Good morning. The mood is grim at the White House. And we talked with the guy who came up with the design for the Cheesecake Factory.
But before that, we’ve got a tale of political intrigue from Alaska. (Also, I know we’ve had some issues with the audio narration of this newsletter for the last couple of days. It’ll be back soon!) Politics is a dirty business. The Times broke news of the latest example: a secret effort by Democratic operatives to make Alaska’s midterm election ballot tilt in favor of Mary Peltola, their candidate for Senate.
It wasn’t a terrifically complicated plan. They wanted to siphon votes from the Republican incumbent, Dan S. Sullivan.
One way to do so, top aides for Peltola decided, would be to scour the state for people also named Dan Sullivan, in the hopes that one of them would go on the ballot and confuse voters. A retired teacher from a tiny fishing village in the Alaska Panhandle named Dan J. Sullivan soon answered the call.
He announced his candidacy for Senate this spring. He’ll be on the ballot Tuesday. Here’s Kellen Browning, who reported the story: To do that, a mysterious Midwestern operative using a fake name crisscrossed the state seeking candidates.
The effort involved him, campaign aides, lawyers and officials at the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee, which directs the party’s campaign strategy in races across the country. At one point they considered spinning up a new MAGA party to further split the Republican vote. None of this is strictly illegal, although last night Alaska’s governor said he was ordering an investigation into the plan.
Attempts to stack ballots have been made by both parties in Alaska. But this particular operation shows how far some Democrats will to go to win a race that could help determine which party controls the Senate. Dirty tricks It’s not just Alaska, and it’s not just now.
Remember the Watergate break-in? The Willie Horton ad that hurt Michael Dukakis’s campaign for the presidency in 1988? The leak of George W. Bush’s 1976 D. U.
I. arrest just five days before the presidential election? “There is always election skulduggery,” Carl Hulse, our chief Washington correspondent, told me. “In fact, machinations like this are really a more traditional way of skewing elections than the idea that thousands of noncitizens sneak in to vote.” Sham candidates show up all the time, he said, recalling a State Senate race in Florida a few years ago in which a Republican operative put up a candidate with the same last name as the incumbent, hoping to sow confusion. (Local prosecutors said he paid the sham candidate $45,000 to run. Both of them were convicted of election crimes.) On the theory that it’s easier to beat an extreme candidate in a general election, Democrats and Republicans alike have run ads to support the fringe contestant in the opposing primary. (Illinois’s governor and his allies, for instance, spent $30 million helping the Republicans nominate someone he defeated easily in 2022.) They’ll try to get third-party candidates on the ballot, in order to siphon off votes. (Republicans tried to help the Green Party’s Jill Stein get back on the presidential ballot in 2024.) They’ll run robocalls telling voters about a change in their polling place. They’ll always look for an edge.
And sometimes the best one is a name. Carl reminded me that Hollywood even made a movie about that, “The Distinguished Gentleman,” in 1992. It stars Eddie Murphy as a Florida con man who assumes the name of a dead congressman in order to run for office and get rich.
He wins. You should read the whole Alaskan saga. (No subscription? No problem. There’s no paywall.) And then listen to Kellen talk about it on “The Daily.”.
Source: New York Times Top Stories · Summarized by HeadlinesBriefing