Authored by James Howard Kunstler via Clusterfuck Nation,

A Fine, Deliberately Engineered Mess

“Can’t we just be Mexico or Paraguay and have peace and quiet while things mostly go to hell?” 

– Matt Taibbi

The garish stunt pulled by the Democratic Party in Alaska’s US Senate race has been known for months – a florid, festering carbuncle on the election’s face – and The New York Times finally reported it this week, mainly to get ahead of an accelerating DOJ probe, spin the story, and soften its sharp edges for public consumption. And a day later, the newspaper is now straining to say that it’s just normal politics.

Here’s what happened: Rep. Mary Peltola is running against sitting US Senator Dan Sullivan (Dan S.). Somehow, a second Dan Sullivan (Dan J.), a retired nobody in a remote fishing village, was induced to jump on the ranked-choice ballot. (The ranked-choice method is another layer of trickery.) So, there are two Dan Sullivans on the ballot. 

Do you suppose this might confuse voters and siphon off votes from the real Sullivan to push a Peltola victory?

Peltola fired her campaign manager, Elisa Rios, in August, for reasons not yet disclosed. Rios then filed a wrongful termination lawsuit against Peltola and sometime along in there Rios went to The Times with the story of how two Dan Sullivans ended up on the Alaska ballot. Turns out that the campaign ran a “ballot composition project.” Also involved were the national Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee (DSCC) and the Marc Elias law firm, which represents both the DSCC and Rep. Peltola’s campaign. Marc Elias was previously the Perkins Coie lawyer who represented the 2016 Hillary Clinton campaign and helped arrange the Steele Dossier facet of the RussiaGate prank. Elias has since then been working tirelessly to engineer election procedures that favor Democrats, enable voting by non-citizens, block election reform, and file lawsuits to prevent states from turning over voter rolls to the DOJ, as they have demanded.

[ZH: Of course, the Peltola campaign has said it “has no involvement with either Sullivan campaign,” and Dan J. Sullivan has denied any contact with her team, according to reports on the Times story.]

A pro-Peltola political action committee (49th State PAC) paid $87,000 to an Ohio consulting company run by one Jerid Kurtz (operating under the name “Zane”) to compile a list of all the Dan Sullivans in Alaska and recruit one to run for Dan S. Sullivan’s Senate seat. They succeeded, finding Dan J., age 69, a retired US Forest Service employee and schoolteacher, in Petersburg, AK, who had never run for anything before. In late May 2026, he filed as a Senate candidate without a party label, then received about 2.5% in the top-four primary, and advanced to the general election ballot.

The Alt Dan Sullivan was assisted with all the filing paperwork by one Amber Lee, an Anchorage-based political consultant. A super PAC, Right for Alaska (meaning good for, not right wing, and based in Hudson, Wisconsin, by the way), has spent $1.15 million on Alt Dan, with $990,000 of that funneled in from the Sixteen Thirty Fund, a Washington DC-based Lefty-left pass-through operation – a 501(c)(4), not required to disclose its dark money donors – that has handled hundreds of millions of dollars in recent years. The org is associated with Arabella Advisors, which is funded by George Soros’s Open Society grants.

Former campaign manager Rios had told The Times that, “Ms. Peltola was not directly involved in the Two Dan Sullivans project, but she was ‘definitely aware.'” Two days ago, just before publication of The Times report, Rios attempted to retract her story, declaring to the newspaper, “As discussed on our call earlier today, I am confirming that I have retracted all statements made regarding the 2026 Alaska Senate Race in connection with any article you may or may not be writing. I am not willing to be a source for any story in any capacity.” Nice try. Explain that to a grand jury.

The DOJ opened criminal and civil investigations in the Two Dan Sullivans matter last summer but bumped up its activities with the publication of The Times report. A grand jury was convened in August. On the criminal side, prosecutors have now issued thirty to forty grand jury subpoenas targeting Democratic officials, the Peltola campaign, and others linked to the Alt Dan recruitment effort. No one has been charged yet. At issue is whether this was a conspiracy to mislead voters or interfere with a fair election. Potential charges could include 18 U.S.C. §§ 241 and 242, conspiracy against rights / deprivation of rights under color of law and wire fraud.

On the civil side, a DOJ lawsuit filed October 23, seeks to block certification of the vote if Senator Dan S. Sullivan happens to lose the election in a way that could be attributed to voter confusion.

Yesterday, Governor Mike Dunleavy directed the Alaska Bureau of Investigation to determine whether the prank violated Alaska law and whether criminal charges or civil action are warranted. The governor said the state’s actions were based on “Alaskans’ right to vote for the candidate they actually intend to support” and described deliberately confusing voters as “striking at election integrity.” The Alaska Supreme Court previously ruled that Daniel J. Sullivan (Alt Dan) met the constitutional requirements to appear on the ballot and that officials could not exclude him based on alleged motives. How that happened remains a mystery.

From a public sentiment point of view, the Two Dan Sullivans case underscores how desperately filthy Democratic Party tactics are in the service of preserving their longstanding racketeering operations. As a practical matter, the outcome could affect which of the two parties gets control of the US Senate. A vote for Democratic Party candidates is a vote to wreck our country. Think hard on that when you go to the polls.