Clay and Buck Radio and elsewhere have been saying for months, which is that a Democratic operative, or a number of them rather, ran a deliberate ballot composition project, that's what they called it, to stack Alaska's rank choice ballot and siphon votes from the incumbent, Senator Dan S. Sullivan, the real Dan Sullivan, if you will. And this is blowing the story up even beyond what we know, because now it's clear what we assumed had happened was in fact what happened. You had a bunch of Democrat operatives decide, hey, we can do something really nasty by finding a random person named Dan Sullivan, Daniel Sullivan, to run because of rank choice voting. It would make it complicated. And you don't remember. It's not that this is Dan Sullivan v. Dan Sullivan. This isn't two guys going head to head. The point is senior citizens, people with maybe not the best eyesight, people who might get a little nervous in the polling station, they may just make an error and you only need a couple thousand of them to make an error to possibly deliver this Senate seat to Peltola, the Democrat. So that's what it is. Back in the summer of 2025, a Peltola campaign staffer was ordered by top aides to comb voter records and find as many people named Dan Sullivan in Alaska as you can. That was the goal. Find as many randos random individuals named Dan Sullivan as you can. The goal was pure name confusion on the four person ballot. That is all clear based on text messages, eyewitnesses, etc. And this worked. A retired teacher named Daniel J. Sullivan, who lived in a tiny fishing village reachable only by the air or the sea. You can't even drive to where this guy lives. He entered the race to be a senator in May, and he's on the November 3rd general ballot alongside the real Dan Sullivan and Mary Peltola, and some long shot Republican guy named Gerald Heiches. So the New York Times says, quote, The Peltola campaign has repeatedly denied any involvement in his candidacy, but the Times found based on interviews and text messages, along with documents prepared for a potential lawsuit by the campaign, that not only did Ms Peltola's team work with people trying to recruit Mr Sullivan to run for Senate, but the effort was much broader. The group worked to coax other would be spoilers into the race to dilute the incumbent support and help catapult the Democrat to victory. End quote. The Ballot Composition Project. It we should call the Ballot Compost Project, because what they're doing here is total crap.

Secret trips to remote Alaskan communities, some Democrat operative from the Midwest using a fake name, pitching candidates over beers at brew pubs. I mean, this really was skullduggery.

And there was an Ohio-based Democrat operative who's a specialist in shady tactics that was at the center of this whole thing. He approached these potential candidates offering outside spending support. So all of a sudden, you get to have a Senate campaign. They're going to throw a bunch of money at you. That's kind of cool, right?

Significant money. One of them was offered significant money, he says, to run as an independent. Dan J. Sullivan, decoy Dan, told the operative that he hated Trump, and if it was going to help Mary, he liked Mary. He didn't have any interest in being a politician, but if this could help, he would do it.

So the former Peltola campaign manager, Elisa Rios, confirmed the New York Times that Peltola was definitely aware of this. Of course she was aware of this. Of course she was aware of this. What a scummy thing to do. Let's just take a moment to take that in. This is about a United States Senate seat. It shouldn't just be some sick joke, but this is the way Democrats view things. If they can get away with something incredibly shady, incredibly dishonest, that increases their power, they're absolutely willing to do it.

There's also a dark money angle here. Wisconsin-based super PAC Right for Alaska, which is tied to the progressive 1630 fund, spent big money promoting Decoy Dan and other spoilers while attacking the real Dan Sullivan. They've put over a million dollars into this.

So this isn't just about operatives in Alaska. This has now become a national apparatus of the Democrats' effort to confuse things and to try and really purloin a Senate seat.

The ballot reality here is in the ranked choice systems, voters rank up to four. Name confusion is the point, especially with similar middle initials and both filing as Republican-ish. So remember, you're not just choosing one. You are ranking all of the names. So all you have to do is mix up the names that you're trying to rank. You have to click for it. You have to put multiple people. Ranked choice voting is idiotic, by the way. That's a whole other thing. And this is a 51-49 or 50-50 race right now between the real contenders, Dan Sullivan and Mary Peltola.