In Alaska, political operatives reportedly went looking for namesakes, the Justice Department went looking for a courtroom, and somewhere along the way, the voters became an afterthought.
Somewhere in Alaska, somebody made a list. It wasn't a list of communities needing better roads, families struggling with grocery bills, or questions a United States senator ought to answer. It was a list of people named Dan Sullivan. Not because they were particularly qualified for public office. Not because they had an extraordinary vision for Alaska's future. But because one of them might have the distinct political advantage of being mistaken for somebody else.
And if that sounds like the opening scene of a political comedy, consider what happened next.
According to an investigation published Wednesday by The New York Times, political operatives working with individuals associated with Democrat Mary Peltola's campaign searched for Alaskans who shared the name of her Republican opponent, incumbent Sen. Dan S. Sullivan.
The effort reportedly involved campaign lawyers, officials connected to the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee, and an operative who traveled through Alaska using a false name while approaching prospective candidates.
One of those candidates was Daniel J. Sullivan Jr., a retired schoolteacher from Petersburg, Alaska, who now shares the November Senate ballot with the incumbent senator.
But apparently one additional Dan Sullivan wasn't quite enough.
The reported operation extended to other prospective spoiler candidates. Another Democrat, David Leslie, was urged to withdraw after advancing through the primary. He did, leaving a place on the four-person general-election ballot for Gerald Heikes, another candidate reportedly approached about running, and a Registered Republican.
The Times described an operation of considerable sophistication, conducted in the service of an astonishingly unsophisticated objective: getting voters to choose someone they didn't mean to choose.
Peltola's campaign and the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee deny involvement in recruiting the candidates. The Times says its reporting is supported by interviews, text messages and documents. Investigators have yet to establish whether any laws were broken.
But the questions raised by the reporting extend well beyond the legality of the operation.
They reach into something we've become increasingly comfortable overlooking.
When did being clever enough to win become a substitute for being worthy of the victory?
The Art of Winning, and the Cost of It
Politics has never been an innocent profession. Campaigns are contests of strategy, timing, organization, persuasion and, occasionally, the ruthless exploitation of an opponent's mistakes. Good political professionals understand the rules, anticipate their adversaries and find opportunities others overlook.
There's nothing inherently dishonorable about that. But there is a difference between outsmarting your opponent and trying to outsmart the voter. One requires making a better argument. The other, if the reported strategy worked as intended, requires someone making a mistake. And there's something especially dispiriting about the amount of intelligence, money and effort that can be devoted to such a small ambition.
Imagine what that campaign war room might have accomplished if its ingenuity had been directed toward explaining a healthcare proposal, crafting an economic argument or persuading a skeptical Alaskan that a different candidate deserved the job.
Instead, according to the Times, political professionals searched voter records for people with the right name. We should be capable of admiring political skill without admiring every use to which it is put.
The inevitable response, of course, is that Republicans have employed their own spoiler-candidate strategies. Ballot engineering is not a Democratic invention, and Alaska has seen attempts by both parties to influence the field of candidates. But they do it, too is an explanation of how the practice became common, not a defense of why it ought to continue.
A bad idea does not become a good one because the other party thought of it first.
At some point, the question has to stop being whether a tactic is permitted, or whether it might succeed, and become whether it deserves a place in the politics we claim to believe in.
Legality is an essential standard. It should not be the ceiling of our expectations.
And Then Came Washington
If the story ended with a second Dan Sullivan, it would already deserve a place in the great and occasionally embarrassing history of American political campaigns. But Washington, apparently unwilling to let Alaska have all the excitement, entered the picture. President Donald Trump's Justice Department filed a lawsuit last week seeking to prevent certification of the Senate election under circumstances in which votes for the other Sullivan might have affected an incumbent loss.
The concern is not imaginary. The state initially sought to keep the second Sullivan off the ballot over concerns that his candidacy was intended to mislead voters. Alaska's Supreme Court subsequently ruled that he was entitled to run. Election officials have since distinguished the candidates on the ballot, identifying the incumbent by his Republican affiliation and office. Alaska's ranked-choice voting system also provides voters an opportunity to rank additional candidates, potentially preserving their preferences even if their first choice is eliminated.
