Quick note: I normally publish once weekly – don’t get attached to three posts in a week!
Wow. Just WOW. Alaska just did the near miraculous; it got the New York Times to call out a Democrat nominee less than a week before the election.
Yeah, yeah, links below – I didn’t believe it either. Quill Sword credits Jonathan Turley with breaking the story for us and includes links to both his blog and to the New York Times article in the footnotes.
It’s at the bottom of the page, Whippersnapper! Or in the description for those of you on one of our outlet platforms.
The New York Times reporting something bad about a Democrat – who’da thunk?
Okay, okay, for those of you who don’t live in political news world, here’s the short version. Alaska got suckered into voting for ranked choice voting…
This isn’t going to be quick, is it?
Okay, okay, ranked choice voting is the dumb idea that you get to vote for your top three favorite candidates in any given race. If your first pick doesn’t get a majority, they move down the list eliminating the guy with the least votes and recounting until a candidate gets a majority (more than 50%). It’s the idea that everyone gets to elect a candidate of their choice – even if it was their third choice. The reality is that the constituents get stuck with the lowest common denominator instead of a candidate that most people thought was best.
Like I said, dumb. Alaska decided to make it worse by doing this to the primaries. Basically, neither party can now select candidates that represent their party. It undermines how parties work in America and it undermines majority rule. Like I said, they were suckered into it.
What? Oh, yes, that is not very objective. You do realize it’s not supposed to be, right? Commentary, not journalism – I’m here to talk to you and learn ya a thing or two. I’m not here to make stupid things sound less stupid.
Can we get back to what is actually happening in Alaska now? We can? Great.
In Alaska’s senate race there are two guys named Dan Sullivan running for the Senate. The incumbent, Dan S. Sullivan, is a Republican. The other is also running as a republican despite having no history with the party. Initially, the second guy registered as Dan S. Sullivan; to their credit, Alaska’s election board made him change it. I think it’s Dan J. Sullivan now but we’ll just call him what everyone else does: Decoy Dan.
If our boy Decoy can pull enough votes from the Real Dan Sullivan, it will hand the election to the Democrat Mary Peltola. Now, Decoy says he decided to enter the race all by his lonesome and didn’t have any discussion with the Democrat Party of Alaska or their kin. Anyone want a lovely piece of oceanfront property high in the mountains of Tennessee?
Well, there have been a lot of back and forth and it ended up in the courts. Decoy Boy got to stay on the ballot. Peltola looked like she was going to make it out unscathed. Then her own staff started turning on her.
My guess – and it’s only a guess – is that staffers got worried about their legal backsides. Lying to voters isn’t illegal; filing false claims with election commissions very much is. Peltola didn’t fill out all that paperwork by herself.
Regardless of why, the whole scheme not only fell apart but the evidence of misconduct got so overwhelming that it could not be ignored.
Which brings us to the New York Times expose’ less than a week before the election. Now why do you think they did that?
I’ve only seen the excerpts Turley sites in his discussion, but that alone is pretty damning. The New York Times went after her big time. I haven’t seen them do that kind of real journalism in three decades.
Yes, I’m old. Whippersnapper.
Of course, I don’t need bird cage liner much anymore so I don’t exactly follow the Times, just to be fair. Still, no one I know who does follow the Times thinks all that much of them, either. So why now? Why this case?
It’s too early to know but my best guess is the Democrats weren’t as happy with Peltola as they should have been. Maybe that ranked choice voting bit them in the behind or maybe Peltola became a liability, don’t know. She’s definitely a liability now. The whole Decoy Dan saga was a farce and all over the media. It makes the Democrats look shady as all get out. If Peltola was involved in setting up a decoy candidate in order to steal an election… it might not be illegal but it will certainly be destructive to the Democrat Party.
If she knew, the assumption, probably correct, is that other Democrat operatives not only knew but were involved. The best they could hope for if that proved to be the case would be to lose every election in the state for years. The worst would be time behind bars. Fraud is illegal and so is lying on official election filings.
I suspect ranked choice voting would also be on its way out, assuming it isn’t already. Democrats pushed this nonsense in states where they are not competitive. Don’t expect to see California change to ranked choice anytime soon. People have lives to live and don’t spend most of it engrossed in politics but they DO notice eventually.
Having a sitting Senator imprisoned and removed from office would get even the most ‘determined to ignore politics’ voter to sit up and pay attention. That risk is what I suspect lead to the Times deciding that they should be a real newspaper again.
Or not. I’m an analyst, not a mind reader. What I can say for certain is that if those allegations against Peltola prove to be true, the Democrats are going to get caught in the backlash.
And it isn’t likely to be confined to Alaska.
References:
2. https://www.nytimes.com/2026/10/28/us/politics/alaska-dan-sullivan-conspiracy-peltola.html
