Just How Many Dan Sullivans Are There in Alaska Republican Politics?!?

When there were merely two guys named “Dan Sullivan” running against each other in the primary for one of Alaska’s two U.S. Senate seats, I thought about highlighting this oddity of chance and potential election interference at Splinter, but ultimately ended up letting it slide. A lot of ink has already been spilled about the twin Sullivans, and I assumed there wouldn’t be any other kooky revelations to come. “I’ll just have faith in people to figure it all out,” I thought. After all, it’s not like there’s about to be a third Dan Sullivan who comes crawling out of the woodwork to insert his name into this debacle. That would be absurd!

But wait, hold on, I’m being told that … yes, it seems that the prophecy has indeed come to pass. Dan Sullivan has appeared to endorse Dan Sullivan in his bid to defeat Dan Sullivan, and the Sullivan Saga has ascended to an entirely new level of madness.

Now a proper recap is truly called for, and it really is a doozy of a story. Alaska, as you might know, has been a consistently red state for many decades. In its history, it’s only voted for a Democrat for President in one contest in 1964 (Lyndon Johnson), and it last elected a member of the Democratic Party to the U.S. Senate in 2008. Nevertheless, with the anti-Trump, anti-GOP headwinds that are blowing into this midterm election, the generally lower midterm turnout (especially for Republicans) that is expected, and a strong Democratic candidate in Mary Peltola, the blue team is dreaming of a historic Alaskan upset–and they’ll need it, to have any real shot at taking back the Senate.

The current U.S. Senator from Alaska (flanked by the ever-frustrating Lisa Murkowski) in question is Dan S. Sullivan, who has been the state’s junior senator since 2015, easily winning reelection in 2020. This time around, however, his race has gotten way more attention, not only because Peltola has crept ahead of him in some of the polls, but also because of another name that will most likely be on the ballot next to his: Dan J. Sullivan.

A retired teacher who lives in rural Alaska and has little state notoriety, Dan J. Sullivan is also running as a Republican, which led to immediate and obvious claims that he was a sham or plant candidate coordinated by Democratic operatives, in an attempt to siphon some small but significant number of votes from the sitting senator.

“A third Dan Sullivan — a former Anchorage mayor — has weighed in on the competitive Senate race, endorsing Sen. Dan S. Sullivan over former teacher Dan J. Sullivan.” www.nbcnews.com/politics/202…

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— Sahil Kapur (@sahilkapur.bsky.social) 9:11 AM · Aug 24, 2026

To be certain, it makes perfect sense that Alaska’s Republicans were suspicious here. After all, their own party knows all about this type of scheme, having famously orchestrated one successfully in Florida in 2020. There, in an election for Florida’s State Senate, the Democratic incumbent, Jose Javier Rodriguez was defeated by his Republican opponent Ileana Garcia by only 32 votes, after another independent “ghost candidate” named Alexis Rodriguez appeared on the ballot and siphoned off more than 6,000 votes, despite the fact that “Alexis Rodriguez” had done no campaigning and raised no money for the race. The ghost candidate would end up pleading guilty to campaign finance charges after revealing to the court that Republican operatives offered to pay him $50,000 to run so there would be two “Rodriguez” names on the ballot. Despite literal criminal charges in this case, the actual results of the vote were upheld and Garcia was allowed to remain in her position. She is still a Florida state Senator today.

So yeah, given that recent history, I honestly cannot blame both the state and national GOP for being suspicious that the same thing has been happening in Alaska. And perhaps unsurprisingly, it has already been reported that prosecutors in both Alaska and the federal government are in the process of investigating the campaign of Dan J. Sullivan, no doubt probing to find some evidence of conspiracy to confuse voters or swing the election to Peltola. Surely, none of those voters will be made any more confused, meanwhile, by the emergence of the latest “Dan Sullivan” … who’s turned out to be the former Republican mayor of the largest Alaskan city of Anchorage, Dan A. Sullivan. This guy, who is apparently the oldest of three, put out a statement lending his support to the current Republican senator, Dan S. Sullivan, saying the following: “As the OG Dan Sullivan, I urge Alaskans to vote for Sen. Dan S. Sullivan. He’s been great for Alaska.”

The correct pluralization is Dans Sullivan https://t.co/QU4JQkie6C

— Mike Nelson (@mikenelson586) August 24, 2026

Which of course begs the question, how many more Dans Sullivan are still to come in this story? Will a former dogcatcher by that name from Juneau weigh in? A bush pilot out of Skagway? Do not tell me that some crucial election official in the state is also named Dan Sullivan. Please, for the love of God. We don’t need this.

For what it’s worth, meanwhile, the interloper Dan J. Sullivan, although a bit on the eyebrow-raising side, at least seems like more of a real candidate than “Alexis Rodriguez” was. He contends that he’s running as a moderate Republican rather than a veiled Democrat, and told The New York Times in a recent interview that he had voted for some Alaska Republicans such as Lisa Murkowski in the past, although not the sitting Sen. Sullivan. He said likewise that he had been a member of the Alaska Independence Party up until this point, which dissolved last year, which is why he has only now registered as a Republican. He says that if he’s elected, he would work as a true moderate and opposes extremism, saying that, “I don’t think the Republican Party needs to be the MAGA party. My dad and my grandfather were Republicans who taught me my work skills, my skills to be a good father and a husband and how to be a kind human being.” By the way? Both of those men were also named “Dan Sullivan.” We’re up to five Dan Sullivans now.

It’s hard not to laugh, or assume at least some kind of ulterior motive here. Dan J. Sullivan can say that “my intention is not to trick people,” and “I would hope people are informed enough to know the difference between an incumbent senator and a teacher,” but anyone genuinely hoping to win federal office in 2026 shouldn’t bother doing so without some basic understanding of just how dumb thousands of voters really are. Any sentence you start with “I would hope people are informed enough to know” will 100% of the time end in disappointment. Never forget that some people apparently voted for Zohran Mamdani in New York because they “thought he was Italian.”

The “Rodriguez” case in Florida in 2020 demonstrates this reality all too readily–a fake candidate who merely had only the same last name, who did no campaigning and didn’t have a website or platform, got more than 6,000 votes and won the Republican candidate that election by 32 votes. Even if the candidacy of Dan J. Sullivan is indeed sincere (which it may well be), he would have to at least recognize that the most likely contribution he makes to this race is to serve as a very useful tool for the campaign of Mary Peltola, a candidate with actual resources and the backing of one of our two major parties. The logical assumption would be that he’s okay with that result.

This is assuming, of course, Dan J. Sullivan does stick on this ballot. In the primary election held in Alaska last week, the potential spoiler finished a very distant third, but his 3,235 votes still puts him well ahead of the fourth place finisher, who had 1,502. And in Alaska’s ranked choice voting system, this should mean that two Dan Sullivans are on the ballot in November, given that they include the top four vote-getters regardless of party. The results are not yet official, but short of some kind of indictment out of the blue, it’s hard to imagine what would stop it at this point.

Alaska has 740,000 people and 415,000 of them are named Dan Sullivan.

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— John Moe (@johnmoe.bsky.social) 1:10 PM · Aug 23, 2026

Regardless of who wins, I hope that in six years we can run it back again, and this time add Anchorage’s Dan A. Sullivan back into the ballot mix, or perhaps discover some young Sullivan blood. How many Sullivans can one state support?