These protections cannot guarantee that every voter will understand every name on the ballot. But there is an enormous distance between acknowledging that possibility and asking the federal government to condition certification of an election on whether a particular candidate wins. Even Alaska's Republican-led state government has pushed back, arguing that the Justice Department lacks the authority it claims.
If laws were broken in assembling the ballot, investigate. If campaign-finance rules were violated, enforce them. If officials deliberately deceived voters in violation of the law, hold them accountable. But the remedy must come from the law, not from the political importance of the result.
An election cannot become less worthy of certification simply because the wrong person might win it.
We can criticize a campaign's reported effort to exploit voter confusion without granting the federal government unlimited authority to decide what that confusion means after the ballots are cast. These are different questions, involving different responsibilities. They deserve independent scrutiny, not an artificial balancing of grievances.
And neither should be answered by asking which party stands to benefit.
The Convenient Conscience
Perhaps the saddest part of this episode is how familiar the arguments have become.
We know the script.
One side calls the conduct outrageous. The other explains that it's perfectly legal, that everybody does it, or that there are more important issues to discuss. Then the roles reverse, the allegations change, and everyone delivers approximately the same speeches with the names rearranged.
We've developed an extraordinary capacity for moral certainty when judging our opponents, paired with an equally extraordinary talent for discovering nuance when judging ourselves.
There is always a distinction to be made, an exception to be considered, a circumstance that makes our preferred side's behavior understandable.
Sometimes those distinctions are real. They deserve a hearing. But sometimes they're just excuses wearing better suits.
A Republican should be able to recognize an objectionable Republican tactic. A Democrat should be able to condemn an objectionable Democratic one. Neither ought to require permission from a campaign committee, a party chairman or the loudest person on social media.
Our principles are worth very little if they survive only when politically convenient.
And voters have a role in this, too.
We cannot spend years complaining that politics has become a cynical contest of tricks and then celebrate those tricks whenever our own team performs them successfully.
Campaigns respond to incentives. If we reward cleverness regardless of its purpose, we should not be surprised when cleverness becomes the purpose.
There may be one small consolation in Alaska's extraordinary political spectacle.
Thanks to the reporting of the New York Times, Alaska Public Media and others, voters now have more information about how their Senate ballot came together.
The attention may even work against the confusion the reported strategy was designed to produce. A voter who has heard about the two Sullivans is better positioned to examine the ballot carefully and make an intentional choice.
That outcome isn't guaranteed. Many Alaskans have already voted, and publicity cannot tell us what any individual voter intended.
Still, there is something encouraging about the possibility that journalism might defeat a political trick simply by explaining it.
Because that, in the end, is what this is supposed to be about: informed people exercising their judgment.
Not strategists arranging a ballot in hopes that someone misreads it. Not federal officials searching for a way to dispute the outcome before the votes are counted. Not partisans defending conduct they would condemn in an instant if the names were reversed.
An election should be a contest between people asking to be entrusted with public power. It should be about their ideas, their records, their character and their plans for the country.
It should not be a test of whether the electorate can distinguish between two men who happen to share a name.
I don't expect politics to become a gentleman's pastime, and I certainly don't expect political professionals to abandon strategy. Competition is part of democracy. Ambition is part of leadership. Winning matters.
But how we win matters, too.
There is a difference between victory and vindication, between collecting votes and earning trust, between finding a path to office and demonstrating that you ought to hold it.
We've become so practiced at asking whether our side can win that we too rarely stop to ask what the victory would say about us.
There are two Dan Sullivans on Alaska's Senate ballot. There will be one winner, and the voters should be the ones to decide who that is.
The rest of us ought to be able to agree on something considerably simpler.
Democracy does not require saints. But surely we can ask its participants to aim a little higher than hoping somebody checks the wrong box.
We should all be better than this.
Editor's note: This editorial draws on Kellen Browning's October 28 investigation in The New York Times, along with reporting by Alaska Public Media, Reuters and The Associated Press. The Directory News has not independently obtained the confidential interviews or communications cited in the Times investigation. The reported recruitment operation remains disputed, and no criminal violation has been established.
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